What’s new in Viva Engage – Ignite Edition

Today at Microsoft Ignite, we announced new experiences in Viva Engage designed to enable leaders and employees to share, connect, and communicate – with new integrations across Viva and Microsoft 365 and new ways to harness the power of Copilot and AI for knowledge discovery, moderation, and analytics.  Here’s a full briefing on the latest news:

Storyline in Microsoft Teams

Storylines in Viva Engage enable you to create, share and discover content with others in your organization, fostering collaboration and connection through personalized content and experiences. The Storyline integration into Microsoft Teams empowers you to follow updates and notifications from leadership, discover content, and contribute your ideas and perspectives while staying in your flow of work in Teams. Landing early in 2025, this update provides a new way for leaders to share communications with the entire company using Microsoft Teams. Full community integration and much more is coming next year.

Storyline announcements – sharing at scale

Leaders and their communications teams can share announcements and posts from leaders’ storylines that reach their target audiences across Teams and Outlook. When a leader sends an announcements, their determined audience will see it as a notification, with the ability to reach and engage virtually any size audience. Please note: Configuring leaders and audiences required Viva Suite or Viva Communications & Communities.

Expanded Copilot Experience

Earlier this year, we added Copilot to Viva Engage to help users stay on top of trending content, spark engagement, get writing assistance, and help drive adoption through community learning. Now, we are expanding the powers of Copilot within Engage to help find knowledge, summarize community content, and catch up on important conversations.

Copilot community summarization in Viva Engage

Copilot in Viva Engage will soon be able to summarize community engagement.

Over time, we will bring more Copilot skills into Engage including predictive analytics, image creation, and best practices for leadership communications.

Copilot in Viva Engage experiences are available to Viva suite and Viva Communications and Communities customers.

AI powered moderation tools for digital safety

Use Engage AI-powered content and keyword alerts to gain visibility into conversations across your network. This new capability gives you visibility into themes of your choosing and proactively mute conversations about controversial topics. As part of our digital safety efforts, we are also modernizing keyword detection giving moderators the ability to mute, flag, or track any keyword with more innovation in the new year including real-time analysis of new posts.

Experts and verified answers in Communities

Discovering and validating knowledge is essential to communities and a driving force behind participation. To help highlight authoritative information, community admins can now designate experts in their communities to scale the load of managing knowledge. Experts can serve as a source of trustworthy knowledge and help members quickly find the solutions they are looking for. Experts will be able to:  

• Mark best answer on questions
• Mark an answer as Verified
• Get an ‘expert’ tag next to their name to identify them
• Be recognized in the expert section

Admins can assign experts within a community.

Engage Q&A coming to Microsoft 365 Copilot

Incorporating Engage Q&A ensures that trusted, expert knowledge is surfaced in Copilot. This will be a game changer in the vast source of knowledge increasing the accuracy and consistency of Copilot’s responses. Soon, you’ll see verified answers in the reference hover card in Copilot. Through verified answers, you can be assured the information is trustworthy. And of course, you’ll be able to see the source and click into it for context.

Q&A from public Engage communities is also now available in Microsoft 365 workplace search in Bing at work, Office.com, and SharePoint.com.

Find Q&A content in Microsoft 365 Copilot Business Chat in Teams

Additionally, the ‘Experts’ tag will appear in the hover card to recognition colleagues for their contributions and expertise. In 2025, we’ll also bring content from Engage communities directly into M365 Copilot chat.

Engage integrations into Viva Connections

We are continuing to invest in deeper integration with Viva Connections including:

• Engage feed card for dashboard – The card will surface recent, relevant community discussions with the ability for users to quickly catch up, take actions or link directly to the community for deeper engagement.
• Engage announcements will start to show up in the Connections announcements banner.
• Spotlight – Bringing Engage campaigns and event content into the Spotlight carousel

Check out the Viva Connections blog for more details.

These are a few of the many new capabilities announced at Ignite and coming your way. Catch everything that is new in the Viva Communications and Communities on-demand session and keep an eye on the Viva Engage Roadmap for detailed timing on releases.