Microsoft Uses Insights from AvePoint tyGraph to Understand Adoption Across its Viva Engage Communities

The AvePoint Solution

At the time, there were no established analytics offerings for Viva Engage, but tyGraph (now part of AvePoint) was developing a comprehensive tool. Microsoft leveraged its strong relationship with tyGraph to collaborate closely as tyGraph for Viva Engage was developed, ensuring the new solution met its analytics needs.

"The relationship with the tyGraph team was a symbiotic one," explains Frank Delia, Principal Product Manager at Microsoft. "The tyGraph team was eager to understand what insights would be most valuable so they could include these metrics in their tool. They heard our pain points and delivered."

One of the critical capabilities of the tyGraph tool was its ability to correlate product signals with HRIS demographic information from employees. This enabled Microsoft to analyze where employees from different departments, regions, seniority, etc. were most active, allowing for targeted adoption strategies to address the needs of specific audiences and geographies. Organization hierarchy data also empowered leaders to discover how their employees embrace Viva Engage.

As Frank says, "We understood that a single company-wide adoption program would not be successful. Being able to understand and measure change within individual communities or organization audiences has been essential. The tight integration with employee data and activity metrics is a big reason we still rely on tyGraph.”

tyGraph not only facilitated the adoption of Viva Engage but also played a pivotal role in optimizing the platform for better efficiency and user engagement. By 2019, Microsoft's culture of self-collaboration and technological experimentation had resulted in over 30,000 Viva Engage communities. However, many of these communities were no longer in use, and there was no efficient way to distinguish active communities from inactive ones.

With tyGraph's analytics, Microsoft discovered that only about 1 in 3 communities were legitimately active. This insight allowed the team to take an aggressive stance in managing their community landscape, identifying and eliminating unnecessary communities, and significantly improving users’ ability to discover relevant and useful communities.

Today, the Microsoft network includes approximately 5,000 communities, with around 2,000 being meaningfully active. Inactive communities are systematically removed, allowing Microsoft to maintain a balance point for its communities and focus on fostering genuinely active and productive collaboration spaces.

Community managers across Microsoft see immediate value from insights that would otherwise be challenging to discover. For example, they can identify which community members are the key influencers so they can encourage them to post regularly. Determining which threads are having the most impact helps them to improve their content plans. Finally, building custom reports showing progress toward the specific goals of their community helps to maintain investment in the active management of the community.

Connected Communities, for example, is Microsoft’s largest internal Communities of Practice program with 60,000 members participating in over 65 communities aligned to industries, solution areas and cross functional priorities. tyGraph data helps the program team better understand community engagement, program-level insights and trends such as active users and active conversations. Custom reports help the business refine and adjust program strategies such as what topics to focus on and what drives member satisfaction and value.

Additionally, customized tyGraph reports provided to the CEO’s communication team enabled detection of themes in comments and questions prior to a live broadcast event. A rich word cloud suggested what was interesting for employees and informed the event agenda and most relevant questions for the senior leadership team to answer.

tyGraph’s analytics also provide significant value for Microsoft’s global communications efforts. Engagement insights allow the communications team to tailor and optimize their internal dissemination strategies. By combining tyGraph data with other data sets, they can compare engagement across Viva Engage posts, emails, blogs, and messages, to determine which platform is best for different types of messaging. As a result, communicators are constantly aware of where and when to publish content for maximum impact.