Viva Engage is coming! In late August, Viva Engage will replace the Communities app in Teams, a new employee experience that connects people across the company to build community, spark engagement with leadership, harness knowledge and answers, and build personal networks. This article provides answers to common questions--particularly from IT, security, compliance, and existing Yammer customers. If you're a business stakeholder (leader, HR, corp comms for example), or have not yet had time to understand Viva Engage, please read Announcing Microsoft Viva Engage and our overview of Viva Engage and Yammer.
Viva Engage is available at no additional cost to most Microsoft 365 customers: It can be used by anyone enabled to use Yammer.
Viva Engage builds on Yammer, and brings together Yammer’s experiences—communities, open conversations, and personalized discovery—with new capabilities for expression and sharing through storyline and stories, and upcoming innovations.
Viva Engage is safe, secure, governable. The Viva Engage app is an innovative, integrated experience in Teams & Outlook, backed by the same Yammer services and enterprise-grade #Microsoft365 security, privacy, compliance and manageability controls, including eDiscovery and communications compliance.
The Viva Engage app in Teams will replace the Communities app. We strongly recommend that Teams admins deploy and pin the Communities app (today) or the Viva Engage app (in late August) for all users using Teams app policies.
The Communities app will be updated automatically starting in late August. If you’ve already deployed the Communities app, it will be updated with no action required. First, the the app name and icon will update. The new user experiences will roll out over the following few weeks.
The Viva Engage app in Outlook will replace the Communities app later this summer.
Viva Engage creates a social layer across Microsoft 365. Relevant announcements, posts and stories from storylines and communities show up in Teams Activity, your Outlook inbox, Viva Connections, the profile card, as well as Viva Engage and Yammer.
Yammer.com and the Yammer apps for iOS, Android, Mac and PC remain the standalone experiences for employee engagement on web, mobile and desktop.
We’re bringing storyline, stories, and Viva Engage innovations to the Yammer apps as well. For example you’ll see storyline posts and stories in the new Storylines page.
Say it with me: Yammer is not going away. In fact, we're investing more deeply in Yammer services and experiences in Viva Engage and across Microsoft 365.
Customers tell us it matters: that's why we built Viva Engage. Remote & hybrid work make it difficult to create and strengthen professional relationships across working groups and business silos. 43% of leaders believe relationship-building is the top challenge for remote work. And they're prioritizing efforts to connect and engage employees.
Viva Engage reflects Microsoft’s continued investment in our employee experience platform through product innovation driven by customer feedback, research and thought leadership.
