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Taming the Wild West of Viva Engage: Why Provisioning Communities is Your Governance Sherriff

Viva Engage (formerly Yammer) is a powerful tool within Microsoft Viva for fostering connection, knowledge sharing, and community building across your organization. It empowers employees to connect around shared interests, projects, and organizational initiatives, breaking down silos and boosting engagement. However, like any powerful tool, without proper governance, Viva Engage can quickly become a source of chaos, leading to community sprawl, duplicated efforts, user frustration and decreased end user adoption.

Imagine a scenario where anyone in your organization can create a Viva Engage community on any topic, at any time, without any oversight. What starts as a vibrant platform can quickly devolve into a confusing landscape of:

  • Duplicate Communities: Multiple communities on the same topic, scattered across the platform, fragmenting conversations and diluting participation.
  • Orphaned Communities: Communities created for short-term projects or initiatives that are no longer active but remain cluttering the platform, making it harder to find relevant and active spaces.
  • Inconsistent Naming and Structure: A lack of standardized naming conventions and community structures makes it difficult for users to discover and navigate communities effectively.
  • Governance Nightmares: Without clear ownership and moderation, communities can become breeding grounds for misinformation, off-topic discussions, and even policy violations.
  • Reduced User Adoption: Overwhelmed by the sheer number of unorganized and inactive communities, users may become disengaged and stop using Viva Engage altogether, negating its intended benefits.

This is where provisioning Viva Engage Communities becomes crucial. Provisioning, in this context, refers to establishing a controlled and structured process for creating new Viva Engage communities. It’s about moving away from a completely open, unmanaged creation model to a more governed approach that ensures communities are created purposefully, with clear objectives, and under appropriate oversight.

Why Provisioning is Essential for Viva Engage Governance

Implementing a provisioning process for Viva Engage Communities offers a multitude of benefits, directly addressing the chaos of uncontrolled community creation and strengthening your overall governance posture:

  • Enhanced Governance and Control: Provisioning allows IT or designated teams to maintain control over the Viva Engage environment. You can define clear guidelines for community creation, ensuring alignment with organizational goals and policies.
  • Reduced Community Sprawl: By implementing an approval process, you can prevent the creation of redundant or unnecessary communities. This keeps the platform clean, organized, and easier to navigate.
  • Improved Community Discoverability: Provisioning enables the enforcement of consistent naming conventions and tagging strategies. This makes it significantly easier for users to find relevant communities through search and browsing.
  • Standardized Community Structure: Provisioning processes can incorporate templates for different types of communities (e.g., project teams, departments, interest groups). This ensures consistency in structure, channels, and initial content, making it easier for users to understand and participate in new communities.
  • Clear Ownership and Accountability: Provisioning workflows can mandate the assignment of community owners and moderators during the creation process. This establishes clear accountability for community management, content moderation, and adherence to guidelines.
  • Streamlined Onboarding and User Experience: A well-provisioned Viva Engage environment is more user-friendly and intuitive. New users can quickly find relevant communities and understand their purpose, leading to faster onboarding and increased engagement.
  • Optimized Resource Allocation: By preventing the proliferation of underutilized communities, provisioning helps optimize resource allocation and ensures that moderation efforts are focused on active and valuable spaces.

Key Elements of a Viva Engage Community Provisioning Process

A robust provisioning process for Viva Engage Communities typically involves the following key elements:

  1. Request Mechanism: Implement a clear and accessible way for users to request new communities. This could be a simple form, a dedicated SharePoint list, or a workflow within your IT service management system.
  2. Approval Workflow: Establish an approval workflow that routes community requests to designated approvers (e.g., IT, Communications, relevant department heads). The approval process should evaluate the need for the community, its alignment with existing communities, and its potential value to the organization.
  3. Naming Conventions and Guidelines: Define clear naming conventions for communities to ensure consistency and discoverability. Provide guidelines on community purpose, scope, and target audience.
  4. Community Templates (Optional but Recommended): Create pre-defined community templates for common use cases. These templates can pre-populate the community with relevant channels, tabs, and starter content, streamlining setup and ensuring consistency.
  5. Owner and Moderator Assignment: Mandate the assignment of at least one community owner and moderator during the provisioning process. Provide training and resources to community owners and moderators on their responsibilities.
  6. Automated Provisioning (Highly Recommended): Leverage automation tools like Power Automate, PowerShell scripts, or third-party provisioning solutions to automate the community creation process once a request is approved. This reduces manual effort and ensures consistency.
  7. Communication and Training: Communicate the new provisioning process clearly to all users. Provide training and documentation on how to request communities and the guidelines for community creation and management.

Technical Implementation Considerations

Implementing Viva Engage Community provisioning can be achieved through various technical approaches:

  • Power Automate: Power Automate is a powerful tool within the Microsoft 365 ecosystem that can be used to build automated workflows for community provisioning. You can create flows that trigger upon form submission, manage approvals, and use the Microsoft Graph API to create Viva Engage communities programmatically.
  • PowerShell and Microsoft Graph API: For more advanced scenarios or bulk operations, PowerShell scripts leveraging the Microsoft Graph API can be used to automate community creation and management tasks.
  • Third-Party Provisioning Solutions like Rencore Governance

Rencore Governance supports provisioning of Viva Engage Communities

Within the IT Admin’s User Interface of Rencore Governance, new Provisioning Templates for Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online Sites and now Viva Engage Communities can be configured. Let me start with defining Visibiliy, Owners and Members:

Provisioning Template Private Viva Engage Sales Security
Taming the Wild West of Viva Engage: Why Provisioning Communities is Your Governance Sherriff 8

Now Policies like minimum owners can be configured as well as pre-and suffixes of community names:

Provisioning Template Private Viva Engage Sales Policies
Taming the Wild West of Viva Engage: Why Provisioning Communities is Your Governance Sherriff 9

Many of our HanseVision customers are requesting approval processes where duplicates can be declined and new, unique groups are approved:

Provisioning Template Private Viva Engage Sales Approval
Taming the Wild West of Viva Engage: Why Provisioning Communities is Your Governance Sherriff 10

You have seen now screenshot of Rencore Governance used by IT Admins. Now we are switching gears and show you how an end user can provision Viva Engage and request new communities within Microsoft Teams and Rencore Nova App. A company internal template marketplace is offered:

Rencore Nova Provisioning Templates
Taming the Wild West of Viva Engage: Why Provisioning Communities is Your Governance Sherriff 11

Basic and security settings need to be filled in before submitting the request:

Rencore Nova Submitting new Viva Engage Community
Taming the Wild West of Viva Engage: Why Provisioning Communities is Your Governance Sherriff 12

The Approver can also work within Microsoft Teams and approve or decline the new Viva Engage Community easily.

Rencore Nova Approval Management
Taming the Wild West of Viva Engage: Why Provisioning Communities is Your Governance Sherriff 13

Conclusion: Provisioning for a Thriving and Governed Viva Engage

Provisioning Viva Engage Communities is not about stifling community creation; it’s about enabling a thriving and well-governed platform that delivers maximum value to your organization. By implementing a structured provisioning process, you can tame the potential chaos of uncontrolled community sprawl, enhance governance, improve user experience, and ensure that Viva Engage remains a valuable asset for communication, collaboration, and knowledge sharing within your organization. Take control of your Viva Engage environment and implement provisioning – your users and your governance strategy will thank you for it!

Where can I get help with implementation?

Support is available through Microsoft Partners like HanseVision 
Feel free to contact me, book a meeting and we walk you through a free Rencore Governance Trial

Resources:

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