Forum Discussion
Hughes818
Aug 23, 2023Iron Contributor
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 tha...
AllisonMichels
Microsoft
Aug 28, 2023Would 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.
- Hughes818Aug 29, 2023Iron ContributorThanks 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.