Blog posts

In early 2021 Microsoft launched Microsoft Viva as an employee experience platform designed specifically to help businesses manage the changes brought about by hybrid working.  

For many people, Microsoft Viva’s appearance in our daily working lives has become quite familiar, but there are still the finer points of the full Microsoft Viva offering that could do with a closer look. In this blog, I’m focusing on Viva Topics and I chatted to ClearPeople Director & Co-Founder Gabriel Karawani to provide an overview – and a review – of Viva Topics. 

In this blog:

• How Microsoft Viva Topics is related to Microsoft Viva
• Microsoft Viva Topics explained
• How does Microsoft Viva Topics compare to other knowledge tools?
• Viva Topics reviewed
• How do Atlas and Microsoft Viva Topics work together?
• Microsoft Viva Topics pros and cons
• Summary: what Microsoft Viva Topics does
• How can I set up or trial Microsoft Viva Topics?
• Microsoft Viva Topics: the roadmap
  
• Microsoft Viva Topics pricing

Consumers, industry associations and governments are increasing their calls to businesses to account for and reduce their environmental impact, and to contribute to sustainability efforts. The need for change is real and immediate, but you may well be wondering how you and your organisation can make a practical difference when it comes to challenges as vast as climate change and addressing inequity of all types. But as with every need, solutions emerge, and here’s how technology can help. 

ClearPeople Operations Director Barry Wakelin published these tips on our company intranet for saving money and energy when working from home – and reducing your home office carbon footprint into the bargain. We thought they were good enough to share.

ClearPeople is a completely virtual company. We all work from home, which provides us with work/life balance and reduces our carbon footprint by removing the need to travel to an office every day.

These are fantastic benefits, but it also means that we are now individually responsible for our environmental impact - we are now in charge of reducing our carbon footprint in and outside of working hours; we’re now Chief Procurement Office and Energy Efficiency Monitor.

Our carbon footprint as a business has been dispersed to individual homes. And with the cost of energy being one of the biggest contributors to rapidly rising inflation in the UK, and our impact on the planet in stark focus, now's a good time to review our personal behaviour, consider energy choices and find ways to save money and benefit the planet.

One of the most powerful tools an organization has for building culture – particularly when many employees work remotely – is an intranet. This blog explores using SharePoint Modern for your intranet.

Remember the TV series The Office? While I imagine most of us can relate to the portrayal of a workplace where no one is very happy and the ways of working are archaic, the world of work today is fortunately quite different. The seismic shift that has had to take place as a result of the pandemic has seen rapid and widespread changes to the way we work.

According to an Employee Well-being Report by Glint, employee happiness is higher than pre-pandemic levels. Compared to their peers at other organizations, employees at remote work-friendly organizations were 14% more likely to agree they feel safe to speak their minds, and 9% more likely to report that their leaders value different perspectives. A rather different picture to The Office thankfully.

The key to this is culture, and one of the most powerful tools an organization has for building culture – particularly when many employees are not in the office or are frontline workers – is technology. Creating an intranet, a robust digital hub where people can find and communicate essential information, is a fundamental step towards creating an effective, engaging and productive workspace to replace The Office-era workplace.

A successful intranet is one of those important factors for a company's success. The uptake of Microsoft 365 technology has been so widespread and rapid since the advent of Covid-19 (about 1 million companies worldwide and 70% of Fortune 500 firms use Office 365), and as ClearPeople is a leading Microsoft global partner with extensive and long-running experience with SharePoint, this blog considers the use of SharePoint Intranet in particular, although the considerations for design and implementation are applicable to any intranet software.

Collaboration and communication across the organization is essential for project management teams. So it's important that project management teams have the right tools to be able to work effectively. Microsoft Teams provides a channel of communication that contributes to project management success.

In the realm of knowledge management, a knowledge base is often seen as a go-to solution for many organizations. However, as businesses evolve and the demand for more dynamic, intelligent and integrated knowledge management solutions increases, you may want to explore other choices over tradional knowledge base software.

Many businesses have to regularly respond to requests for proposals (RFPs) - after all, each RFP is a sales opportunity. But proposals require resources and good proposal management to be successful, and to realise that business growth potential. How well is your business equipped to produce efficient and effective proposals?

What is the difference between out-of-the-box intranets and SharePoint intranets? When choosing an intranet solution, organizations often find themselves weighing the pros and cons of out-of-the-box intranets versus SharePoint intranet. This blog aims to clarify the key differences between these two options, helping you make an informed decision for your business.

Ever tried to find something on Teams and got nowhere? I think we can all relate. Google or Bing 'Microsoft Teams search' and you'll see a long list with terms like 'Microsoft Teams search not working'.

The amazing thing about Microsoft Viva Topics is how well the AI engine is able to discover and group together lots of content from across your SharePoint Online estate. It is really quite phenomenal to see Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing in action like this and we're getting the same positive and excited reaction from our clients who are using Viva Topics.