Announcing Microsoft Viva Engage

Aphonicnoise 
I totally understand the frustration. Viva has gobbled up many good things for internal communications and turned them into something worse: 

• Yammer -> Viva Engage (rebranding for no reason, not well thought out monetization scheme)
• Teams Communities App -> Viva Engage Teams App (totally different UI than the web app for no reason)
• SharePoint Home Site App -> Viva Connections (forcing you into the Viva Home experience on mobile instead of a responsive view of the actual home site, forcing you to use PowerShell to get out of the Viva Home experience on desktop, SharePoint news and Yammer posts in the same feed)
• ...

Viva has also taken the spotlight from the Microsoft Intelligent Intranet which had and still has the potential to be the top choice for intranets worldwide but which hasn't seen any meaningful further development in three years (and no: Copilot in SharePoint is not it when there are still huge gaps in the software, when so many bugs remain unfixed and when so many quality-of-life improvements for intranet power users remain unadressed).

If Microsoft only cared to know what their power users and customers know, Viva could be a tremendous success. But for that to happen they would need to come out of their ivory tower and as someone who is in quite a few customer connection programs I unfortunately must say that they are still very much living in their ivory tower and not caring enough about their users.