Microsoft Viva Engage AMA

This is a great question, Kevin. And thank you and others on this thread for your feedback regarding navigation for the Viva Engage app in Teams. TL:DR; here is - we are not making changes to the primary navigation (hence the functioning of the left navigation pane which lists your Communities) when Yammer web experience is rebranded to Viva Engage. You will still be able to use the navigation that you love and enjoy on Yammer web when it is rebranded to Viva Engage. Our philosophy for any navigational or layout changes for Viva Engage on web would be to make those changes only if they help reduce any friction in workflows and makes it easier for users to navigate the app and find what they are looking for with ease and efficiency. In the future, we will also make sure that any such changes would be experimented and if proven successful for our users, we'd provide enough heads-up to our customers to allow enough time to update any training documentation before we start to roll out those changes. Heard all your feedback loud and clear on the navigation in Viva Engage app in Teams, we will look to improve that in the coming quarters and make it more consistent and coherent. As we bring all our experiences under the Viva Engage brand, you can expect more consistency in terms of navigation, layout, look & feel, across the board. Re: URLs, Viva Engage on web would still use the same/similar url schema as Yammer.com so that a conversation, community, storyline, etc. have their own distinct urls. We will make sure when we rebrand the Yammer domain to Viva Engage that all the links are backward compatible, so that the existing Yammer links work with the new rebranded Viva Engage experience.

Seconding Kevin here! It's also important that people can easily find the URL of any asset, whether it's a conversation or a community. I have always trained key stakeholders like admins and communicators that everything in Yammer has a unique URL. That means you can embed a link to a community in a FAQ, or a hack I've always loved: email a list of 3-5 linked conversations weekly to a leader for them to jump in and make an impact via this curated list.

I can't agree more. Definitely need more clarity on Yammer web's faith, as removing it might be a wrong turn resulting in a loss of adoption. In my tenant (60k users), Yammer web is heavily used, and Viva Engage app is clearly way less popular since, as mentioned here, the experience is not easy to navigate. Leaving an app solely can be risky, at least as of now, both for users and communicators (we can't filter the feed, and communities, it is crucial for us, not sure how featuring and ACA will work), Yammer might lose its position of being such a fantastic powerful channel

Agree...I would like more understanding on what will happen with the Yammer web version which as everyone is saying is far easier to navigate.

Thank you for mentioning this, Kevin. I fully agree: The Yammer web interface objectively works a lot better than the Viva Engage interface. The fact that in Viva Engage there are two separate communities panels - one open by default but not expandable to all your communities and another that you first have to open manually but which at least lets you see all of your communities - does not make any sense from a usability perspective.

Completely agree Kevin, I encourage businesses to deploy the Viva Engage app in Teams but I only deliver Yammer training to end users using the Web version as I find it much more straight forward to navigate and teach and the feedback has always been so positive!