End of the calendar year is when organizations, teams and individuals are typically planning what should be their goals for the coming year. What better moment for Microsoft to make the announcement that they’ll be shutting down their goal management product at the end of 2025:

This week’s Perspective Plus 💎 newsletter issue will dive into the world of Microsoft Viva. Why do Power Platform professionals need to care about these products anyway? Because they have more in common than the product branding might lead you to believe.

A new breed of collaborative apps

In the beginning, there was a vision of bringing business apps and Microsoft Teams together. At Inspire 2021, Microsoft started shouting about the concept of collaborative apps, promising to “activate the flow of work with Dynamics 365 in Teams”. Not only was this about making business app data editable inside the Teams chat and meeting UI. The announcement went all the way down to the commercial terms:

The CVPs and Satya himself were excited to talk about this bold new vision that included the Microsoft Viva suite of products announced earlier in February 2021. Employee experience platforms, EXP, were on the rise and looked to potentially becoming the next enterprise software TLA in the style of CRM and ERP.

Collaboration tools meet business apps. On the surface, that sounded like a decent business opportunity to pursue. The most business-like product was of course Viva Sales, which blurred the lines between what is a Microsoft business application anyway. Dynamics 365 professionals were curious about what to do with this product that overlapped existing Outlook/CRM integration to some extent, lacked many everyday features, and also promoted integration with Salesforce CRM alongside Dynamics 365.

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