Viva Engage Blog articles

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.

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

Introducing Viva Engage Masterclass: Your Guide to the Viva Engage Essentials (Season 2)

espnguyen — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 21:37:46 GMT

Last year, we launched the Viva Engage Masterclass: Your Guide to the Viva Engage Essentials to help communicators, community managers, and IT leaders build confidence with Viva Engage, and we were blown away by the engagement from customers around the world.and we were blown away by the engagement from customers around the world.

So we’re excited to bring the series back for Season 2 in 2026.

This year’s masterclass includes four live sessions designed to go beyond the basics, helping you explore new capabilities, apply AI thoughtfully, and design experiences that truly resonate with employees.

Whether you’re just getting started or looking to elevate how you use Viva Engage today, these sessions are built to help you take the next step, practically and confidently.

What is the Viva Engage Masterclass?

The Viva Engage Masterclass is a customer focused learning series that covers the essentials of Viva Engage. From foundational concepts to real world strategies you can apply immediately.

Each session is:

Comprehensive Overview: Get an in-depth look at the core capabilities for all roles who will be using Viva Engage, including admin and governance, moderations to how to create and manage communities, start and participate in conversations, and organize virtual events.
Expert Guidance: Learn from Microsoft experts who will share best practices and tips for maximizing the use of Viva Engage in your organization.
Interactive Q&A: Have your questions answered in real-time by our product group experts, ensuring you leave the session with a clear understanding of how to leverage Viva Engage in your organization.
Hands-On Experience: Participate in live demonstrations and interactive activities that will help you get comfortable with the platform's functionalities.

Register for the Masterclasses

You can join one session or attend all four. Each masterclass stands on its own while also building toward a stronger, more connected Viva Engage strategy over time.

Add Season 2: 2026 Masterclass sessions to your calendar!

Week 1: Beyond the Basics

Move from setup to scale with practical guidance on community structure, assigning roles, governance, and moderation, plus how Copilot and AI can streamline management. We'll also touch on the feed and notifications.

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

Week 2: AI-Powered Engagement

Discover how Microsoft Copilot and AI can amplify engagement, simplify moderation, and help leaders and communicators create content faster and smarter.

Monday, February 9, 2026 | 8:00 am PT https://aka.ms/VivaEngage/AIEngagement

Monday, February 9, 2026 | 3:00 pm PT https://aka.ms/VivaEngage/AIEngagement/2

Week 3: Campaigns and Storytelling

Learn how to run campaigns that spark participation, amplify leader voices, and craft compelling narratives that turn announcements into conversations.

Monday, February 23, 2026 | 8:00 am PT https://aka.ms/VivaEngage/Campaigns

Monday, February 23, 2026 | 3:00 pm PT https://aka.ms/VivaEngage/Campaigns/2

Week 4: Designing Events Employees Remember

Plan and promote events that feel intentional and engaging, with tips for discussions, Q&A, moderation, and post-event follow-up that keeps the momentum going.

Monday, March 9, 2026 | 8:00 am PT https://aka.ms/VivaEngage/Events

Monday, March 9, 2026 | 3:00 pm PT https://aka.ms/VivaEngage/Events/2

View the full schedule and register here: https://adoption.microsoft.com/en-us/customer-hub/monday-masterclass-your-guide-to-the-viva-engage-essentials/

Who should attend?

The Viva Engage Masterclass is designed for:

Corporate communicators
Community managers
Employee experience leaders
IT admins and adoption leads
Anyone responsible for building connection, culture, and conversation at scale

No matter your role or experience level, each session offers practical guidance you can apply right away.

Join us live (and earn recognition!) and in case you miss it, they’ll be recorded

All sessions are held live, giving you the opportunity to learn from experts, ask questions, and connect with other Viva Engage customers. Each session has a blog post with dedicated resources and information including the recording.

New for 2026: attendees will have the opportunity to earn certificates and badges, recognizing their learning and participation throughout the series.

See you in the masterclass!

Customer Spotlight: Copilot Adoption in Viva Engage with Micron

AllisonMichels — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 00:51:48 GMT

One of the most effective ways to accelerate adoption and build confidence is by learning from the experiences of others. Gaining insights from customers who have already navigated similar journeys provides invaluable real-world examples and practical lessons, helping organizations avoid common pitfalls and capitalize on proven strategies. It's especially beneficial to connect with other customers who have gone first, as their firsthand knowledge can guide and inspire your own approach to Copilot adoption.

Join us and discover how Tiffany Terry-Hughes, Senior Manager of IT Communications at Micron, is advancing Copilot adoption through Viva Engage. In this webinar, Tiffany shares actionable strategies and lessons learned from Micron’s journey, offering guidance for organizations eager to integrate Copilot into their digital workplace.

Key takeaways include:

Micron’s approach to leveraging Viva Engage communities for accelerating Copilot adoption
Best practices for empowering employees and building confidence in AI-powered solutions
Effective methods for tracking adoption success and keeping engagement strong

Tiffany Terry-Hughes is Senior Manager of IT Communications and Training at Micron Technology. She leads efforts to boost AI adoption by producing multimedia resources, running social campaigns, and building an influencer network. Her aim is to drive a 50% productivity improvement at Micron in five years through innovative communication and learning programs.

To wrap up, we’ll do a quick recap of the latest developments and what’s on the horizon for Copilot and Viva Engage. Stay tuned as we highlight new features and share what you can expect next, ensuring you’re equipped to make the most of these powerful tools in your organization.

Whether you’re launching Copilot for the first time or scaling existing efforts, gain insights from Tiffany and the product group to help you onboard efficiently and establish Copilot as a trusted tool in your organization’s digital toolkit.

Moderation strategies to scale participation and communications in Viva Engage

Spencer_Perry — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 21:21:32 GMT

Viva Engage brings people together around org-wide communications, communities, and knowledge sharing. Leaders, frontline workers, employees, and corporate communicators want the benefits of two-way dialog and community participation, but often wonder how to make sure relevant content reaches the right audiences while keeping public spaces safe for all.

When your network is thoughtfully crafted to match your business needs and reflect your culture, users can contribute openly with lots of benefits and minimal risk. To ensure it remains a productive and safe space for all, Engage provides capabilities for network administrators and corporate communicators to moderate content and for end users to control over what reaches them.

Set your Engage network up for success

Like a great party, first you must set up the room to create a welcoming vibe people can lean into right away. Careful planning at the network level can jumpstart engagement and save trouble later.

Define the purpose for the All Company community

By default, everyone in the organization is in this community, creating a central hub for connection and engagement. Some organizations use this as a valuable peer-to-peer sharing channel, while others find it to be noisy with a lack of purpose and flood of irrelevant information.

Many organizations see success turning “All Company” into more of a broadcast channel for company news while encouraging employees to post their content in specific communities or on their storylines. Consider renaming All Company to reflect its purpose, and restricting who can post to it.

Define a few Official Communities with dynamic group membership

Official Communities give people a signal around where to spend time and for what business purposes your organization intends to use Engage. Map them to important topics like leadership updates, business units, employee groups, company initiatives, or geographies, and then use dynamic group membership to get the right people in the community on day one.

Restrict communities to reduce new post noise

Restricting a community means only admins can post, but everyone can comment. In addition to considering this for All Company, you may want to consider restricted communities for communities with large membership, where you want to share leader and company news with control over who starts new conversations.

Post your usage policy

Ask users to accept your usage policy, and any behavioral expectations aligned with your culture and values, before they use Engage. You can edit and restart the acceptance flow any time. Consider letting users know you moderate this space in that policy; open communication about moderation helps users feel comfortable posting content because there are rules of engagement

Enable Report a Conversation

Users can notify admins of questionable or inappropriate content. Define a process to review and respond to issues when enabling this powerful feature. Report a Conversation is off by default in the Engage Admin Center.

Govern the “Move conversation” feature

Move conversation is great for getting discussions into the right place, but sometimes creates confusion among network and community members if someone moves a post without warning. Network administrators can decide if end users can move conversations with a setting in the Engage Admin Center. In communities, community admins can decide if members should be able to move conversations into their spaces. When members can’t move a conversation, roles like network administrators and corporate communicators can put conversations in the right place.

Decide who needs a role

Creating a healthy network requires network admins, corporate communicators, and community admins to work together.

Moderation at scale: How corporate communicators can shape discussions and interactions

Users with the corporate communicator role can do most moderation actions in Engage. This role sets the tone for others to follow, so know what’s available to prepare and plan for impact.

Use theme moderation for broad oversight and automatic action

Theme moderation is a powerful new AI capability in the Communications Dashboard that allows you to input themes that you want to monitor.

You may want to monitor themes to understand employee sentiment or to reduce amplification of conversation on certain topics. Themes pick up conversations based on contextual matches, not straight text.

When a conversation matches a theme, you can notify moderators, automatically mute the conversation, and/or take additional action such as blocking a post.¹ Themes created are automatically applied across all languages, unlike keywords monitoring.

Theme moderation is available with Viva Employee Communications and Communities or Viva Suite license.

Create a targeted list for keyword monitoring

Keywords lists are best for terms that require moderation or intervention. Keyword monitoring looks for exact matches of characters, so consider common spellings for deep coverage.

Mute communities for the network

You can remove entire communities from everyone’s Home Feed or email digests, unless they’re a member. Consider this approach for groups that are lively but not necessarily of interest to non-members. Social or special interest communities are good candidates to mute for the network, allowing more focus on relevant news, team updates, and other org-wide communications.

Mute conversations

If something doesn’t need to be in broadly visible in everyone’s home feeds or email digests, use the mute option on the conversation. This keeps the thread visible in communities or storylines, and all aspects of the conversation continue to function as before. Users do not know when moderators mute their conversations.

Close, move, or delete conversations

Depending on the context, it may make sense to limit new comments by closing the conversation, move the thread to a new community, or delete the content entirely to avoid further issues.

Have a plan for how to use these content moderation features aligned with your communication goals and company culture and values, and share widely with community admins, corporate communicators, and other admins.

User controls: Helping people get the most out of Engage

Moderation at the network, community, and conversation levels goes a long way. Even still, there are often calls from users to further finetune their experience.

Users can close, move, or delete their own conversations in Engage. Admins and corporate communicators can also take these actions if necessary.

Notification settings

Stop further notifications from a conversation with the Unfollow control in the overflow menu. Unsubscribe or re-subscribe to email digests in the user settings notifications center.

Mute a community

Building on the network-wide control, any user can mute a community from their home feed and email digests. This is a great tool if posts from a community are popular in the network but not relevant to you.

Hide someone’s messages

Users can reduce the visibility of others’ content, removing posts from the home feed and email digests and visually obscuring that content if seen elsewhere.

Hide messages is coming soon to general availability.

Learn more about moderation in Engage

View the Engage Masterclass for in-depth walkthroughs and best practices.

Watch our moderation webinar, covering features and strategies for new and mature networks.

See how AI theme moderation and keyword monitoring work together for holistic, proactive coverage across a network.

¹Theme blocking feature coming soon to general availability.

What’s New in Viva Engage – Microsoft Ignite 2025

MuraliSitaram — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 21:22:50 GMT

Trust in leaders and their strategic vision is essential for driving an AI-powered workplace. When leaders truly listen and respond, employees feel heard, and they lean into shared objectives. This isn’t just an abstract principle—it's something we can see and measure. And IT is the backbone that makes those meaningful connections possible. Engage is designed to bring leaders right into the heart of day-to-day work, sparking open, two-way dialogue and connecting people and knowledge across teams and business silos. In fact, over a quarter of a billion unique connections are created each week on Viva Engage¹.

With these principles front and center, we’re rolling out updates inspired by your feedback—features built to deepen trust, turn signals to action, and unlock knowledge across your organization. From smarter, AI-powered Copilot experiences to advanced analytics and segmentation, these enhancements help you turn scattered conversations into clear insights for your organization. Here are the latest features and AI-powered capabilities coming to you in Engage.

Agents in Communities

Community agent in Engage introduces AI-powered assistance to help communities thrive. Acting like a helpful community member, the agent uses your community’s knowledge to answer questions, surface relevant resources, and keep conversations moving. It can proactively identify unanswered posts and draft responses based on trusted content, reducing the burden on community managers and ensuring employees get timely information.

For organizations, this means stronger engagement and more efficient knowledge sharing. Community agent makes it easier to connect people with answers, scale expertise across teams, and maintain vibrant communities without adding extra workload.

Agents in communities are available in public preview for users with Microsoft 365 Copilot license. Check out our launch blog to learn more about public preview and how to get started.

Microsoft 365 Copilot in Engage

Copilot in Engage is now smarter, faster, and more personalized—designed to help you work more efficiently. Acting as your assistant, it enables you to stay up-to-date, catch up quickly, and benefit more from your experiences throughout Viva Engage. Copilot in Engage delivers the information you need, right when you need it.

Here’s what is available:

Context-aware intelligence: Copilot adapts prompts based on where you are—community, campaign, storyline, or post—to maximize relevance.
One-click catch-up and trending themes: Stay updated with summary cards and discover trending themes across your network, linking to dedicated feeds for more detail.
Conversational, contextual search: Search within Engage to get results relevant to your current context, with options to broaden scope as needed.
Smarter, connected writing assistance: Create richer posts efficiently with context from Teams, Outlook, and Microsoft 365 signals.

And if you’re looking to accelerate your Copilot journey at your organization, don’t miss the Copilot Adoption Community in Engage, a ready-made space with pre-built posts for peer-to-peer learning, sharing best practices, and getting the most out of Copilot in Engage.

Copilot in Engage is generally available for users with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license.

Engage Public Content in Microsoft 365 Copilot

All public Engage content is available in Copilot chat responses, making knowledge across your Engage network easily accessible and actionable for every employee. Copilot surfaces relevant conversations including discussion posts, Answers, discussions within events and leader posts so that if someone asks a question and relevant information is available in Engage, it will be highlighted in the Microsoft 365 Copilot response.

Engage public content in Microsoft 365 Copilot is generally available to all users with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license.

Community Themes and Sentiment in Community Analytics

Engage community admins can now quickly understand trending themes their community members are discussing within communities they manage. Leveraging the technology powering network and audience analytics, we help you keep up with the most popular themes from conversations in your communities. You can also review summaries of posts and sentiment trends across any period using the newly released custom date range capabilities! Network admins and corporate communicators can also access these advanced analytics across public communities.

Community themes and sentiment in community analytics is generally available for users with Viva Suite or Viva Communications and Communities license.

HR Org Filters & Activation Metrics

Organizational data filters enable users to filter analytics by employee attributes such as country, department, and job title. This capability is available to admins and corporate communicators through the ‘All filters’ panel in Network Analytics.

These filters offer insight into how different employee segments interact with Viva Engage. To support deeper analysis on onboarding and adoption, the dashboard also now includes two new metrics: Enabled users and Activated users. When paired with existing engagement metrics, these values provide a view of the engagement funnel across segments.

To further support data exploration, network-wide analytics can now be exported via the new Network Analytics CSV export, allowing networks to dive deeper into their data.

HR org filters and activation metrics are generally available for users with Viva Suite or Viva Communications and Communities license.

Storyline Targeting

Storyline targeting brings more flexibility and precision to leadership communications in Viva Engage. With this capability, leaders and their delegates can define a custom audience at the time of posting, without relying on pre-configured Leader Audiences. Audiences can be built using organizational attributes like reporting structure, country, department, role or job title; existing groups such as M365 Groups, DLs, or SGs; and even individual users by name. This flexibility ensures timely, relevant communication that reaches the right people with the right message. Notifications and delivery channels, such as Teams and email, continue to follow existing Storyline Announcement behavior, providing a seamless experience for recipients.

Storyline targeting is available in public preview and for users with Viva Suite or Viva Communications and Communities license. Learn more about how to sign up for public preview!

Multi-language Posts

Viva Engage now empowers global communication with manual multi-language posting. Authors can craft tailored messages in multiple languages—preserving tone, cultural nuance, and regional compliance—while readers seamlessly view content in their preferred language. Communicators can use different image and video assets for each translation. From leadership updates to global campaigns, this feature ensures inclusivity and clarity across borders, helping organizations connect confidently in today’s multilingual world.

Multi-language posting is rolling out to general availability in the coming weeks for users with Viva Suite or Viva Communications and Communities license.

AI Theme Moderation

AI theme moderation is now generally available! Engage network admins and corporate communicators can use theme moderation to keep an eye on conversations. Themes don’t have to be exact matches like keywords, instead themes can be either broad topics or specific words or phrases. Once we detect a conversation matches the theme, you can track the conversation, alert on it, take manual action, or mute it from feeds.

Theme moderation is always-on, working tirelessly on your behalf to scan and monitor conversations. It leverages the power of AI and LLMs to detect conversations across languages and context to extend the powers of moderators beyond what is possible through traditional keyword monitoring or human effort.

AI theme moderation is generally available and available for users with Viva Suite or Viva Communications and Communities license.

Post Tab in the Communications Dashboard

The Posts tab in the communications dashboard offers a new comprehensive feed to review your published posts (retroactive to May 2025). You can access detailed analytics to evaluate post’s performance, manage drafts and scheduled posts, and conveniently create new posts directly from this page.

The Posts tab includes filters that allow delegators and delegation team members to view posts they have created on behalf of others, as well as posts published on their behalf.

View your published posts, and all posts published for you by your delegates (Created by filter).
View your published posts, drafts and scheduled posts, and any or all posts that you've created for others (Owned by filter).

The Post tab in the communications dashboard is generally available for users with Viva Suite or Viva Communications and Communities license.

Live events produced with Teams Town Hall

Community admins can now host live events using the Teams Town Hall (TTH)² for production. Built for high-quality, large-scale event delivery, TTH enables organizers to use RTMP to ingest a studio-quality production feed, or to use Teams Production Studio which makes it easy to switch between sources like presenters, screen shares, videos and slides with a familiar Teams environment. Teams Town Hall support live captions, translations, and reactions³, as well as an open feed of conversations and questions. Live events with Teams Town Hall are available today and can support up to 10,000 real-time attendees.⁴ TTH is built for the future of enterprise events at scale.

Live events produced with Teams Town Hall is generally available. To learn more about how to use Events in Engage, join us at our upcoming webinar!

Segmentation

Segmentation in Viva Engage helps complex organizations deliver more relevant and personalized experiences at scale. By grouping employees based on attributes like region, department, or business unit, segmentation ensures that communities, storyline posts, and feeds are scoped to the right audience. This reduces noise and makes it easier for employees to find content that matters most to their work.

Segmentation enables targeted communication from leaders and communicators, supports compliance by limiting sensitive information to the right groups, and creates a sense of belonging by connecting employees with content that reflects their role and context.

Segmentation is generally available for users with Viva Suite or Viva Communications and Communities license.

What to do next?

Join us at Ignite!

If you are attending Microsoft Ignite in person or online, come to our session How Microsoft manages employee & executive communications with AI to learn about communication tools and methods, with special focus on the latest AI-powered innovations and roadmap for Engage.

Don’t miss our theater session Building Copilot momentum with community-led engagement in-person at Microsoft Ignite where we’ll be diving deeper into AI-powered capabilities including Copilot Adoption Community, Microsoft 365 Copilot in Engage, and agents in communities.

We're always looking for new ways to make Viva Engage better, and your feedback is a huge part of that. If you’re looking for more ways to connect with us:

FREE! The Communicator's Guide to AI: LinkedIn Learning: aka.ms/TheCommunicatorsGuidetoAI
AI for Communicators First Fridays: aka.ms/FirstFridaysDec and for previous sessions aka.ms/FirstFridaysPlaylist
Join us! What’s New with Events in Viva Engage webinar on December 4, 2025 at 8:00am PT: https://aka.ms/VivaEngage/Eventswebinar
Come to our webinar, Copilot Adoption in Viva Engage with Micron on December 9, 2025 at 8:00am PT: https://aka.ms/VivaEngage/CopilotAdoptionMicronWebinar
And coming early in 2026… Viva Engage Masterclass series for Season 2. Stay tuned here: https://aka.ms/vivaengage/masterclass

See how you can do more with Microsoft 365 Copilot in Viva Engage in the short video below:

Thanks so much for sharing your thoughts and ideas—they help guide where we go next.

¹Based on Microsoft Internal Data collected between 11/05/2025 to 11/11/2025. Unique connections is defined as the unique pairs of employees who interact with each other on Engage (viewing each other's content, reacting, or replying)

²Requires Microsoft Teams license.

³Available with Microsoft Teams Premium license and up to 20,000 users.

⁴If the event creator has Teams Premium, up to 100,000 attendees can join the event.

Viva Engage Festival 2025: Real Stories. Real Impact. Real Community

AllisonMichels — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 16:06:57 GMT

Join us on November 12 for the Viva Engage Festival 2025, a free, fully virtual global event hosted by SWOOP Analytics that brings together the Viva Engage community to connect, share, and learn from one another’s experiences.

This practitioner-led festival showcases real-world success stories, leadership engagement strategies, and community-building insights from across the world. This event will arm you with actionable ideas to elevate your Viva Engage experience. You'll discover a unique blend of practical advice and uplifting inspiration drawn directly from customers' journeys and achievements.

Featured Speakers

From internal campaigns that unite families to strategic transformations that connect thousands, this year’s lineup is packed with inspiration:

Cat Owen, Medibank
A heartwarming campaign that united families across Australia.
Jordan Gilliland, Reece
Their journey from Workplace to Viva Engage—and what they learned.
Sam Parker, ACC New Zealand
Making leadership visible, accessible, and actively involved.
Louise Durmus Kay, Danske Bank
Using Viva Engage to drive strategic change during a major transformation.
Jeanette Vikbacka-Castaing, Capgemini
Turning the dreaded all-company “black hole” into a thriving community.
Cécile Kozinski, Schneider Electric & Dan Mulcahey, Nuveen
Leadership engagement and top-down communication that drives adoption.
Carla Guest, Siemens Energy
Moderation that Matters: Building Safe and Engaging Communities
Ray Gonzales, Eli Lilly
Why communities win: How culture & connection fuel productivity

Be among the very first to experience an exclusive unveiling of the 2025/26 Viva Engage Swoop Benchmarking Report. Get the insider’s view on the good, the bad, and the ugly before anyone else. You’ll hear directly from the experts at Swoop, Sharon Dawson, Dr Laurence Lock Lee & Cai Kjaer!

Register now!

Don’t miss out on this celebration of connection, leadership, and transformation.

Join us on November 12 and be part of a global community that’s shaping the future of employee engagement.

No matter where you are in the world, there’s a way for you to participate: register for a session that matches your time zone or challenge yourself to wake up early or stay up late to gain insights from peers across different regions. This is your chance to connect, learn, and be inspired alongside industry leaders worldwide.

Don't miss out on joining this FREE event hosted by Swoop Analytics that celebrates our customer community, and the amazing progress we've made together. We look forward to seeing you there!

New Viva Engage Capabilities Now Available to All Engage Customers

dchang — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 16:40:37 GMT

Many of you told us that creating, organizing, and sharing content in Engage could be easier and we’ve taken that to heart. We’re excited to announce that several highly requested features: draft and schedule posts, storyline cover photos and AMAs, featured posts and ‘post on behalf of’ are now available for all Engage customers. These updates are designed to give employees more flexibility and help leaders and communicators share their messages more effectively.

Draft and Schedule Posts

We heard you, timing matters. Employees can now draft and schedule posts in their communities or storyline. Whether you want to plan for a big announcement or simply polish your message before sharing, this feature makes it simple to organize your posts and publish them when the moment is right.

Learn more about drafting and scheduling posts here.

New Storyline capabilities

Storyline Cover Photos

Storyline in Viva Engage is a personal feed where employees and leaders share updates, ideas, and experiences to connect and engage across the organization. Now, give your Storyline a more personal, branded look. With cover photos, everyone can customize the visual identity of their Storyline, helping their posts stand out and feel more connected to their organization’s culture.

Storyline Delegate Posting

Communication teams can now help leaders shine. With delegate posting or post on behalf of (POBO), designated communicators can draft and publish posts for leaders directly in their Storyline — keeping voices consistent and messages impactful. Read more about how to set up delegate posting here.

Storyline can be enabled for certain groups within your organization, empower leaders or subject matter experts to test these new experiences. Learn more about how to get the most out of Storyline in our Storyline playbook.

AMAs

Employees want more direct access to leaders. With Ask Me Anything (AMA) sessions, leaders can host open Q&As on their storyline, where employees can submit questions and comment anonymously, and get real-time responses, all in one familiar place. Organizers can also moderate questions and export them for analysis, making it easier than ever to understand what’s top of mind for employees. It’s a simple, authentic way to build trust and spark dialogue.

Learn more about hosting successful AMAs in our AMA playbook. For more information on setting up AMAs read our support docs.

We’re thrilled to bring these new features to life and can’t wait to see how they empower you to connect, share, and lead more effectively across Viva Engage. Stay tuned—there’s even more innovation on the horizon.

Introducing agents in Viva Engage communities: Your AI-powered community expert

John_Mighell — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 18:44:00 GMT

Building a vibrant employee community takes time and commitment from leaders, managers, and subject matter experts. To keep everyone aligned and informed, organizations need simple, trustworthy ways to share accurate information and grow collective knowledge.

As AI and human collaboration continue to transform the way we work, it’s more important than ever to foster engagement, deliver reliable communication, and scale knowledge sharing across teams.

That’s why we’re excited to introduce agents in Viva Engage communities - purpose-built AI designed to help communities thrive.

Launch Demo

Launching in Public Preview today, Microsoft 365 Copilot can give every Engage community its own agent, grounded in the conversations and content that matter most to your community. It’s designed to provide time-savings, facilitate trusted knowledge sharing, and make expertise readily available in organizations so that communities can thrive with less effort. Read on to discover how an AI-powered community expert can foster community engagement and growth.

Your intelligent, collaborative community expert

Proactive answer generation

Agents in communities will proactively identify unanswered questions and use deep reasoning to draft responses, accelerating community connection and knowledge sharing. If the community admin chooses to require review before posting, agent suggestions will be ready in a queue so admins and experts can efficiently review, edit, and approve responses to meet the community's needs.

The agent monitors for open questions, helping communities stay responsive and get members the information they need. By proactively answering questions to support employee connection and knowledge, the agent helps overcome the challenge of starting on a blank page, so your community never stalls waiting for a response.

Grounded on community conversations and SharePoint*

By default, agents in communities are grounded in your community’s conversations and the associated SharePoint site. You can also specify additional SharePoint sites for even richer knowledge that the agent can source from, such as adding dedicated knowledge libraries maintained by the community. The agent uses advanced AI models, including GPT-5, to provide answers that are relevant and contextual.

Expert verification and cited references in answers

Every answer includes citations to its sources and can be verified by community experts, building trust and transparency for your community. When a community expert approves an answer, it’s automatically marked “Verified,” so members know they’re getting trusted information. Answers posted directly by the agent can also be verified by experts at any time.

Notifications in the flow of work

When answers are ready for review, the agent notifies admins and experts in Microsoft Teams so they can review, edit, and approve answers without leaving their workflow.

Transparent sources with the agent hovercard

Every member can see the agent’s grounding sources and skills through the hovercard, making it easy to understand how answers are generated and what the agent can do.

Getting started with an agent in your community

Agent set up and configuration

Community admins can easily add an agent to a Viva Engage community and connect to relevant knowledge, including SharePoint sites. The agent is now ready to assist the community with its unique information and context. The agent will also automatically take on the name of the community it serves. For example, if your Engage community is named “Product Sales Support” the agent will be automatically named “Product Sales Support agent”.

In the agent settings, the community admin can choose to keep the admins and experts in the loop with the optional review toggle, so answers are always aligned with your community’s standards. The community admin can activate, pause, or remove the agent at any time. All members in the community can see the agent activation status, capabilities, and connected knowledge sources on the agent hovercard. To ensure privacy, the agent will only share information in answers that all community members have access to.

Availability and licensing

Now in Public Preview, AI-powered agents are available in Engage communities for users with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license. Community members without a Microsoft 365 Copilot license will be able to view agent interactions with other licensed members. Admins can opt into Public Preview in the Engage Admin Center. Learn more on how IT Administrators can opt in by following instructions in this article.

Looking ahead: What’s next

As we approach General Availability, stay tuned for exciting upcoming features and improvements with AI-powered communities in Engage. While we’re starting here, our vision is to expand to additional community scenarios over time. Additionally, Copilot is now generally available in Engage for users with Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses, bringing even more AI-powered assistance to your employee communities and communications.

*SharePoint integration is not yet available and will be rolling out to Public Preview in the coming weeks.

Microsoft 365 Copilot is coming to Viva Engage

trisharti — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 18:26:34 GMT

We’re excited to announce that Microsoft 365 Copilot is coming to Viva Engage. Copilot in Engage is now smarter, faster, and personalized-designed to boost your productivity. Operating as an assistant, it helps you stay informed, catch up quickly, and get more out of your interactions across Viva Engage.

Catch up on community conversations, get insights from colleagues, find posts from leaders, see what’s trending, and recall key updates-Copilot in Engage brings you the information you need, right when you need it.

Stay in flow with context-aware productivity

Copilot in Engage is context-aware and recognizes when you're in a community, storyline, campaign, or a single conversation. It tailors responses to your current workspace, helping you catch up faster and find what you need, all while staying focused on your current context.

Copilot in Engage also includes contextual, pre-populated prompts designed to help you maximize value. Contextual prompts adapt dynamically as you navigate from one surface to another on Viva Engage, providing AI-powered assistance throughout your experience.

Stay in the loop with smart catch-up cards

Get the latest updates across your network and inside specific communities on Engage by asking Copilot to catch you up – all in a single click. You’ll get clean, organized summaries that help you focus on what truly matters.

Curious about what people are buzzing about across your organization? Prompt Copilot to show you what’s trending across Engage. You’ll see popular content grouped by themes. Clicking on a theme takes you to a new Themes Feed, where you can explore all the conversations that contribute to that trend. It’s never been easier to see what captures your organization’s attention.

Find what you need when you need it with effortless search

Whether you’re hunting for a specific post in a community or catching up on everything shared in communities you follow, Copilot now has enhanced contextual search to track down what you’re looking for in Viva Engage.

Here are examples of how Copilot in Engage search can assist you:

Find the post my teammate shared in the PM Learnings Community
What are the latest updates across all the communities I follow
Show me posts from the last week related to <insert subject>
Catch me up on where I’ve been mentioned

Whether you’re asking something broad or diving into specifics, Copilot in Engage is here to help you stay connected, informed, and in control

Write better with Copilot’s improved writing assistance

Sharing updates just got smarter. Want to post a quick recap of what your team’s been up to this past month? Copilot in Engage now has enhanced writing assistance that can pull in relevant context from Teams and Outlook. Effortlessly connect the dots and craft more complete, informed updates, without starting from scratch.

The future of workplace productivity in your communities and conversations is here. With new Copilot capabilities in Engage, you’re a step ahead—more connected, more informed, and more empowered. Now rolling out to general availability, customers can unlock the full potential of the Copilot experiences in Viva Engage with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license.

We’d love your feedback

If something works well or could be improved, just click the thumbs up or thumbs down icon on any Copilot response. This feedback goes directly to the Copilot team and is regularly reviewed to help us refine the experience. You can also share your thoughts through the Message Center posts or in the comments below — we’d love to hear from you.

Learn more:

Viva Engage Public Content is Now Available in Microsoft 365 Copilot

RamyaRajasekhar — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 15:00:55 GMT

We understand the value of information in your Viva Engage network, whether it’s a post from a leader, an answer to a question or in a community. So, we’ve made public information from across Viva Engage available in Microsoft 365 Copilot — starting with Q&A and now including discussion posts. This includes public discussion posts from public communities, events, Answers and Storylines.

We are delighted to bring this new content source to Copilot, making the everyday conversations, Answers, events and leadership posts more discoverable so that, if a user asks a question and relevant information is available in Engage, it will be highlighted in the Microsoft 365 Copilot response. This ensures users receive high-quality answers that fully address their queries.

Engage content is also available in agents like Researcher (built into the default Copilot experience) where users can scope the source to just Viva Engage as necessary.

Eager to get started? Try out some of these prompts in Copilot:

Tip: when using these prompts specifying “Viva Engage or Engage” in the prompt will return better results.

“What did I miss in Engage in the past 2 weeks?”
“What has <your favorite coworker> posted recently in Engage?”
“What are my coworkers saying about <topic>? In Engage”
“Show me the post regarding <topic> that <your favorite coworker> posted in Engage”
“From the discussions in Engage, what is the AI strategy in my company and how are people reacting to it?”

We can’t wait for you to test out this new Copilot capability. It’s all about helping you stay informed, inspired, and connected with your Engage content. We encourage you to send us feedback with a thumbs up/down and “#GraphConnector” in the text box.

For additional information check out our support documentation.

Viva Engage Email Sender Domain Update

richafnu — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 13:50:36 GMT

As part of the final phase of the Yammer to Viva Engage rebranding, we are updating the email sender domains used for all Viva Engage communications. This change ensures a consistent and secure brand experience across all surfaces and completes the transition from the Yammer brand to Viva Engage. Please see Message ID MC1117814 for earlier communications on this release.

The new email domains continue to leverage industry-standard email authentication (such as SPF) to help prevent tenant spoofing and improve deliverability.

When will this happen?

The rollout of the new email sender domains will occur in phases over several months starting in early September 2025:

We plan to complete the transition by the first quarter of 2026 but may adjust the timeline based on feedback. Any updates will be sent via the Message Center.

During this transition you should expect to receive emails from both the old and new domains. This is very important if your tenant has custom email rules or is processing emails sent by Engage in a special manner. Please ensure that you are prepared to receive emails using the old and new sender domains until communication has been sent notifying you of the completion of these changes.

How this affects emails across mailbox and organizations

All emails from Viva Engage will now come from a new domain instead of yammer.com or eu.yammer.com The exact sender domain depends on the data residency for your Viva Engage network:

US geo: from @yammer.com to @engage.mail.microsoft
EU geo: from EU.yammer.com to @eu.euengage.mail.microsoft

In addition to the domain change, Viva Engage email addresses will now include a tenant-specific prefix to help differentiate your organization’s environment such as test and production tenants. This prefix will use your organization’s tenant name in Microsoft Entra ID and will appear in the sender address. For example, fabrikam.onmicrosoft.com will result in a “fabrikam” prefix. Continuing with this example, sender addresses may include:

noreply_fabrikam@engage.mail.microsoft – for digest emails, leader identification, community expert identification, delegate notifications and others.
notifications_fabrikam@engage.mail.microsoft – for community posts, storyline updates, and other user activity notifications.
announcements_fabrikam@engage.mail.microsoft – for leadership announcements and other broad communications.

For networks in the EU geo, you should change the sender domain in the examples above to noreply_fabrikam@eu.engage.mail.microsoft, etc.

Including this identifier makes it easier for admins, users, and mail systems to distinguish between tenants, reducing confusion and improving traceability. It also adds an additional layer of protection by making it easier to identify and authenticate emails originating from your tenant.

Scope of impact:

This change applies to all Viva Engage customers and all email notification types, regardless of your Viva license tier (Viva Engage Core, Viva Suite, etc.).

It affects all Viva Engage emails, including user notifications, community announcements, storyline digests, and any other Viva Engage–generated emails. Most end users will only notice that the “From” address looks different

Custom email transport rules: If you rely on specific email address formats in rules configured within your tenant, please ensure that the configuration is updated to cover both the old and new email address formats accounting for the data residency of your network.

Third-party integrations: If your organization uses any third-party services (such as email journaling/archiving systems, security gateways, or custom email workflows) that filter or classify emails based on the sender domain, those will need adjustment to include the new email sender domain. Any tool explicitly looking for only @yammer.com or EU.yammer.com in email addresses will fail to recognize the new addresses. You should review such configurations and update them to accept or recognize the new @engage.mail.microsoft and @eu.engage.mail.microsoft domains. This will ensure continuity in archiving, compliance journaling, or application of custom routing rules that were targeting the old domain.

Finally, note that this is not an optional change, it’s an automated part of the service rebranding. After the coexistence period, emails from the old Yammer domains will stop. We will communicate via the Message Center at the completion of this transition so that you know when the old email address has been discontinued.

What you need to do to prepare

Admins should review and update the following configurations before and during the rollout:

Email Transport Rules / Mail Flow Rules: Update any Exchange transport rules, mail flow policies, or email gateway allowlists that reference @yammer.com (or EU.yammer.com) to also include the new domain(s) @engage.mail.microsoft and EU.engage.mail.microsoft. This ensures that automated rules (for encryption, forward, etc.) continue to work with the new sender addresses. For example, if you have a rule that flags or redirects Yammer emails, edit its conditions to accept the new domain as well.
Security Filters: Check your anti-spam or email security filtering configurations. The new domains are Microsoft-managed and authenticated, so in general they should be treated as trustworthy senders. If your organization had any custom filter allowing all @yammer.com mail, you should add the new domains to those allowlists. Likewise, if you blocked @yammer.com anywhere (some organizations temporarily block Yammer emails prior to launch), you’ll need to update those blocks to use the new domain.
Outlook Inbox Rules (User Mailbox Rules): Inform users that any personal Outlook rules they created that filter or sort emails by the sender domain will need to be updated. For instance, a user might have an Outlook rule moving all Yammer emails to a folder. After the change, that rule (looking for @yammer.com) would no longer catch the notifications. Users should update such rules to the new domain or adjust their logic. (If a user does nothing, the worst case is that Viva Engage emails will start landing in their inbox instead of the expected folder.)
Safe Senders and Allow Lists: To proactively prevent any Viva Engage notifications from being misclassified as junk email and treated as external, consider adding the new domain to your organization’s safe sender lists. In Exchange Online, this might mean adding engage.mail.microsoft (and the EU variant if applicable) to tenant allow lists. See more here- https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/mail-flow-best-practices/manage-accepted-domains/manage-accepted-domains
Users can add the new addresses to their personal Outlook Safe Senders list. Email addresses and domains on the Safe Senders list are never treated as junk mail. For instructions, see Add recipients to safe sender list in Outlook. This step can help ensure smooth delivery during the transition.
No action needed if no custom configurations: If your organization has no custom mail rules or integrations related to Yammer, then in most cases no administrative action is required for basic email delivery. The domain change will happen automatically.

For admins, communicating these changes in advance to users in your organization is highly recommended.

Compliance considerations

No new compliance or privacy impact has been identified with this change. The content of the emails remains the same; only the sender domain is changing. Data residency and compliance for Viva Engage continue to follow the existing policies and region of your network as the domain rebranding won’t affect that.

As always, you should review this change against your organization’s policies. For example, if your organization had any internal compliance rule specifically referencing the old domains, update those references. Otherwise, standard email compliance (retention, eDiscovery, auditing) for Viva Engage messages is unaffected by the domain change.

By updating your configurations and informing users, you can ensure a seamless transition as Viva Engage completes its rebranding. After the transition is complete, all your Viva Engage emails will arrive under the new domain names, offering a more coherent experience.

Learn more

For more background on the Viva Engage rebranding journey, see the blog post “Yammer is evolving to Microsoft Viva Engage” on the Microsoft Tech Community.
Official documentation is updated to reflect these new domains. Please refer to the Message ID (MC1117814) for the Viva Engage email rebranding updates.

Introducing Teams Q&A export API on Microsoft Graph Beta

pallaviverma — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 15:00:00 GMT

We are thrilled to announce the availability of the Teams Q&A Export API in Microsoft Graph Beta: Use the Microsoft Graph API to work with Microsoft Teams. It enables programmatic access to Q&A content across Microsoft Teams meetings, webinars, and town halls, addressing a key need for data portability and cross-platform interoperability of question & answer (Q&A) conversations messages for a tenant.

The new Export API, the API returns a just-in-time snapshot of all Q&A activity in JSON format. The API supports app-only access and does not support delegated permissions.

We encourage you to try out these APIs and reach out to us with your feedback. See Microsoft Graph REST API beta endpoint reference to learn more about the MS Graph beta program and best ways to provide feedback.

Pre-requisites to test the API:

Testing instructions below require Bruno API platform setup
Some steps require tenant admin approval

To test the API, follow the steps below:

a. Go to Register an application - Microsoft Azure and register a new application.

b. Specify your custom callback URL.

Note the Application (client) ID and Directory (tenant) ID. This information will be required in the following steps.

Note the OAuth 2.0 endpoints. This information will be required in the following steps.

Request API permissions:

a. In the API permissions tab, select Add a permission and select Microsoft Graph.

b. Select Application permissions to use app-only access, without a signed-in user.

c. Select EngagementMeetingConversation.Read.All.

Share your app’s API permission URL with a tenant admin to get admin consent for your app to use these permissions.

Create a new client secret under the Certificate & secrets tab. A refresh is recommended every 6 months as a security best practice. Note the Secret ID. This information will be required in the following steps.

Set up Q&A messages GET request on Bruno:

a. Request type: GET

b. Request URL: https://graph.microsoft.com/beta/communications/getAllOnlineMeetingMessages?$expand=conversation

c. Set up Auth:

i. Select type as OAuth 2.0

ii. Input Access Token URL: This is the token endpoint noted in step 3.

iii. Input Client ID: This is the Application (client) ID noted in step 2.

iv. Input Client Secret: This is the Secret ID noted in step 7.

v. Input Scope: https://graph.microsoft.com/.default

d. Select Get Access Token

Send request: If the request is submitted successfully, a 200 OK response will be returned along with a response body containing question and answer (Q&A) conversation messages.
Get a list of reactions by setting up a List reactions GET Request: https://graph.microsoft.com/beta/communications/onlineMeetingConversations/{onlineMeetingEngagementConversationId}/messages/{engagementConversationMessageId}/reactions. If the request is submitted successfully, a 200 OK response will be returned along with a response body containing question and answer (Q&A) conversation message reactions.

We hope you like this new API capability, helping you get the most out of your Teams Q&A experience.

Modern External Networks is now generally available to all Engage customers

RajJain — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 15:04:47 GMT

We are excited to announce the modernization of external networks with Viva Engage! Modern external networks will continue to promote collaboration between users and teams from different companies, known as external participants, to communicate and share information in an industry-standard secure environment. Admins can configure these modern external networks to partners, consultants, and other outside companies to conduct team discussions, share files, and collaborate on projects.

In case you missed our webinar on modern external networks you can view it here.

What this change means for you:

Modern External Networks: Transition from legacy external networks to modern external networks, providing a fresher, more intuitive user experience.
Migration Process: The process involves setting up a new tenant, connecting it to your home network, and migrating content and users from legacy networks.
Timelines: The deadline for migrating to modern external networks is August 15th. Ensure your networks are moved to avoid any disruptions.

Find additional step-by-step set up instructions on Microsoft Learn.

Benefits for your organization:

Enhanced User Experience: Enjoy a modern interface with improved functionality and a seamless transition.
Future-Proofing: Align with Microsoft’s Secure Futures Initiative, ensuring your networks are secure and up-to-date.
Comprehensive Support: Access to our support team for any questions or issues during the migration process.

We’re excited to continue to invest in more ways for organizations to collaborate across networks. For any questions or further assistance, please reach out to our support team or join the Viva Engage customer community.

Thank you for being a valued part of our journey towards modernization!

Viva Engage Blog articles

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

Scaling Copilot adoption with the Copilot Adoption Community in Viva Engage

Getting Started with Copilot Adoption Community

Step 1: Create your community

Step 2: Customize your community

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

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

Why storytelling matters right now

Use Storylines to build leadership presence

Run social campaigns that invite participation

Think series, not a post

Why this works: relevance, clarity, and connection

What’s next

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

1. Communities Are the Engine of AI‑Powered Engagement

2. The Four Pillars of Connected Communications

3. Copilot Adoption Community

4. Scaling Knowledge With the community Agent

5. A Simple 3‑Week Path to Get Started

What’s Next

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

Notifications: Relevance, Not Noise

Digests: The Daily & Weekly Visibility Engines

The Home Feed: Built In Personalization

Content & Contributors: How Everyone Shapes Reach

Moderation & Governance: A Modernized Approach

The Community Management Toolkit

AI in Viva Engage: A New Era of Engagement

A Day in the Life: Copilot + Viva Engage

What’s Next

Introducing Viva Engage Masterclass: Your Guide to the Viva Engage Essentials (Season 2)

What is the Viva Engage Masterclass?

Register for the Masterclasses

Customer Spotlight: Copilot Adoption in Viva Engage with Micron

Key takeaways include:

Moderation strategies to scale participation and communications in Viva Engage

Set your Engage network up for success

Moderation at scale: How corporate communicators can shape discussions and interactions

User controls: Helping people get the most out of Engage

Learn more about moderation in Engage

What’s New in Viva Engage – Microsoft Ignite 2025

Agents in Communities

Microsoft 365 Copilot in Engage

Engage Public Content in Microsoft 365 Copilot

Community Themes and Sentiment in Community Analytics

HR Org Filters & Activation Metrics

Storyline Targeting

Multi-language Posts

AI Theme Moderation

Post Tab in the Communications Dashboard

Live events produced with Teams Town Hall

Segmentation

What to do next?

Viva Engage Festival 2025: Real Stories. Real Impact. Real Community

Featured Speakers

Register now!

New Viva Engage Capabilities Now Available to All Engage Customers

Draft and Schedule Posts

New Storyline capabilities

Storyline Cover Photos

Storyline Delegate Posting

Featured Posts