Forum Discussion
Does anyone know the future of working with "guests" or "external users" within Viva Engage?
We are struggling with trying to figure out the best practice for working with external users in Viva Engage. Our understanding is that there are basically two options: Add guests to communities that are in Native Mode OR create External Networks. However, we are confused...because External Networks are part of the old "Yammer" architecture...so it makes you wonder...will "External Networks" one day be deprecated since you can add guests to Native Mode/B2B communities?
Honestly, we would love to just stick with Native Mode...but here is the issue...when you enable "Guests" to be allowed in Viva Engage, they can be added to ANY communities. You can't specify which communities can allow guests and which cannot. That is something you can do with a Teams/M365 Group but can't do it with a Viva Engage/M365 Group.
Another thing we tried to do was use Sensitivity Labels for Containers on a Viva Engage community/Group to try to restrict external access. Well, it doesn't work. It works for a Teams/M365 Group but not for a Viva Engage/M365 Group. It will restrict access to the connected SharePoint site but not the specific Yammer community. Microsoft Docs also specifies that Sensitivity Labels are not available to Viva Engage yet.
This document also does not really clarify things at all.
Does anyone know the future of "External Networks"?
Does anyone know if Microsoft will one day make it possible to restrict specific Viva Engage communities from allowing external users/guests while allow it in others?
(I would say that Microsoft needs to get it together here before Meta Workplace starts to bite into their "collaboration tools" market share.)
2 Replies
- AllisonMichels
Microsoft
Would love to know more about your use of external users - about how many are you talking about? Would they be involved in multiple communities? I want to loop in a few of the right people to share where we are headed in a few of the questions you've shared. Thanks for more details.- Thanks for the response. It would be to include interactions with external vendors, suppliers, and customers. Teams or a SharePoint Communication site doesn't fit all the use cases for that. Sometimes, the need is to create a locked down knowledge base that has that social interaction layer on top of it. A place for internal folks to provide knowledge information with ability for those external users to ask questions (and mark the best answers), start discussions, or create polls/surveys. Viva Engage/Yammer is really the best fit...but it has some limitations right now that don't make that very possible. The biggest limitation is probably that you can't indicate the external access permissions for each community. It's very strange that when you enable external access for Viva Engage...it's all or nothing...the community admins can add external users into any of their communities. So, I think that is ability is missing...as well as integrations with Sensitivity labels. The other thing that is missing from communities is there is no easy way to make the connected knowledge base (SharePoint site) just read-only for everyone other than the admins. For external use case scenarios...it's fine for users to drop files into their questions or discussion points within the community side of things. But if it's truly more of a service-oriented knowledge community, admins should be able to easily prevent everyone else to making changes to the "formal" knowledge that might be stored in SharePoint site. Right now, you need to perform a work around where you make SharePoint read only but provide unique permissions to the App folder so that users can still add attachments to their Viva Engage posts....not very intuitive.
