Forum Discussion
Teams, SharePoint, Viva Engage - which to use for dept comms?
I lead a 300‑person department, and I’m looking for guidance on the best Microsoft tool(s) to improve employee engagement and awareness across our organization.
Right now, most of our communication happens in Microsoft Teams (channel posts, group chats), but we have dozens of channels and each group has its own space, which makes it hard to share department‑wide news, cascade annual strategic initiatives, report monthly progress, and celebrate wins or employee recognition. We don’t currently have any SharePoint sites built out, and we’re not using Viva Engage or communities.
For those who’ve tackled similar challenges: Which Microsoft tools or combinations have worked best for broad communication, engagement, and consistent messaging across a large department? I’d love to hear what’s been effective for you.
Thanks in advance for any insights!
2 Replies
Take the trouble to setup a SharePoint official Home hub site. Activate the Home app in Teams for all users and set this one in the top of the Teams applications as preset for all users. SharePoint home news will automatically pop up on in Teams this way all organized via 'Connections'. The official SharePoint Home hub page can also function to organize all central information for the team. An intranet home page. The SharePoint news can also be extra promoted via email and has a boost function. Setting up your Connections setup a bit further gives you a total out of the box one place to be for news, info and user guidance. A relative small setup with a lot of advantages. And keep Teams groups for your teams to simply collaborate. The SharePoint Home page can also be pushed as default start page for your users Edge browser ensuring they have the central start page and the latest news always at hand, via the browser (non Teams users) and Teams (Home/connections app).
Teams should do just fine, unless you have some special requirements. Create a new team with all the users (you might be able to use a dynamic membership one), configure a channel or two for generic announcements that can only be published by specific people (i.e. enable moderation), and some that are "free" for all to share praise/recognitions/etc. As each team comes with its own SharePoint site, you can directly leverage this as a store for any documents you might want to share with the department, add them as tabs when needed, etc. Use the built-in tags (@channel, @team) to ensure people get notified.
It should also be straightforward to integrate with any HR system you might be using and you can take advantage of the many first- and third-party apps, bots and so on. For example, if you HR system already has a recognition functionality, it can feed data into a specific channel. Same for any sales data, or pretty much any tool out there - the vast majority nowadays have some sort of integration with Teams.
Remember that Teams also come with an email address, which you can leverage to ensure people that don't live in Teams also receive the important stuff. Though you might have to work with your IT folks to ensure all members can receive such email directly in their Inbox ("subscribers"). Channels can also have an email address (separate from the Team one), but you have less control over it.
