Storyline and stories in Viva Engage + Yammer: Fundamentals
Help me understand and explain storyline & stories
FAQ: How can I best understand and explain storyline & stories in Viva Engage and Yammer?
Many of my followers are responsible for technology solutions that support productivity and employee experience, including tools like Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Viva. They need to understand our technologies in order to align them with their business objectives, to drive adoption, and to measure success.
In this article, I’ll start with some fundamentals to help you explain to your end users. In later articles, I’ll go into more details to give you a deeper understanding.
Storyline is a feature of Viva Engage, available to most Microsoft 365 customers at no additional charge, that appears across Microsoft Viva and Microsoft 365 apps. You’ll see storyline experiences in Yammer, Microsoft Teams, Outlook, Microsoft Viva Connections, and more.
Your storyline is your place to express yourself, share updates, experiences, knowledge and perspectives with followers and coworkers.
You can learn more about coworkers from their storylines and what they share. You can follow interesting people to prioritize their activity in your feeds, and you can choose to receive notifications when they share.
I often describe storyline as “LinkedIn inside your organization”. What you share reaches your followers and coworkers across your company. You can share and discuss internal activity that would not be appropriate to share on public platforms, and you can build relationships that foster connectedness, professional development, and career advancement.
You share with posts or stories.
Posts often lead with text, and can also contain images, video, links, and attachments—very flexible, very familiar.
Stories are media-centric posts that lead with a short video (up to 3 minutes in public preview) or photo, though they also support a short description (up to 150 characters in public preview) to facilitate accessibility, search, links, topics and @mentions.
Posts and stories show up in feeds and carousels. You find and view posts in feeds. You find stories in a carousel feed, and they play in an immersive media viewing experience. You’ll find feeds and carousels across Viva Engage (in Teams and Outlook) and Yammer (web and mobile):
The Home experience, which is a feed of all content from across Viva Engage and Yammer from any community or storyline. The feed is highly personalized to surface and suggest the most relevant content to you.
The Storylines experience, which zooms in on content only from storylines. There’s a highly personalized feed that includes suggestions, and an even more sharply focused feed of content only from people you follow. And there’s a feed of all storyline content that will be particularly useful to people who “own” the storyline experience for their organizations, allowing you to keep tabs on everything that is being shared.
Individual storylines, which show content shared by the individual.
Campaigns—a new features of the Viva suite coming in 2023—will aggregate all content using the campaign #tag from storylines and communities
Leadership corner—a new feature of the Viva suite coming in 2023—gives each employee a personalized view of their leaders and the content they’re sharing on storylines and in communities.
You’ll also see feeds and carousels in digests that help you catch up from your Outlook inbox or Teams activity feed.
You’ll see storyline posts in the Viva Connections feed.
And you can receive notifications (in email, Teams Activity, or Viva Engage/Yammer bell) for new posts and stories from people you follow—a particularly useful way to stay informed about valuable updates.
Hopefully this gives you enough to understand and explain storyline and stories to your organization and end users. I plan to share more perspectives on how to do so, in future articles. And to share learnings about how our customers are using these capabilities to improve communication, engagement, and connectedness.
What, exactly, do you want to hear more about? What questions can I answer for you? Let me know, here! And if this was valuable, please share it forward, and subscribe!
Very helpful framing Dan. I recently made the commitment to start my own Storyline. Loving the engagement thus far.
The ability to set a cover photo on storyline is currently available to Viva customers: either Viva suite or Viva Communications and Communities. In other words, it is currently a premium feature.
It is possible we might change that requirement in the near future, so stay tuned!