rss.livelink.threads-in-node

Customer spotlight: Less inbox, more connection at Nuveen

sarahLundy — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 19:40:15 GMT

Helping leaders reach employees in new ways

At the Microsoft 365 Community Conference, we explored a challenge many communicators are dealing with right now: employees are surrounded by nonstop signals—email, chats, meetings, and posts—and important messages get lost in the noise.

Dan Mulcahey, VP, Internal Comms at Nuveen, a TIAA company, joined us to share how he and his team are evolving their communications approach using Viva Engage to make messages more relevant, visible, and engaging over time.

Mulcahey highlighted how moving away from email to Engage marked a strategic shift in how leaders communicate and build connection with employees.

Why email wasn’t enough

The Nuveen comms team looked at the reality: email volume was high, open rates were going down, and leaders needed a better way to reach employees. From there, they piloted Engage, proved reach first, and built confidence over time. Reach came quickly, while engagement required more patience.

“We proved the reach first… But you need patience for the engagement.”

— Dan Mulcahey, VP, Internal Comms, Nuveen

Create for the channel

One of the biggest lessons from Nuveen was that communicators can’t just copy email content into a social channel and expect different results. The team had to create content for the medium. For example, Nuveen’s CEO launched a recurring “Fun with Facts” series that used humor and short videos to make even routine topics, like compliance training, more engaging.

That shift in content style reflects a broader change toward making communications feel more like what people already consume outside of work: more visual, more direct, and more conversational. What people experience on social platforms and consumer apps shapes what they expect at work, and internal communications need to keep up.

“People don’t come to work and suddenly turn off their brain. They don’t forget the platforms they use in the real world.”

— Dan Mulcahey

Mulcahey reported that since June 2023, for a business unit of around 3,700 employees, that approach generated 2.5 million impressions, 25.5K reactions, and 2K comments on Engage, along with what the team described as “one executive team of believers.”

In a video shared during the session, Josh Shamansky, Chief Human Resources Officer, said Engage had become central not only to communications distribution strategy, but also to content development. He also shared that employees and leaders were engaging in ways that email and the intranet could not support in the same way.

“Viva Engage has become the most important channel for leaders and employees to stay connected across the organization. It is hard to remember that we did it any other way.”

— Josh Shamansky, Chief Human Resources Officer, Nuveen

Start small, build momentum

The Nuveen team described a phased journey that started small in one business area, expanded to a 3,700+ person Nuveen business unit community, then grew to 10 more communities before expanding to the TIAA all-company level. They focused first on the parts of the organization most ready to adopt, used those wins as proof points, and let leadership advocacy help the model spread.

Mulcahey and members of his team — Chris Dickey, Comms Business Partner, and Chris Martin, Communications Operations Lead — talked openly about the importance of “starting small and sending wins up the chain,” democratizing communications operations, and enabling non-communicators to help carry the story forward.

That meant communicators weren’t the only people creating momentum: leaders, advocates, and business-area contributors became part of the engine. That matters even more in an AI era, where the opportunity isn’t just to create more content faster, but to build more distributed participation around the messages that matter.

If there is one takeaway, it’s this: relevance comes from building communications that fit the channel, reflect how people consume content, and unfold over time in a way employees can follow.

We’ll be sharing more blog posts throughout June to recap the Engage Track sessions at the Microsoft 365 Community Conference. Follow along on the Viva Engage Blog | Microsoft Community Hub, and learn about all the new and coming soon experiences in Engage that we highlighted at the conference.

What’s new and next in Engage: June 2026

espnguyen — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 18:57:51 GMT

The Microsoft 365 Community Conference Viva Engage track demonstrated how communications are changing: for many organizations, leaders are more visible, connection is stronger, and everyday communication is becoming a useful source of organizational knowledge for AI.

Examples from Capgemini, Nuveen, Foot Locker, AdventHealth, and Takeda showed how organizations are using Engage to create two-way dialog with leaders, support Copilot adoption, run employee events, and improve communication in the flow of work.

When product and people come together, the impact is real.
We saw what happens when customer stories, product teams, and community energy meet in the same room. In case you missed it, join our upcoming webinar on June 30, 2026, to catch the highlights, hear what we learned, and see how these conversations are shaping what’s next.

Communications meetup at the Microsoft 365 Community Conference

Engage everywhere: communities, events, and Storylines in Teams, powered by AI

In our “Engage Everywhere” session, the Engage leadership team explained why leadership communication works better when it is visible, relevant, and interactive in the tools employees already use. It matters for employee connection, and it matters for AI too: in organizations using AI, leadership communication gives Copilot more of the context it needs to return useful answers.

Jeanette Vikbacka Castaing from Capgemini shared how her team is using Engage to make leaders more visible, bring corporate events into the flow of work, and create more participation through employee challenges and community conversation. Her examples showed how communities can spark dialogue, strengthen connection, and turn everyday engagement into lasting organizational knowledge.

The Engage team demonstrated the new and coming-soon experiences that bring this vision to life across three categories of intelligence, context, and trust.

Intelligence

Available now: Copilot in Engage

For organizations with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license, Microsoft 365 Copilot in Engage helps people quickly catch up and contribute in Engage. Smart catch-up helps employees see what happened recently across their communities and network. Scoped search makes it easier to find relevant information within Engage, and writing assistance helps people draft and refine posts with better context.

Private community content is planned next. That is a meaningful step because some of the most valuable knowledge in an organization lives in smaller, role-based, or more sensitive communities.

The Engage team is also exploring more agentic experiences in Engage to help leaders, communicators, and employees keep up with what matters and take the right next step more easily. The team is considering support for actions like deciding where to respond, what to acknowledge or share, and what may need a closer look, all based on configurable instructions.

Public preview: agents in communities with grounded answers

If you’re a community admin or contribute as an expert in a busy community, it can be hard to keep up with questions. Answering them can feel like a demanding side hustle. Agents in communities can answer questions posted in a community using content from both community conversations and SharePoint sites, so responses are based on internal context instead of generic information.

Admins and experts can review, edit, or verify answers before they are posted, helping organizations scale expertise without sacrificing trust. For companies dealing with repeated questions, distributed knowledge, or hard-to-find answers, this could become one of the most practical ways to reduce effort and connect people with expertise faster.

Launch Demo

Available now: Communities to support AI adoption

We know from our research that peer connection and learning is a critical part of scaling your AI transformation efforts. The Copilot Adoption Community gives organizations a starting point for peer learning, questions, shared prompts, and ongoing education. Instead of relying only on one-way communication about AI, organizations can create spaces where employees learn from each other and build habits over time.

Microsoft’s own data shows that adoption is more sustainable when people have a place to ask questions, compare experiences, and share what is working. Communities help turn individual experimentation into collective learning, which benefits employees and strengthens the knowledge base that AI can draw from later.

Context

Public preview: Communities in Teams

One of the biggest changes coming up is the move to bring communities into Microsoft Teams. As communities become part of the flow of work in Teams, leadership dialogue will become more visible, knowledge sharing will be more habitual, and expertise will be easier to find.

Launch Demo

Public preview: Smarter communication and targeting

Communicators need options for reaching specific audiences with targeted messages while reducing overall noise. Our roadmap includes several investments designed to help communicators reach the right audiences with less manual effort, including audience storyline announcement targeting based on organizational data such as reporting structure, department, country, role, and group membership.

The team also highlighted smart notifications and delivery tracking. Available now for announcements, replies, and reactions in communities, smart notifications in Teams, mobile, and Outlook start in a user’s most frequented channel first, followed by the secondary channel if they don’t see the notification in the primary channel.

Delivery tracking gives communicators more visibility into whether announcements were sent across channels like Teams, Outlook, and Engage. Together, those updates point to a broader focus on relevance, reach, and measurable communication outcomes.

Available now: Events that extend beyond the moment

The new events in Viva Engage experience is now generally available and supports conversation before, during, and after an event. Hosted in communities or storylines, events give people one place for updates, discussion, questions, and follow-up.

These events are easier to discover, easier to revisit later, and better connected to the broader conversation in the community. This also helps turn event participation into lasting organizational knowledge.

Coming soon: Community membership auto-enrollment

Customers tell us that you'd like greater flexibility in managing community membership right within Engage. Community membership auto-enrollment helps communities stay current without manual list management. Admins can define rules based on org data or existing groups, so the right people are added automatically as teams and roles change.

Coming soon: End-to-end leader communications

For high-stakes communications, communicators need a more durable way to coordinate planning, drafting, and timing for multiple posts. The team is working on a concept for managing complex communication campaigns from end to end. Think planned message cascades, coordinated timing, and shared visibility for teams working across large leadership announcements or org-wide changes, all supported by Copilot.

Available now: New analytics

You've told us that your leaders love some healthy competition, which is why we're introducing a frequent contributors view. We're also adding click-through rate reporting so communicators can measure responses to link-based calls to action.

Coming soon: SharePoint News cross-post to Engage

Do you spend time crafting a beautiful SharePoint News post, only to see it reach a limited audience? We’re working to extend the reach of your SharePoint news by bringing it into Engage. Cross-posting brings SharePoint and Engage together in a more connected publishing flow. You’ll be able to publish a news article once and have employees engage with the same conversation across SharePoint, Teams, and Engage.

Available now: Article improvements

Articles in Engage now offer a more polished reading experience with cleaner layouts, better navigation, and richer formatting. Updates like table of contents, improved previews, multi-column layouts, and inline media make long-form communication easier to publish and easier to read.

Trust

Available now: Updated admin experiences

Admins are getting a more modern and consistent management experience across Engage. Updates include support for sensitivity labels, a new Engage email domain, improved admin workflows, and stronger governance options to help organizations manage communication with more confidence.

Coming soon: Company branding

Company branding lets organizations bring more of their visual identity into Engage. With support for custom colors and logos across web and mobile, the experience feels more familiar, more on-brand, and more connected to company culture.

Catch up on all the Microsoft 365 Community Conference news

Look out for blog posts to recap the Viva Engage Track sessions, including videos. More to come like:

Authentic leader communications with Nuveen
Playbook for a Viva Engage deployment
Copilot adoption with Footlocker
And more!

Want to get a closer look at these features and experiences? Join us for the What’s new and next with Engage webinar, 8:00 am Pacific Time, Monday, June 30, 2026

Note: Network analytics frequent contributors; announcement delivery tracker; click through rates; predictive analytics for reach; guided flows for leader posts, announcements, and cascades; and related capabilities described in this blog post are available with a Premium Viva Engage license (for example, Viva Employee Communications & Communities or Viva Suite). Engage private content in Copilot, Community Agent, and other Copilot experiences in Engage require a Microsoft 365 Copilot license.

Video links becoming attachments rather than embeds

JordsAU — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 01:18:53 GMT

Since 3 weeks ago, whenever I paste a Vimeo link into Viva Engage it becomes an attachment that, when posted, requires the post to be expanded before it can be watched.

Previously it's always scraped the vid and embedded to the post, so both the player and copy are immediately viewable by the community.

None of my Vimeo settings have changed so I'm unsure why this has occurred.

Could someone please assist?

Leadership communication in the flow of work

samsearth — Thu, 14 May 2026 22:10:44 GMT

Leadership today is less about occasional broadcasts and more about consistent, credible presence. Employees expect leaders to:

Provide clarity amid constant change
Show follow-through, not just direction
Communicate in ways that feel human and accessible

Why this matters

This playbook scales based on a leader’s scope and audience size – from company-wide executives to function and team leaders.

Research from Engage UX Researcher Paula Wellings, shared during our Masterclass series, outlines what employees expect from leader communications. This research (and our internal experience) consistently show that visible, two-way leadership communication is a key driver of trust, engagement, and successful change. When leaders participate directly, downstream employee engagement increases.

Ongoing dialogue—through posts, responses, and visible follow-through—is the foundation of leadership presence on Engage. Structured moments such as ask-me-anything (AMA) sessions and organization-wide events can reinforce that dialogue and deepen trust at scale.

At the same time, leaders face real constraints: limited time, channel overload, and high scrutiny.

Engage is designed to help leaders communicate once, in the right place, and stay visible in the flow of work without adding meetings or increasing email.

Where Engage fits in the flow of work

Leaders communicate across many channels today, including email, meetings, and the intranet. Each has a role, but not all support visibility, persistence, or two-way engagement at scale.

Engage is designed for leadership communication that benefits from reach, context, and dialogue—where updates need to travel beyond immediate teams and employees can respond, not just receive.

Read about Microsoft executive Ravi Vedula’s Viva Engage adoption journey, and chart your own course.

Choosing the right surface based on intent

Engage gives leaders two complementary avenues for communication. Each serves a different leadership intent. The choice between storyline and communities depends on the leader’s scope, audience size, and communication intent.

Storyline

Storyline enables leaders to reach both their intended audience and people across teams and hierarchies, making it well suited for visibility, alignment, and leadership presence.

Share perspectives, priorities, or decisions
Recognize people or progress publicly
Cascade or amplify important updates
Close the loop in a visible way

Communities

Communities bring together people organized around a shared variable (org, role, region, topic). They typically feature multiple voices, curated content, and ongoing discussion aligned to the purpose of the community.

Use communities when you want to:

Engage a specific group or function
Invite discussion, Q&A, or feedback
Go deeper on a topic over time
Build shared understanding within a domain

Communities are ideal when the goal is conversation rather than broadcast.

How leaders typically use both

Leaders do not choose between storyline and communities based on title or level. They choose based on audience scope and communication intent.

Storyline is typically used when the goal is broader visibility:

Sharing perspective or context that benefits cross-team awareness
Reinforcing leadership presence beyond a single org
Public recognition or commentary that should travel widely

Communities are typically used when the goal is focused dialogue:

Communicating with a defined audience (org, region, function, topic)
Hosting discussion aligned to the purpose of that group
Sustaining ongoing conversations within a curated space

In practice, leaders often use both surfaces together — for example, sharing a visible update on storyline and continuing deeper discussion within a community.

Leadership presence isn’t just posting

Leaders often pair posting with lightweight engagement—replying to comments, acknowledging questions, or reacting—to reinforce trust and dialogue.

Building blocks for effective leadership communication

To ensure clarity and reach, two things need to be in place:

Leader identification

Leaders must be identified as such in the system. This enables:

Appropriate visibility across Engage
Access to leader-level insights and analytics
A consistent experience for audiences

This ensures that leadership communication is surfaced and measured correctly.

Delegates enabled

Leaders can designate delegates to support their communication on Engage. Delegation is about support, not outsourcing leadership voice.

Delegates can:

Draft posts on behalf of the leader
Publish updates with the leader’s voice and attribution
Help manage cadence, timing, and follow-up
Help leaders stay engaged by surfacing conversations, questions, and moments worth responding to

This allows leaders to maintain an authentic presence while scaling communication – especially during busy periods or major moments.

Audiences built in (no set up required)

Engage provides built-in audiences based on organizational data, such as the reporting hierarchy, so leaders can reach the right people by default from their Storylines. Leaders and delegates can define audiences when they publish, with no setup required. Audiences provide:

A built-in followership
Confidence that messages are seen
Less reliance on follow-up email
Clear expectations for who an update is for

Core leadership use cases

Engage helps leaders put leadership behaviors into practice in a way that’s visible, consistent, and part of the flow of work.

Narrate what’s happening

Share priorities, decisions, and context at the appropriate scope so teams stay aligned.

Keep updates concise and focused on what changed, why it matters, and what’s next.

Acknowledge people and progress

Recognize wins, milestones, and contributions publicly to reinforce morale and culture.

Specific recognition lands better than generic praise. Call out teams, behaviors, or moments.

Close the loop

Reflect back what you heard, what changed, and what’s next. This is a key driver of trust.

Follow-up posts that reflect what you heard build trust and increase engagement. Even brief responses signal listening and build credibility, especially during change or uncertainty.

Host interactive leadership moments

In addition to ongoing posts and dialogue, leaders strengthen trust through live and structured interaction.

Ask-me-anything (AMA) sessions and broadcast events are powerful ways to:

Provide clarity in moments of change
Address questions transparently and at scale
Demonstrate accountability
Reinforce alignment across teams

A common pattern is to use Engage end-to-end:

Solicit questions in advance on storyline or in communities
Host the live broadcast event
Follow up with key takeaways or clarifications

Interactive moments often become anchor points in a leader’s communication strategy, complementing regular posts and dialog.

For setup guidance and event mechanics, refer to Ask me anything events in Engage.

Measuring leadership impact

Engage provides leadership analytics to help leaders understand how their communications land.

Leaders and delegates can view:

Reach: how many people saw a post
Engagement: reaction, replies, and sentiment to understand the tone and quality of responses, not just volume.
Conversation signal: whether people are responding, not just reacting
Trends over time: consistency and momentum in leadership communication

These insights are not about scoring or ranking leaders. They are designed to help leaders:

Understand what resonates
Know when follow-up is needed
Communicate with more intention over time

Leaders who consistently respond and engage tend to see stronger momentum over time, not just higher reach.

Getting started (10 minutes)

Choose the right surface:

Storyline for broad context and visibility
Communities for focused dialogue

Confirm your audience and delegates
Writing guidance:

Quality over quantity: Consistency matters more than volume. One thoughtful post a month is better than frequent updates if there isn’t something meaningful to say.
Sound human: write conversationally. Share perspectives – not corporate language.
Be timely and relevant: Address what’s top of mind for your audience right now.
Invite engagement: Ask a question or prompt reflection when appropriate.
Use visuals when possible: Images or short videos help posts stand out and travel further.
Choose the right tone: Use announcements, polls, or praise intentionally based on your goal.
Plan time to engage after posting: even a few replies can meaningfully increase trust and participation.

Example posts that leaders can model

Employees value leaders who show up, respond, and follow through — not just those who post.

Team recognition: “Proud of the team for delivering this milestone. The collaboration across groups really showed up in the final result. Thank you for the focus and persistence.”
Leadership reflection: “This month I’ve been reflecting on how we balance speed with quality. Both matter, and I’m encouraged by the conversations I’m seeing across the org.”
Amplifying an announcement: “Today’s company announcement is an important step forward. I appreciate the work behind it and encourage everyone to take a look at the full update.”
Culture and values: “One thing I consistently see here is people showing up for each other. Those moments define our culture more than any slide ever could.”
Change and transparency: “As we move through this transition, I want to acknowledge the adaptability I’m seeing across teams. I’m committed to keeping communication open as we go.”

The bigger picture

When leaders use Engage intentionally:

Important context travels faster
Teams feel more informed and connected
Reliance on broadcast email goes down
Leadership presence becomes more continuous and human

Note: Storyline announcements, targeting, the ability to identify leaders, some advanced analytics, and related capabilities described in this blog post are available with a Premium Viva Engage license (for example, Viva Employee Communications & Communities or Viva Suite).

Resources

Relevance is the new reach: modern leadership communications in Viva Engage

evelynchan — Tue, 12 May 2026 23:09:58 GMT

Leadership communication has never been more important... Or more complex. Leaders want to communicate clearly and consistently, but every message comes with a risk. Broadcast it broadly, and employees tune out. Narrow it manually, and someone important gets left out.

This isn’t a leadership or strategy gap. It’s a tooling gap.

Most platforms still force you to choose between reach and relevance. But research from Viva Engage UX Researcher Paula Wellings, shared during Viva Engage Masterclass Season Two: Session 3 – Campaigns & Storytelling, confirms what corporate communicators have long suspected: Employees don't ignore leadership communication because they're disengaged. They ignore it because it doesn't apply to them.

When messages aren't tied to an employee's role, location, or reporting chain, they're not just ignored. They create active disengagement and information anxiety. That's why precision targeting is no longer optional. It's a prerequisite for engagement.

That insight is exactly why Viva Engage is investing in a next generation of capabilities designed specifically for leadership communication through Storyline.

How Storyline targeting changes the game

By enabling Leaders, and their Delegates, to define audiences directly at publish time using existing organizational attributes like reporting chain, department, or role, Storyline announcements make it easier to confidently notify the right audience without relying on static distribution lists or organization‑wide alerts. This allows leadership teams to move from volume‑based communication to relevance‑based reach — ensuring that the most important updates are delivered with precision, not noise.

Storyline announcements = Precision, not volume

Real‑world example: targeted HR updates without the overhead

Scenario: HR needs to share a benefits update that applies only to employees in the United States.

Before

Build and maintain a US-only distribution list
Or send org-wide and create confusion for EMEA/APAC teams
Rely on email, with no visibility into reach or engagement

With Storyline announcements:

Select Country = United States at publish time
2,400 relevant employees notified automatically, with optional notification channel delivery customization (Engage, e-mail, Teams)
Engagement tracked through analytics
No list management required

Targeting isn’t just about who sees a message, it’s also about how they’re notified and whether that audience can be reused. With Storyline Announcements, leaders and their delegates can customize notification channels and save audiences for reuse, making repeat communications faster and more consistent over time.

And soon with smart notifications for Storylines, Engage will send alerts to an employee’s preferred delivery channel first, helping reduce duplicate notifications across Teams, email, and Engage.

Why use Storyline announcements (instead of sending another email)?

Storyline gives Leaders a direct, measurable channel for communicating with their audiences, while still supporting dialogue and participation.

Unlike email broadcasts, Storyline posts:

Appear across Teams, Outlook, mobile, and desktop

Support engagement and feedback

Can be measured using audience analytics

Allow Delegates to manage communications on behalf of the Leader

Leaders’ Storyline posts can complement community‑based communications, and the same principle applies more broadly across corporate communications: the best tool depends on both the audience and the level of amplification a message needs.

Cascading messages with added relevance

Reinforcing organizational priorities

Sharing context and perspective

Building leadership visibility and authenticity

This makes Storyline an ideal channel for business updates, organizational changes, initiative rollouts, policy notifications, campaign reinforcement, event reminders, or action‑oriented leadership messages - all delivered to the people who actually need them.

To explore these upcoming Storyline announcement targeting capabilities, sign up for the public preview and read more about Storyline announcements.

Another way to increase reach without extra noise

Featured conversations offer another way to increase reach without adding noise.

For posts in public communities, communicators can now choose whether to feature a conversation to everyone in the network or to community members only. That makes featuring a useful option when the goal is to increase visibility without defaulting to a broad notification for every message.

Featured conversations and storyline announcements are separate capabilities in Viva Engage, but they reflect the same principle: giving communicators more control over how broadly a message is amplified. Storyline announcements remain the right fit for targeted leader communications, while featured conversations give corporate communicators another way to match reach to relevance in community-based campaigns and updates.

Learn more about featuring a conversation in Viva Engage.

How analytics help communicators measure leader reach

Analytics in Viva Engage help communicators understand whether a message reached the right audience and resonated once it got there.

Understand a post’s reach across audiences and platforms
Measure reactions, replies, and shares to understand engagement
Extract important themes and sentiment from comments

Now, the Frequent contributors leaderboard view in network analytics can help communicators understand which leaders’ posts are catching employee attention and compare engagement trends across leaders and top creators.

Note: Storyline announcements, targeting, frequent contributors, and related capabilities described in this blog post are available with a Premium Viva Engage license (for example, Viva Employee Communications & Communities or Viva Suite).

Unable to tag distribution lists (DLs) in Viva engage posts

gibhnovo123 — Mon, 11 May 2026 03:58:13 GMT

Dear All,

It would be helpful to have a feature in Viva Engage posts that allows us to tag DLs when needed. While planning a post, I noticed that cross functional teams are not part of the community for specific reasons, which I understand. Instead of reposting in their community, it would be useful if we could tag DLs so the original message reaches everyone intended.

Issue with notifications in external network

MaciejO — Thu, 07 May 2026 10:22:34 GMT

I am having problems with seeing notifications from external network (Microsoft's network to be exact).

I can see the notification count all right:

However upon clicking the bell, I get this error 90% of the time:

What is really weird, is that every now & then it works just fine - it might take 10 times trying the bell icon, or 50, but those notifications will at some point be shown to me all right.

I seem to be in tiny minority of people having this issue.

Does anyone have any guidance or troubleshooting approach? Is this a setting in my home tenant, or Microsoft tenant? Account permissions?

Does a log or telemetry exist anywhere where I could start asking the right questions how to resolve this.

If anyone has any insight, that would be greatly appreciated

Thanks,
Maciej

Planning for Communities in Teams: What Admins and Communicators Should Do Next

AllisonMichels — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 16:12:03 GMT

Imagine if employees could spend less time sorting through messages and more time engaging with what actually matters, whether it’s a leadership update, a company announcement, or an important change…all in one place where they can understand, react, and respond.

Communities are becoming a more visible part of Teams, making now the right time for admins and communicators to align on readiness, governance, and content. This 3-step post helps you plan your rollout:

How to get ready
How to reset All Company
How to address concerns about noise as adoption grows

You’ll also learn the key decisions admins and corporate communications teams should make to ensure Communities add clarity, not noise as adoption increases.

And in case you missed it, the Teams blog covers what’s new and why it matters. (If you haven’t read the announcement yet, start here:
Introducing communities in Teams: Unifying company communication and connection)

What’s changing... and what’s not

What’s new:

Communities are easier to discover and access in Teams
Visibility of posts and announcements increases

What’s not changing:

Governance is still in your control
Communities still follow your existing structure and purpose

The opportunity isn’t to rebuild everything, it’s to refine what already works.

Start from where you are

We recognize that not every customer is starting from the same place. For organizations already using Viva Engage, Communities in Teams is less about reinventing your strategy and more about extending it into the flow of everyday work. Communities are now easier to find and engage with inside Teams, raising the stakes for clarity, governance, and content design. As access becomes simpler and participation grows, it’s important to have your policies, onboarding, and launch plan in place.

"Bringing our Viva Engage communities into Teams was an instant win for our organization. By standardizing on a single pane of glass, inside of Teams, we've made it easier and more enjoyable for staff to communicate with other, using a trusted tool that requires no additional enablement overhead. Cognizant has over 350,000 employees - and managing communities at scale requires us to leverage Viva Engage - by now having those live inside of Teams, we get the best of both worlds: the ability to participate in communities with 30k+ employees while still maintaining the notification and organization we've come to depend upon inside of ad-hoc Teams groups and more traditional Teams channels. This further reinforced the idea that Viva Engage Communities are where work gets done - they aren't an optional location for employees - and staying on top of groups and communities together helps make us better at supporting our clients! Best of all - we like to say we "drink our own champagne" here at Cognizant - we can now go to those clients and use our story to show them how an integrated Teams/Viva environment can drive positive business outcomes and enhanced employee experiences."

Reed Wiedower, Cognizant, Innovation and Enablement Leader

If you are new to Viva Engage, or have not used it strategically in some time, start by defining a few high-value communities, setting clear governance, and giving employees simple guidance on where to go, what to expect, and how to engage.

Start by understanding where your organization is today:

What governance looks like the next 30 days:

Revisit All Company and determine if its purpose or usage should change.
Define “official communities” strategy. Start with a small set (e.g., employee news, leadership updates, IT help, communities of practice), seed them with content, and actively promote them.
Establish a naming convention to support discovery as Communities become visible in Teams.
Define governance and moderation: who creates communities, who can post announcements, and how moderation works.
Communicate these changes to community admins and encourage them to activate or refresh key communities.

Not using Viva Engage yet? Start here.

If you’re unsure where to start, start small: define the purpose, set expectations, and publish a simple guide for employees on how to follow, post, and manage notifications. With a few well-run communities in place, you’ll have the proof, and the playbook, to expand with confidence.

Once you’ve defined your starting point and aligned on governance, the next critical step is resetting how your most visible community, All Company, should be used. If you need more guidance or a starting point, check out the Communities in Teams Playbook!

Reset All Company for the Teams experience

As Communities become more visible in Teams, All Company becomes even more important. This is the moment to reset its purpose: one place for company-wide updates that matter to everyone.

For Admins (IT / Network Admins): Set the guardrails

Your role isn’t just to enable Communities, it’s to prevent noise before it starts.

Start here:

Limit who can post (e.g., Corp Comms + delegated leadership voices)
Document what qualifies as a post vs. what belongs elsewhere
Define when announcements should be used (not every post needs one)

For Corporate Comms: Reset how you use All Company

Think of All Company as your broadcast + engagement layer inside Teams.

Use it for:

Leadership narratives and context (not just links)
Major moments that need visibility and dialogue
Posts that invite reaction, questions, and discussion

Decide:

What qualifies as a new post vs. a reply
Who moderates, and when to step in
Expected cadence (not every update = an announcement)

Write for Teams behavior:

Lead with “what this means” (not just “what’s new”)
Keep posts scannable (short, clear, structured)
Use announcements sparingly—overuse reduces trust

Once All Company is clearly defined, look for follow-on communities (like Copilot Adoption Community) where more targeted conversations can happen.

Address concerns about noise early

As Communities expand in Teams, one concern comes up quickly: Will this create more noise? Done right, the answer is no. Start with this mindset: more posts ≠ more value. Engagement doesn’t mean more content. It means more relevant content, in the right place. If everything is posted everywhere, or if everything is an announcement employees will tune out.

Admins: Control where content shows up

Next Steps:

Ensure communities are purpose-driven (not duplicates of the same topic)
Guide teams to use the right community for the right audience
Review the Governance of the network and Watch session: Mastering admin and governance in Viva Engage for community management, moderation capabilities and more.
Review moderation and theme moderation in Viva Engage

Corporate Comms: Be intentional with reach

More visibility is powerful, but only when used carefully. Clarity reduces noise more than volume control ever will.

Reminders:

Use announcements for high-signal moments only
Reserve broad reach for content that applies to most employees
Let smaller or targeted communities carry more specific conversations

The goal is trust, not volume

As Communities become easier to access in Teams, the priority is making them feel useful, intentional, and worth employees’ attention. Done well, Communities don’t add noise, they make important communication easier to find, easier to understand, and easier to trust.

Continue the journey

PS. Want access now? Communities in Teams is available now for Engage customers who opt into public preview, with no migration required. All existing community content, permissions, and governance settings carry over automatically.

Review the network and tenant requirements to ensure your network meets the criteria.
Make sure the engage experiences in Teams toggle is on for your tenant.
Opt-in to the public preview through Teams.
Learn more about the full experience for communities in Teams.

Viva Engage for recognition feels limited, what are you all using?

HarryP — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 04:51:45 GMT

We rolled out Viva Engage hoping the praise feature would help build a recognition culture but honestly its kinda buried and most employees forget its there. Our managers want something where giving recognition is part of the daily flow, like right inside a Teams chat or after a meeting. Are you running into difficulties with praise? Any best practices you can recommend so we can use it better? Or are you using something else?

Effective, engaging events in communities and storylines

tricialybrook — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 16:03:56 GMT

Whether you’re running a company-wide broadcast, a training session, a Reddit-style “ask me anything” (AMA) or an in-person gathering, Viva Engage and Microsoft Teams help you host and manage more effective and engaging events.

Events have always been central to employee communications. Viva Engage and events play a critical role in building trust, encouraging authenticity, and listening at scale. From highly produced hybrid all-hands to asynchronous AMAs, the new Viva Engage features are helping our leaders connect with employees, address what matters most, and build trust—all in one platform.

- John Cirone, Senior Director of Global Employee and Executive Communications

We are upgrading existing community live events and storyline AMA features with a simple model: three event types—broadcast, meeting, async—from any community or storyline, super-powered with a long list of event features you have asked for. The result: improved experiences for organizers, presenters and attendees both before, during and after the event. This blog post will detail what this means for you!

These new events features start rolling out April 27^th. And guess what? All of these new features will be available to all Microsoft 365 commercial customers with access to Engage and Teams—no “premium” license will be required for events up to 10,000 attendees.

New features: the highlights

The new capabilities of Engage events—particularly the moderated feed with support for anonymous questions and upvotes—has transformed the way we empower our leaders to listen and respond to questions from employees.

- Alexander Bradley, Senior Director of Executive Communications

With that in mind, let’s start by exploring the new features for every event in every community and storyline:

Events listing: Each community and storyline has a calendar of upcoming and past events—a destination for people to register for future events and catch up with events they missed.
Event page: The home for your event is a branded landing page with a custom cover photo (coming soon), the event details and description. This is the “micro site” for your event to which you drive attendees. They can learn about the event, engage with it, join the live session, and catch up with the event if they missed it.
Event feed: A new event feed enables you to share updates, solicit questions, ideas and feedback, and support engagement between attendees and presenters. The new event feed introduces support for optional anonymous posting and moderation which allows organizers to approve posts before they are made visible to attendees. The feed allows you to tune the event experience for the engagement you want to encourage and support; you can enable or disable questions, comments, reactions, and upvoting; and you can change the settings at any time. The event feed is available before, during and after the event, showing up on the event landing page in Engage and in the “Q&A” panel of Teams.
Event recording: After the event, the recording is available on the event page, so attendees can review both the recording and the feed. You can now update the recording link, allowing you to make edits to the video.

Calendaring options: Events in Engage support two models to support your efforts to drive demand and attendance. First, you can invite attendees directly from Outlook, putting an invitation directly in their calendar. This model supports scenarios where their attendance is expected. Or, you can drive attendees to the event page where they can add to calendar, supporting an “opt-in” model that gives attendees control of what is on their calendar. Or you can mix and match, inviting those attendees who really need to have it on their calendar and letting others opt in.
Event analytics: You’ll have access to analytics throughout the lifecycle of your event. You’ll be able to see how many people attended, how they engaged in the event feed, and how people consumed the recording after the event. For broadcasts, you can also access Teams insights.

Mobile app choice: Attendees can join events from either the Teams or Engage mobile apps, across both iOS and Android.

Integration with enterprise search and Copilot: Content from public events serves as grounding for Microsoft 365 Copilot and enterprise search, amplifying the reach and impact of the knowledge and information you share in your event.

Event types

Now, let’s explore the three event types and what is different.

BROADCAST is best for company-wide or large-scale events, launches, keynotes and organizational “town hall” or “all hands” events. Key characteristics:

Deliver a high‑quality live stream that scales to large audiences
Organizers control what appears on screen
Attendees watch the event and participate using Q&A and reactions

This experience is an upgrade to the legacy “live event” broadcast, with an advanced feed and a rich suite of production features.

MEETING is best for collaborative sessions, presentations, training workshops, expert panels, and all of the regular “rhythm of business” events your team or department conducts. Key characteristics:

Share camera, microphone, and screen in real time
Organizers can control who can present and share
Up to 1,000 people can participate in the live event

A collaborative event can feel exactly like a Teams meeting, where anyone can share. Or it can be like a presentation or webinar, where only presenters can share. Or anything in between.

ASYNC is best for soliciting questions, collecting feedback, and crowdsourcing ideas from employees.

Conduct an offline, asynchronous event with no live presentation or video stream
Host an "ask-me-anything" (AMA) during which leaders or experts answer questions
Enhance an in-person event by engaging your audience before and after

This experience features an event page and event feed, but no real-time video experience powered by Teams. You can gather questions, ideas and feedback before an in-person event, or host a text-only (asynchronous) event like a Reddit-style AMA that can connect people with experts even over longer periods of time.

Why host events in a community instead of creating them from your calendar?

Until now, you’ve had one way to create events: From your Teams or Outlook calendar, you can create a Teams meeting, a Teams webinar, or a Teams Town Hall. Why would you want to change where you create and host events?

An event isn’t just a calendar entry; its impact continues outside of the event confines. New event features help employees who missed the live event catch up quickly, help moderators engage attendees, and help leaders close the loop by responding to remaining questions. The result is a richer, more durable record of the event, so your organization benefits from the information and knowledge long after the event ends.

Here’s the short list of what you can do better when you create your event from a community:

Provide a calendar of upcoming and past events.
Communicate effectively to drive awareness and attendance.
Engage your audience before, during and after the event.
Leverage event analytics to measure and improve effectiveness.
Amplify information and knowledge shared at the event, after the event.
Integration with community objectives and experiences.

If you have experience with Microsoft 365 and events, think of it this way: By creating an event in a community, you’re taking a Teams event and wrapping it with the superpowers of Engage to reach and engage your audience at scale, before, during and after your event.

And remember communities are not just for Engage anymore! Communities (powered by Engage) will be available in Teams Chat, alongside your chats, channels, and meetings; so, your events and their content will be seamlessly integrated into the flow of work in Teams.

Preview customers have used these new event capabilities at scale, for company-wide “all hands” events, departmental rhythm-of-business meetings, and an extraordinary number of internal AI learning events. We look forward to celebrating your successful events as you apply these features to share news and information, train people, and engage employees.

Resources

Viva Engage Explained: Search

RamyaRajasekhar — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 18:53:46 GMT

Every person's search results are different. Just like the home feed, Engage search is personalized. When you search, we don't just look at the words you typed - we consider who you work with, which communities you're active in, and what content is most likely to be useful to you specifically.

So how does search work? What happens when you type a query and press Enter? And how can you search more effectively? Let's take a closer look.

The search experience

Search in Viva Engage has two stages: suggestions as you type and full search results. Each is designed to help you find what you need as quickly as possible.

Stage 1: Instant suggestions

Even before you start typing anything, when you click on the search bar, you are presented with suggestions based on your previous searches. As soon as you start typing in the search box, Engage shows you instant suggestions before you even press Enter. These suggestions are organized by type:

Query suggestions - popular and related search terms that help you refine your query
Ask Copilot - an option to have Copilot answer your question directly using knowledge from Engage
Communities - matching communities you can navigate to directly
People - matching users so you can jump straight to their profile
Campaigns - campaigns that match your search terms

As you type "copilot," Engage instantly shows related query suggestions, matching communities like "Microsoft Global Hackathon 2025," and relevant people - all before you press Enter.

These suggestions are designed to save you time. If you see the community, person, or campaign you're looking for, you can click it directly - no need to go to the full search results page.

When to use Ask Copilot

You'll notice that the autosuggestions include an "Ask Copilot" option at the top. This is especially powerful when your search goes beyond simple keywords and becomes a full question or request.

Here's a good rule of thumb: if you're typing more than a couple of keywords, consider using Ask Copilot. When your query looks more like a sentence or question than a keyword search, Copilot is often the faster path to an answer.

What you're typing	Best approach
"hackathon"	🔍 Regular search - a simple keyword, great for browsing posts
"hackathon winners 2025"	🔍 Regular search - specific keywords will surface the right threads
"who won the hackathon last year"	🤖 Ask Copilot - this is a question; Copilot can synthesize the answer from multiple posts
"how do I set up a community in Engage"	🤖 Ask Copilot - a how-to question; Copilot can assemble step-by-step guidance
"what was discussed in the last leadership town hall"	🤖 Ask Copilot - a summarization request; Copilot can pull together key points from recap threads
"what are the latest AI tools people are using"	🤖 Ask Copilot - an exploratory question; Copilot can aggregate insights from across the network

How it works: When you click "Ask Copilot," your query is sent to Microsoft 365 Copilot, which searches across conversations in your Engage network and generates a natural-language answer with citations. You'll see a summarized response with links to the source threads - so you can always verify and dig deeper.

License requirement: Ask Copilot is available only to users with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license. If you don't have a Copilot license, the "Ask Copilot" option will not appear in the search suggestions. All other search features - keyword matching, meaning matching, personalized ranking, and filtering - are available to all Viva Engage users.

Think of it this way: regular search helps you browse and discover. It's ideal when you want to see a list of posts and scan through them yourself. Ask Copilot helps you get answers. It's ideal when you have a specific question and want a synthesized response instead of scrolling through dozens of results.

Both options are available in the same search box - start typing and choose the path that matches your intent.

Stage 2: Full search results

When you press Enter (or click the search icon), you land on the full search results page. Results are organized into tabs so you can focus on exactly what you're looking for:

Tab	What it shows
Conversations	Thread results with full post previews, author info, community name, and highlighted matching terms
Answers	Questions and answers that match your query
Communities	Communities with matching names or descriptions
People	Users matching by name, job title, or email
Campaigns	Active and past campaigns matching your query
Files	Documents and files shared in Engage posts
Topics	Topics used across the network

The full search results page for " copilot" - notice how the matching keywords are highlighted in the post preview, and results show the community name, author, date, and reply count.

You can further narrow your results using the filter bar at the top of the results page. Filters include Date, Posted by (a specific person), Posted in (a specific community), and an All filters option for advanced filtering.

How search finds your results

When you search in Viva Engage, a lot happens behind the scenes - all in less than a second. Here's a simplified view of what happens:

Keyword matching + meaning matching

Viva Engage uses hybrid search - two fundamentally different approaches that run at the same time and complement each other:

Keyword matching finds posts that contain the exact words you typed. This uses a proven information retrieval technique that considers not just whether your keywords appear, but how often they appear and how distinctive they are. A rare, specific word like "hackathon" carries more weight than a common word like "team." This is great for specific terms like project names, acronyms, or someone's name. If you search for "FY26 Q3 OKRs," keyword matching finds posts that use those exact terms.

Keyword matching also draws from two pools of content: exploration results (discovery-focused, across all content you can access) and affinity results (personalized, weighted toward people and communities you interact with most). These two pools are merged to give you both breadth and personalization right from the start.

Meaning matching uses AI to understand the intent behind your query. Your query text is converted into a mathematical representation of its meaning (called an "embedding"), and then compared against embeddings for all threads in the network. Posts with similar meaning are surfaced - even if they use completely different words. For example, if you search for "team morale ideas," meaning matching can surface a post titled "Fun Activities to Boost Team Engagement" - there's no word overlap, but the meaning is the same. Only results that meet a minimum similarity threshold are included, ensuring quality.

Why both? Keyword matching is precise and predictable. Meaning matching helps you discover content you might have missed. Together, they cast a wide net - typically evaluating hundreds of candidate posts - before narrowing down to the most relevant results for you.

Privacy and permissions

Engage applies strict permission checks. You will only ever see content you have access to. Posts from private communities you haven't joined, or threads that have been deleted, are never shown. Note that content from communities you've muted will still appear in search results - muting affects your feed, not search.

Personalized ranking

After finding all the potentially relevant posts, Engage uses a machine learning model to re-rank results specifically for you. The model evaluates each candidate post across over 100 different signals, organized into several categories:

Text relevance - how well the post content matches your query, measured through multiple dimensions including term frequency, term importance, match density, and which part of the post the match appears in (title, body, or replies)
People affinity - how much you interact with the person who wrote the post, across Engage, Outlook, Teams, and other Microsoft 365 tools. The system computes a personalized affinity score between you and every author in the result set
Community affinity - how active you are in the community where the post was shared, based on your visits, replies, and engagement history with that community
Semantic similarity - three separate AI-computed similarity scores: how close your query meaning is to the post content, to the post author, and to the community where it was posted
Recency and time signals - when the post was created, how much time has elapsed, and time-decay factors that naturally boost newer content
Engagement signals - view counts, reply counts, reactions, and the user's own search and click history help predict what they'll find valuable
Highlight quality - where in the post the matches appear, how concentrated they are, and how prominent the matching sections are

This is why two people searching for the same thing may see different results. If you work closely with someone in the engineering team and they posted about "hackathon," their post will naturally rank higher for you than for someone who has never interacted with them.

Speed and performance

All of this - hybrid candidate generation, feature computation across 100+ signals, machine learning ranking, and permission filtering - happens in under a second. Several techniques make this possible:

Parallelism - keyword and meaning matching run simultaneously, not one after the other, so the total time is the duration of the slower search, not the sum of both
Smart caching - when you view the first page of results, Engage pre-fetches and caches the next page in the background. This means pagination feels instant - clicking to page 2 or 3 serves cached results with no delay
Batch processing - signals like engagement history and community metadata are fetched and computed in optimized batches rather than one at a time

The result is a search experience that feels instant while doing sophisticated work behind the scenes.

Searching for people

Viva Engage search isn't just for conversations - it's also a powerful way to find people across your organization. When you search for a person, Engage matches against:

Display name - first name, last name, or both (e.g., "Rajesh Jha")
Job title - search by role (e.g., "engineering manager" or "principal PM")
Email or alias - search by email address or alias prefix

People results appear in both the instant suggestions dropdown and the People tab on the search results page. Each result shows the person's name, profile picture, job title, and email - so you can quickly identify the right person even when there are multiple matches.

Tip: If you know someone's email alias, searching for it (e.g., "chrzeng") is often the fastest way to find them. Searching by job title (e.g., "product manager Engage") helps you discover people you may not know by name.

Searching for communities

Looking for a community to join? Search matches against community names and descriptions. This means you can search by topic (e.g., "accessibility," "onboarding," "women leadership") and find relevant communities even if the exact word isn't in the community name.

Community results also appear in the instant suggestions as you type, making it easy to navigate directly to a community without visiting the full results page.

A few examples of how community search works:

You search for...	You'll find communities like...
"accessibility"	Engage Accessibility, Accessibility Connected Community, Accessibility Leadership Community
"women leadership"	SME&C Women in Leadership, Women's Leadership Community (WLC), Technical Women at Microsoft
"Azure DevOps"	Azure DevOps / 1ES, and related Azure engineering communities
"onboarding"	Onboarding, Alchemy Onboarding, New Employee Onboarding

Keyword highlighting

When you land on the search results page, you'll notice that your search terms are highlighted in the post previews. This helps you quickly scan results and understand why each post was returned.

Highlighting appears in:

The thread title (if the post has one)
The body text preview - Engage shows the most relevant snippet of the post with your keywords highlighted
Replies - if a reply matches your query, it's shown with highlights below the original post

For example, searching for "AI tools and copilot" highlights each matching word in the results, making it easy to see how the post relates to your query at a glance.

A note on highlighting: We’re aware that keyword highlighting may not appear consistently across all result types. For instance, topic names and community names are indexed and searchable but are not currently highlighted in the search results. We’re actively working to improve highlighting consistency across the search experience.

Search on mobile - the same engine, designed for your pocket

Search in Viva Engage works the same way whether you're at your desk or on the go. The mobile apps (iOS and Android) use the same search engine, ranking, and personalization as the web experience - so the results you see on your phone are the same quality you'd get on the web.

On mobile, the search results page is optimized for touch and smaller screens: result cards are streamlined, tabs let you tap between Conversations, People, Communities, and more, and tapping any result takes you straight into the full thread. Use search on mobile to stay connected with your organization's conversations on the go - catch up on town hall recaps, hackathon updates, or announcements from anywhere.

Feature	Web	Mobile
Search engine & ranking	✅ Full hybrid search with personalization	✅ Same engine and ranking
Search tabs	✅ Conversations, Answers, Communities, People, Files, Topics	✅ Same tabs
Autosuggest	✅ Communities, People, Campaigns, Ask Copilot as you type	— Not available
Filters	✅ Date, Posted by, Posted in	— Not available
Keyword highlighting	✅ Yellow highlights on matching keywords	✅ Same highlighting
Result cards	Rich cards with hero images, inline replies	Streamlined cards optimized for smaller screens
Search operators	✅ AND, OR, NOT, "exact phrase", wildcards	✅ Same operators

What impacts your search results?

Your search experience improves over time as Engage learns from your activity. These actions directly influence the quality and personalization of your results:

Join communities. Joining relevant communities and leaving ones you're not interested in helps search understand what topics matter to you. Results from communities you've joined receive increased weight.
Interact with posts. Liking, replying to, and viewing posts tells search which content and authors are relevant to you. The more you engage, the better your people and community affinity scores become.
Follow people. Following leaders and colleagues is one of the strongest signals for search personalization. Posts from people you follow get a natural ranking boost.
Join relevant communities. Being a member of communities helps search understand your interests and can surface more relevant content from those communities.

Good to know: Engage uses the same affinity signals as the home feed. If you've been improving your feed experience by following people and joining communities, your search results are benefiting too.

Tips for more effective searching

Engage search learns from the signals you provide. Here are some ways to get better results:

Be specific

Instead of “strategy,” try “FY26 company strategy.”
Adding context like dates, team names, or product names helps search find exactly what you need.

Use the tabs

If you’re looking for a person, click the People tab.
If you’re looking for a community, click Communities to focus results on the right content type.

Filter by date

Use the Date filter to narrow results to a specific time period.
Especially useful if you roughly remember when something was posted.

Filter by author

Use the Posted by filter if you remember who posted it.
Helps narrow results to a specific person’s posts.

Filter by community

Use Posted in to limit results to a specific community.
Helpful when you know where the conversation happened.

Ask Copilot

When you see Ask Copilot in the suggestions dropdown, click it.
You’ll get an AI-generated answer drawn from Engage conversations.

Use search operators

Use AND to require all terms e.g., safety AND store
Use OR to broaden results e.g., hackathon OR innovation
Use NOT to exclude terms e.g., hackathon NOT 2026
Use quotes for exact phrases.
Operators can be combined e.g., (hackathon OR innovation) AND 2025

Search by hashtag

If you know the topic or campaign tag (e.g., #CopilotStories), search for it directly.
The Topics tab shows all matching hashtags and their associated threads.

We're always improving

The Viva Engage search team is continuously improving the search experience. As you use search, you're helping it get smarter. Your interactions - the results you click, the posts you engage with, and the communities you join - all contribute to a better experience for everyone.

Have feedback on search? Send an email to rarajase@microsoft.com - we're listening.

Sensitivity Labels Are Coming to Viva Engage Communities Here's What You Need to Know

audreyhosford — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 18:06:54 GMT

If you've seen MC1250283 in your Message Center and have questions, you're not alone. In the past few weeks we've heard from customers across industries — financial services, manufacturing, healthcare, government — all asking variations of the same questions. This post is our attempt to answer them all in one place. You can find out more via this article Sensitivity labels in Viva Engage. | Microsoft Learn

What's changing

Starting March 31, 2026 sensitivity labels will be available in Viva Engage community creation. When someone creates a new community, they'll see a sensitivity label picker, the same kind of label selector that already exists in Microsoft Teams and SharePoint.

This is Engage joining the rest of Microsoft 365. Sensitivity labels for groups and sites have been supported in Teams, SharePoint, and M365 Groups for years. Engage communities, which are built on top of M365 Groups and SharePoint sites, are now part of that ecosystem.

How it works

Labels come from Purview, not Engage. There is no new admin setting in the Viva Engage admin center to turn this on or off. Your sensitivity labels are configured and published in Microsoft Purview, and those settings now apply to Engage communities the same way they apply to Teams and SharePoint.

Labels are synced across all three surfaces. An Engage community's sensitivity label is shared with its linked M365 Group and SharePoint site. When a label is applied to one, it synchronizes across all three. This means your label governance is consistent — not fragmented.

Existing communities are not automatically labeled. Communities created before this rollout will remain in an unlabeled state. They won't have a label auto-assigned. Admins can apply labels to existing communities in bulk using existing PowerShell scripts against the linked M365 Groups or SharePoint sites, no new tooling is needed. Applying a label via those surfaces will trigger the sync to Engage.

Labeling can be mandatory or optional. Whether users must pick a label when creating a community is controlled by your Purview label policy. In the label policy publishing flow, under "Groups and sites > Settings," there's a checkbox to make site labeling mandatory. If you check it, users will be required to select a label when creating a community. If you don't, the label picker appears but community creation is still allowed without a selection.

Default labels are set in Purview. If mandatory labeling is enabled and a user hasn't picked a label, the creation flow pre-populates a default. That default is determined by your label policy settings in Purview — Purview suggests the lowest-priority label with the right scope, but you can configure a different one. On Day 1, before an Engage-specific default is configured, the existing site default label (if set) will pre-populate.

Community admins and owners can change labels after creation. This isn't locked to tenant admins. Community admins and owners will be able to update the label via community settings in Viva Engage or through the M365 admin center group listings.

Sensitivity labels can be managed via community settings.

Programmatic community creation still works. If you create communities via the Graph API's /community endpoint, the label won't be set through that call — there's no Graph API support for setting labels directly on communities in this release. However, after creation, you can apply the label via PowerShell targeting the linked M365 Group or SharePoint site, which will sync to Engage. Your existing automation flows won't break; they just need a label-setting step added if you need one.

The governance tension we've heard

The most substantive concern we've received, and it's a legitimate one, comes from organizations that have configured their Purview label policies to enforce private-only labels for groups and sites. These organizations allowed public Engage communities precisely because Engage wasn't subject to sensitivity label governance. When Engage joins that ecosystem, their Purview policy will apply — and if their policy only permits private-supporting labels, new Engage communities will only be creatable as private communities.

We want to be direct about this: Purview sensitivity label policies are tenant-wide and can't be scoped to individual workloads. There is no way to say "apply this policy to Teams and SharePoint but not Engage." Engage communities are built on M365 Groups and SharePoint sites, and they share the same label scope in order to stay in sync.

If your organization has strict private-only governance and you need to continue creating public Engage communities, the practical path is:

Create a public-supporting sensitivity label (e.g., "General - Internal Communications")
Publish it to admins only — not your entire user base — so it doesn't accidentally appear in Teams or SharePoint creation flows for end users
Apply this label to Engage communities via the admin center or PowerShell scripts
Optionally, publish the label to your entire user base and use automated scripts to monitor Groups and Sites for misuse of that public label and correct them

This is a workaround, not an ideal solution. We've heard the feedback clearly: Engage's use case — broad internal communication and knowledge sharing, is fundamentally different from SharePoint or Teams collaboration, and a one-size-fits-all label scope creates real tension. We're tracking this as a design consideration and have raised it with the Purview team. If you want to formally register this feedback, submit a Design Change Request (DCR) with your Microsoft Account team asking for per-workload label scoping support.

What sensitivity labels do NOT change

Community discoverability. All Engage communities remain discoverable to all users regardless of sensitivity label. Labels don't create "hidden" communities. A private community is visible in search — users just can't read the content without being a member.
What users can see in search. Search results are governed by access control lists (ACLs), not sensitivity labels. Users will only see content they have permission to access.
Your custom label taxonomy. Labels like "Confidential" or "Highly Confidential" are defined by your organization in Purview. There's no universal label structure — your configuration is yours.

Frequently asked questions

Can I test this in a staging tenant before it hits production? This rolls out to production tenants starting March 31. There isn't a separate staging path for this feature. We recommend using this window before rollout to review your Purview label policies, identify any communities where label assignment may create issues, and prepare admin and end user documentation.

What happens if we have no sensitivity labels configured in Purview at all? If you don't use sensitivity labels for groups and sites, this change will have no impact. Community creation will support the privacy picker as it always has.

Will this affect Copilot? Yes, and this is worth thinking through. Verified answers and content in private communities are scoped to members of that community. If your governance pushes more communities to private, that content becomes less accessible to Copilot for org-wide knowledge retrieval. If broad knowledge sharing is a goal, this is a factor to weigh in your label policy decisions.

Will there be any visual change for end users? Users creating communities will see a sensitivity label dropdown in the creation flow. If your organization has labels published to users, they'll be able to select from those labels. If mandatory labeling is not enabled, they can leave it blank. If a community has a label, it will be visible in the community header.

Once a community has a sensitivity label applied, end users will see it in the lower right of the community header.

What to do before March 31

Review your Purview label policies. Specifically check whether you have mandatory labeling enabled for groups and sites, and what default label is configured. This will determine what your users see in community creation.
Check for existing communities with label mismatches. If your linked Groups or SharePoint sites already have labels applied, confirm that those labels are ones that make sense for public community use.
Prepare your community admins. Let them know the label picker is coming and what they should (or shouldn't) select.
Prepare end user guidance if needed. For most organizations this will be low-friction. But if you have a complex label taxonomy or strict governance, proactive communication helps.

Monday Masterclass Season 2 – Week 4 Designing Events Employees Remember

AllisonMichels — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 18:50:16 GMT

Great events don’t just deliver information — they create moments people remember, return to, and build on.

In Week 4 of the Viva Engage Monday Masterclass Season 2, we wrapped up the series by focusing on how to design events that drive participation, trust, and momentum before, during, and after the moment. This session brought together product insights, customer examples, and practical guidance to help communicators and community leaders turn events into ongoing engagement engines.

If you’ve ever hosted an event that felt successful in the moment — but fizzled right after —or if you had questions on how to drive engagement beyond the event... this session was for you.

Why host events in Viva Engage?

Instead of treating events as one-off calendar invites, hosting them in Viva Engage creates a single, continuous experience. When you host events within a community, you target the audience for the event and discovery happens across your network.

Before the event:
Build awareness and anticipation with announcements, pinned posts, and seeded questions.

During the event:
Centralize participation through questions, discussions, reactions, and upvotes — all in one place.

After the event:
Keep the conversation alive with recordings, recaps, followups, and searchable knowledge people can return to.

This approach helps events support broader goals like leadership visibility, culture building, learning, and community connection — not just attendance.

Event formats that fit your goals

The session walked through how different event formats support different outcomes, including:

Broadcasts
Ideal for large, one-to-many moments like town halls or major announcements.

Meetings
Better suited for learning sessions, office hours, and interactive discussions.

Inperson or textonly events
Flexible options that still keep the conversation anchored in Engage.

Choosing the right format isn’t about feature checklists — it’s about optimizing for the experience you want attendees to have.

Before, during, after: designing the full event lifecycle

The session emphasized thinking about events as a connected journey, not a single time slot.

Before the event

Promote early with clear value and calls to action

Share teaser posts tied to key themes

Seed conversation with openended questions

During the event

Guide participation clearly

Use moderation and upvotes intentionally

Keep conversation focused in the event feed

After the event

Share recordings and highlights

Publish a recap that’s skimmable and actionable

Continue answering questions and extending the discussion

This is where events shift from “done” to durable.

Customer spotlight: turning events into learning rhythms

We also highlighted how customers are using Viva Engage events to create repeatable learning moments, not just onetime sessions — from biweekly Copilot learning hours to office hours that build steady adoption momentum.

The common thread:
Events work best when they’re part of a rhythm, not a reaction.

Keep learning with the Viva Engage Masterclass

This session capped off Season 2 of the Viva Engage Monday Masterclass, which covered:

Week 1: Beyond the basics – roles, moderation, and community configuration
https://adoption.microsoft.com/en-us/customer-hub/monday-masterclass-your-guide-to-the-viva-engage-essentials/session-7/

Week 2: AI-powered engagement in Viva Engage
https://adoption.microsoft.com/en-us/customer-hub/monday-masterclass-your-guide-to-the-viva-engage-essentials/session-8/

Week 3: Campaigns and storytelling
https://adoption.microsoft.com/en-us/customer-hub/monday-masterclass-your-guide-to-the-viva-engage-essentials/session-9/

Week 4: Designing events employees remember

All session slides and recordings can be found here

Broadcast and meetings require Microsoft Teams, available as part of the suite or as a standalone. Learn more: Licensing updates extend access to advanced capabilities in Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Places | Microsoft Community Hub"

Scaling Copilot adoption with the Copilot Adoption Community in Viva Engage

SowmyaGogineni — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 18:40:31 GMT

Organizations everywhere are embracing AI, but getting value takes more than turning on a tool. It takes shared learning, practical examples, and a place where people can build confidence over time.

The Copilot Adoption Community in Viva Engage is an out-of-the-box template that helps people learn and use Copilot together, whether they are using Microsoft 365 Copilot or Copilot Chat.

The best way for employees to learn to use AI is by seeing coworkers like them try it, talk about what worked (and what didn’t), and make it feel safe to jump in. The Copilot Adoption Community brings those everyday moments into one place, so learning stays visible and people can easily see, try, and share what’s helping them do real work.

Our data reveals that users who engaged with the Copilot Adoption Community show +30% more active days on Microsoft 365 Copilot compared to users in the same network who didn’t interact with the Copilot Adoption Community (Internal Microsoft study over a 12-month period, June 2024–July 2025).

You also don’t have to start from scratch. Microsoft provides weekly suggested content, like #PromptOfTheWeek, short how-to resources, and product updates, that you can edit to match your company’s voice.

Getting Started with Copilot Adoption Community

The Copilot Adoption Community can be activated in a few clicks, creating a single place to learn, experiment, and share what works with Copilot. It’s available to all tenants with Viva Engage enabled and requires no additional Copilot or Viva Suite licensing.

Who it’s for: admins enable and set up the community; comms and adoption leads run content, campaigns, and champion engagement.

It’s a single hub for:

AI announcements
Training plans
Success stories
“What’s new” updates
Ask me anything (AMA) events, office hours, and leadership messages

Step 1: Create your community

Viva Engage admins will see a banner in the home feed and in the Engage Admin Center with options to learn more and create the community.

Already have an AI or Copilot community? You can apply the Copilot Adoption Community features to an existing community. This adds the setup checklist, suggested members, and suggested content—without changing your current posts or customizations.

Step 2: Customize your community

Your new community includes a customizable cover photo and description, is marked as an official community, and comes with the onboarding checklist below.

Pin resources to make key links easy to find (for example: training, policies, or FAQs).
Review suggested content from a Microsoft-curated library that refreshes weekly. Everything is editable before you publish.
Add a community expert by selecting members as experts. You can add more experts at any time.
Add members with dynamic suggestions as Copilot licenses roll out, or add members manually.
Create a post to get things moving. Pro tip: use Suggested Content for your first post, or start with a warm welcome.

Step 3: Make your community the place to go for Copilot news and learning

Once your community is live, encourage champions and Copilot enthusiasts to participate. Tiffany Terry-Hughes, Senior Manager of IT Communications at Micron, told us:

Our Copilot Adoption Community has been a great place for people to share their prompts and use cases, short videos on how to perform Copilot actions within applications, and essentially grow not just the community and user base, but everyone’s ability to become experts and influencers. There are people who are not on my team, who I’ve never met before, who are sharing their use cases—and I’m choosing to mark them as experts in this community.

Terry-Hughes and her team keep Copilot adoption practical with frequent communications and regular training. “We showcase specific use cases that we know our employees could benefit from,” she said.

Learn more about how the communications team at Micron are advancing Copilot Adoption with Viva Engage.

As you plan content for your Copilot Adoption Community, use these best practices to keep posts relevant, engaging, and easy to try:

Focus on Copilot scenarios people encounter in their daily work.
Highlight real examples from employees, not just official guidance.
Encourage visible participation from leaders or champions.
Maintain a consistent cadence, and use short series when a topic needs reinforcement (and mix formats like tips, polls, questions, and short videos).

Start by reviewing Microsoft’s suggested content each week and sharing what fits your employees. Suggested content now shows a Posted status and timestamp so you can track what you’ve shared. Viva Engage admins with the Copilot Adoption Community enabled get an email when new suggested content is published.

Viva Engage masterclass season 2—Session 3: Campaigns and storytelling

sarahLundy — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 21:20:39 GMT

When communication is intentional, it doesn’t just inform. It creates clarity and connection. In Session 3 of the Viva Engage Masterclass (season 2), we covered practical ways to build that impact with Storylines, Campaigns, and series-based storytelling.

Below is a recap of the key takeaways you can apply right away.

Why storytelling matters right now

Work is full of constant signals: email, chat, posts, meetings, and in-person interruptions. Microsoft Work Trend Index research describes this as the “infinite workday,” where employee attention is limited and company communications are easy to miss.

What helps is narrative coherence over time: messages that connect into a story employees can recognize, follow, and act on. The goal is to build understanding and momentum.

Use Storylines to build leadership presence

If leaders want to build trust and ongoing connection, their Storyline is an important place for them to show up in Viva Engage. A simple way to think about it:

Email is delivery
Meetings are moments
Storyline is presence

In Viva Engage, Storyline gives leaders a consistent way to share updates, add context, and invite conversation in one place. What Storylines provide:

Intelligence and targeting: reach defined audiences with the right message.
Multi-way dialogue: make communication two-way, so people can respond, ask questions, and build on the message.
Measurable impact: understand what landed through engagement and analytics.

To set a leader up for success with Storyline, start by making sure they’re identified as a leader in the product, assigning delegates who can help draft and publish posts, and defining the audience they want to reach. Then confirm they have the right profile details and a short “about” that matches their role.

Agree on a simple cadence (for example, one post a week), draft the first few posts together, and keep a short list of topics they can pull from.

Strong posts are clear about what they’re trying to do. The session shared a simple way to pressure-test drafts before posting following the 3C model:

Context: What’s happening?
Clarity: Why does it matter?
Connection: What do I want people to do?

One more reminder that came through clearly: engagement doesn’t happen by accident—ask for it. End with a question or prompt that makes it easy to respond.

Used well, Storyline becomes a reliable place for employees to hear directly from leaders and respond in the moment. It helps leaders show up consistently, keep updates connected over time, and build trust through two-way conversation.

Run social campaigns that invite participation

Campaigns help the organization rally around a shared theme through repetition and participation. In the session, we discussed how campaigns can support different goals, such as:

Driving business initiatives
Crowdsourcing ideas and experiences
Creating belonging through employee stories

We also covered the difference between:

Official (global) campaigns that roll up content across Storylines and communities
Community campaigns that stay within a specific community (lighter-weight, designed for local participation)

A key takeaway: campaigns work best when they’re designed so employees can join the story—not just read it.

Here are a few campaign examples we shared in the session that translate well to Viva Engage:

Win. Win. Win. Invite people to share weekly wins, shout-outs, or lessons learned—and encourage others to add their own.
Product launch or roll out. Announce a new tool or change, then keep everything in one place: tips, FAQs, help resources, and Q&A.
30 days of ____. Pick a theme and post a prompt each day (or each week) to keep the story moving and make it easy to join in.
Leadership series. Have leaders take turns sharing what they’re learning, reading, or trying, then ask employees to share their own.
Recognition and gratitude. Spotlight individuals and teams who are making an impact and invite peers to add praise.

A simple recipe for success: be clear on the goal, make it easy to participate, and keep a steady posting rhythm.

Even though it’s quick to create a campaign, the work is in the planning. The session shared a straightforward timeline:

Two+ weeks before: define the theme, align stakeholders
One week before: define success (KPIs), finalize messaging
Days before: prep content and resources, remind contributors
Kickoff: publish the Campaign and start the rhythm

Bring it together with a simple plan: set a clear goal, give people an easy way to participate, and keep the Campaign active with a steady rhythm. Track what’s landing as you go, and close the loop by sharing progress and outcomes.

Think series, not a post

One of the clearest themes from the session: if you want adoption or behavior change, one message won’t do it.

We talked about the “rule of 7” concept. People often need repeated exposure before they act. The practical takeaway is to build a series with:

A consistent theme
A recognizable visual style
A predictable rhythm

When employees “watch for the next drop,” your #campaign has started to stick.

The session also introduced “trend-jacking”: using safe, current memes and social trends to make internal communications feel more creative and fun.

Why this works: relevance, clarity, and connection

We closed with research on how communications cut through the noise—especially for younger employees who have learned to filter fast.

The three elements of communication that cut through the noise are:

Relevant: tailored to an employee’s context (not just “for everyone”). Start with what the update means for people’s day-to-day work. Make the “why it matters to me” clear up front.
Clear: easy to scan and understand quickly, with optional depth. If you need to include detail, put the most important point first and add the rest below, so people can read more when they have time. Clarity also means being specific, not vague, about dates, owners, and decisions.
Connected: designed for dialogue, not “do not reply” broadcasting. End posts with a question that’s easy to answer, or a prompt that invites examples. Respond to early comments so people see that engagement is welcome and valued. Over time, this builds trust and helps employees feel like they’re part of the story, not just receiving updates.

One important point: it’s not that people can’t focus—it’s that they’ve built faster filters. If content doesn’t signal value quickly, it won’t land.

What’s next

The Masterclass continues with Session 4: Designing events employees remember. You’ve got live events coming up soon at your company, this next session will help you plan moments that drive real participation—and follow-through.

You can register for upcoming sessions and explore the full schedule at:

👉 https://aka.ms/VivaEngage/Masterclass

Monday Masterclass Season 2 – Week 2: AI Powered Engagement in Viva Engage

AllisonMichels — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 15:58:29 GMT

AI has officially moved from an interesting add‑on to a core part of how modern organizations communicate and connect. In Week 2 of the Viva Engage Masterclass – AI‑Powered Engagement, we explored what that shift really means for employees, leaders, and communicators—and how Viva Engage is becoming the place where human connection and AI scale together.

Week 1 covered how the system works. Week 2 focused on how to amplify your impact with it. Below is a recap of the key themes and practical takeaways you can apply.

1. Communities Are the Engine of AI‑Powered Engagement

Every organization is on a journey toward becoming what Microsoft calls a Frontier Firm—where humans and AI work side by side. Communities play a critical role in enabling that shift.

Why? Because the most valuable knowledge in organizations is often informal, unwritten, and distributed across people. Viva Engage communities:

Enable peer‑to‑peer learning across roles, teams, and geographies
Make it easier to connect with experts and surface trusted answers
Provide the signal AI needs to deliver relevant, contextual insights at scale

AI doesn’t replace these conversations; it learns from them and scales their impact.

2. The Four Pillars of Connected Communications

Throughout the session, we grounded AI‑powered engagement in a simple but powerful framework: the Four Pillars of Connected Communications.

Relevance – This matters to my role, context, or priorities
Effort – I can tell that real thought and care went into creating this
Signal – I understand the core message and action
Safety – Engagement feels safe, respectful, and without professional and personal risk

AI can help improve all four, when guided with clear human intent.

3. Copilot Adoption Community

Support doc link Champions and the Copilot Adoption Community

AI‑powered engagement doesn’t scale on its own—it scales through people. That’s where Champions and a dedicated Copilot Adoption Community play a critical role.

Champions act as trusted guides inside the organization. They help:

Model effective Copilot usage in real‑world scenarios
Encourage experimentation and peer learning
Answer common questions and escalate feedback
Reinforce best practices around tone, trust, and effort

A Copilot Adoption Community in Viva Engage provides a shared space to:

Ask questions and learn from early adopters
Share prompts, tips, and success stories
Surface patterns and feedback for continuous improvement
Connect employees to Champions and experts at scale

Together, Champions and the Copilot community turn AI from a tool into a habit.

Copilot Champions

Learn about driving Copilot adoption with champion communities at our April First Friday webinar: aka.ms/FirstFridaysApril

Copilot in Viva Engage: Practical Scenarios

We explored how Microsoft 365 Copilot supports engagement throughout the day by helping you:

Catch up faster with AI‑generated summaries of community activity
Write better posts with contextual drafting and tone suggestions
Spot trends and sentiment without reading every reply
Create leadership‑ready recaps from long discussions

For employees, Copilot removes friction. For communicators and leaders, it creates space to focus on connection rather than mechanics.

4. Scaling Knowledge With the community Agent

A major highlight of Week 2 was the community agent—an AI-powered expert designed to scale answers while preserving trust.‑

Key capabilities include:

Drafting grounded, contextual responses using community conversations and SharePoint files
Expert and admin review with Verified answers
Faster time‑to‑answer for common questions
Clear transparency into sources and review workflows

When paired with Community Experts, agents become a force multiplier—not a replacement.

Set up and manage agents in Viva Engage communities | Microsoft Learn

5. A Simple 3‑Week Path to Get Started

To make this real, we closed with a practical adoption path:

Week 1 – Get Started

Week 2 – Set Up & Experiment

Week 3 – Expand & Optimize

Invite more members
Curate trusted sources
Measure impact and refine

Small steps, taken consistently, create momentum.

What’s Next

Next up in the Masterclass series: Campaigns and Storytelling. We’ll dive into how to run campaigns, amplify leader voices, and create narratives that resonate—using both human creativity and AI support.

You can register for upcoming sessions and explore the full schedule at:

👉 https://aka.ms/VivaEngage/Masterclass

AI changes how we work, but connection is still what makes it matter.

Disable Sharing Outside of Private Group

Cathrina_de_Lange — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 13:18:31 GMT

I work in a large organization, and we have many private groups to avoid employees getting tired of seeing posts that are not relevant to them. However, it is difficult to tell whether a group is private or not, so users often end up sharing posts from private groups. Is there a way to disable the sharing option in our group? And could you please make it easier to see when a post is in a private group?

Monday Masterclass Season 2 – Week 1: Beyond the Basics in Viva Engage

espnguyen — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 18:55:10 GMT

We hear repeatedly how valuable it is to have a space dedicated to practical guidance, real world examples, and direct access to product experts. Monday Masterclass Season 2 builds on the essentials while introducing capabilities that help organizations scale their employee communications and community strategy with confidence.

This year’s program includes four live sessions that “go beyond the basics” with advanced guidance, smarter workflows, AI powered tools, and a strong focus on reach, relevance, and connection.

Below, I'll recap highlights from our first session: Week 1 – Beyond the Basics

Notifications: Relevance, Not Noise

We kicked off with one of the most influential parts of the employee experience: notifications. We dive deep into how notifications function across Teams, mobile, email, and the inapp bell, and why smart delivery matters now more than ever.

A few standout insights:

Smart Notifications, now rolling out, intelligently determines for a community announcement the primary channel a user engages with most—and only move to a secondary one if the message hasn’t been consumed.

Delivery respects all user preferences while reducing inbox and device clutter.

Scenarios like community announcements, @mentions, new storyline posts, and replies all benefit from this “rightchannelfirst” intelligence.

The theme is clear: precision beats volume, and great communicators design with this in mind.

📘 Learn more:

Viva Engage Explained: Notifications — covers channel behavior, digests, and configuration

Manage your Viva Engage notifications (support) — how users adjust their settings

Digests: The Daily & Weekly Visibility Engines

We clarified the value of Engage’s digests:

Daily Digest: Prioritizes leadership content, helping key updates cut through everyday noise.

Weekly Digest: Highlights content users may have missed—an intentional discovery channel driven by organizational signals, relevance, and trending topics.

Featured Conversations: Remain one of the strongest tools for ensuring important posts persist across both digests.

For communicators, this is a massive lever. Digests reach audiences who aren’t actively checking their feed—and do so with content tailored to individual interests.

📘 Learn more:

Digests Explained (Tech Community)

The Home Feed: Built In Personalization

The Home Feed continues to be the front door of Viva Engage, and we unpacked the ranking signals and influence pathways that shape what employees see. Key factors include:

Community membership

Past interactions

Organizational signals

Relationships

Featured conversations, announcements, and mute behavior

AI-driven relevance scores

We also outlined the tactics different roles can use to influence the feed, whether through featured posts, dynamic membership, leadership participation, or simply encouraging lightweight employee engagement (react, reply, follow, join). This section reinforced that the feed isn’t random, it’s an engine, and every role has influence.

📘 Learn more:

Home feed Explained (Tech Community)

Feature a conversation in Viva Engage (Microsoft Support)

Create dynamic communities

Content & Contributors: How Everyone Shapes Reach

We dive into Content creation, the anatomy of a post and how to use Copilot to enhance your posting! We walked through different post types and we broke them down by persona, showing how each contributes to Engage. For example:

Corporate Communicators

Publish announcements

Feature conversations

Pin posts

Review analytics

Network & Community Admins

Manage community configuration

Set dynamic membership

Mark official communities

Shape governance

Assign experts

Add Community agent

Employees

Favorite communities

Interact to improve their own feed relevance

Post, reply, react, and contribute to knowledge flow

Each role meaningfully impacts network health, visibility, and culture.

📘 Learn more:

Microsoft-Viva-Engage-adoption-guide — includes guidance on community setup, managing conversations, and best practices

User Guide

Moderation & Governance: A Modernized Approach

We walked through the playbook with guidance on scalable governance practices:

Keyword monitoring and Report a Conversation help route safety signals to the right reviewers.

AI-powered theme moderation understands context—not just keywords—and enables proactive detection.

Move Conversation capabilities ensure discussions land in the right place.

View only mode supports sensitive or read only scenarios.

Together as well as the others we walked through allow admins to encourage respectful networks without slowing down participation.

📘 Support documentation:

Keyword Monitoring in Viva Engage (Microsoft Support)

Report a conversation (Microsoft Support)

AI theme moderation overview

Moderation playbook (Adoption)

The Community Management Toolkit

We introduced a rich set of tools for community managers, including:

Copilot powered prompts for conversation starters, announcements, and event planning

Engagement tactics to keep communities vibrant

Post types (Questions, Praise, Polls, Articles) and their ideal uses

Anatomy of a high performing post

“Good → Better → Best” content comparisons

These resources help community managers evolve beyond day to day posting and into strategic facilitation.

AI in Viva Engage: A New Era of Engagement

This year’s masterclass marks a fundamental shift: AI is now woven into nearly every part of the Viva Engage experience. We walk through how Copilot assists:

Before you post

Predicting questions your audience will ask

Locating vague or unclear language

Adding calls to action

Making messages more engaging

After you post

Summarizing comment threads

Identifying themes and patterns

Pulling sentiment cues

Drafting recaps for stakeholders

For moderators

Brainstorming keyword lists

Creating response plans

Tracking usage trends

Drafting workflows

Across all these scenarios, AI reduces busy work so communicators and admins can focus on clarity, connection, and culture.

A Day in the Life: Copilot + Viva Engage

We also included a behind the scenes look at how our team uses Copilot and Viva Engage throughout the day to manage customer communities, identify top themes, draft content, and stay ahead of fastmoving conversations. It’s a practical illustration of how AI and human insight work together to scale impact.

What’s Next

Week 2 of the Masterclass, AI-Powered Engagement! We will dive deeper into Copilot in Engage, Community Agent, Copilot Community and activation strategies. If Week 1 was about how the system works, Week 2 is about how to amplify what you do with it.

You can register for upcoming sessions and explore the full schedule here:
https://aka.ms/VivaEngage/Masterclass

Notifications for scheduled publications that fail to send

huntrita — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 15:01:25 GMT

How do I turn on notifications for a campaign to let me know when a scheduled publication fails to send?

How to stop post content in Viva Engage to sending emails to the whole company

StefenB — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 19:29:33 GMT

Loving having a New Viva engage community but trying to figure out a way to determine who gets new posts to the community . Currently it sends out to everyone which then looks like spam. I want to keep engagement but cannot have it sending the email to the whole company as we create new communities.

Can someone help?

Stefen

rss.livelink.threads-in-node

Customer spotlight: Less inbox, more connection at Nuveen

Helping leaders reach employees in new ways

Why email wasn’t enough

Create for the channel

Start small, build momentum

What’s new and next in Engage: June 2026

Engage everywhere: communities, events, and Storylines in Teams, powered by AI​

Intelligence

Available now: Copilot in Engage

Public preview: agents in communities with grounded answers

Available now: Communities to support AI adoption

Context

Public preview: Communities in Teams

Public preview: Smarter communication and targeting

Available now: Events that extend beyond the moment

Coming soon: Community membership auto-enrollment

Coming soon: End-to-end leader communications

Available now: New analytics

Coming soon: SharePoint News cross-post to Engage

Available now: Article improvements

Trust

Available now: Updated admin experiences

Coming soon: Company branding

Catch up on all the Microsoft 365 Community Conference news

Video links becoming attachments rather than embeds

Leadership communication in the flow of work

Why this matters

Where Engage fits in the flow of work

Choosing the right surface based on intent

Storyline

Communities

How leaders typically use both

Leadership presence isn’t just posting

Building blocks for effective leadership communication

Core leadership use cases

Measuring leadership impact

Getting started (10 minutes)

Example posts that leaders can model

The bigger picture

Resources

Relevance is the new reach: modern leadership communications in Viva Engage

How Storyline targeting changes the game

Storyline announcements = Precision, not volume

Real‑world example: targeted HR updates without the overhead

Why use Storyline announcements (instead of sending another email)?

Another way to increase reach without extra noise

How analytics help communicators measure leader reach

Unable to tag distribution lists (DLs) in Viva engage posts

Issue with notifications in external network

Planning for Communities in Teams: What Admins and Communicators Should Do Next

What’s changing... and what’s not

Start from where you are

Not using Viva Engage yet? Start here.

Reset All Company for the Teams experience

For Admins (IT / Network Admins): Set the guardrails

For Corporate Comms: Reset how you use All Company

Address concerns about noise early

Admins: Control where content shows up

Corporate Comms: Be intentional with reach

Continue the journey

Viva Engage for recognition feels limited, what are you all using?

Effective, engaging events in communities and storylines

New features: the highlights

Event types

Why host events in a community instead of creating them from your calendar?

Resources

Viva Engage Explained: Search

Sensitivity Labels Are Coming to Viva Engage Communities Here's What You Need to Know

What's changing

How it works

The governance tension we've heard

What sensitivity labels do NOT change

Frequently asked questions

What to do before March 31

Monday Masterclass Season 2 – Week 4 Designing Events Employees Remember

Why host events in Viva Engage?

Event formats that fit your goals

Before, during, after: designing the full event lifecycle

Customer spotlight: turning events into learning rhythms

Engage everywhere: communities, events, and Storylines in Teams, powered by AI