Viva Engage

Microsoft Viva Engage is the enterprise social network inside Microsoft 365 — the product formerly known as Yammer. It gives an organisation open, company-wide conversation: communities anyone can join, storylines where leaders and employees post personal updates, and a question-and-answer layer that surfaces expertise across departments. Engage runs as an app inside Microsoft Teams, as a standalone web and mobile app, and embeds directly into SharePoint intranet pages.

Part of the SharePoint reference · Licensing verified against Microsoft documentation · Last reviewed 1 September 2026

The five surfaces

Engage is easier to plan for once you separate it into the places conversation actually happens. Three are included everywhere; two depend on licence.

• Communities. Open or private groups around a department, interest, initiative or location. Every community is backed by a Microsoft 365 group, so membership works the same way it does for Teams and SharePoint sites.
• Storyline. A personal feed per person. Leaders use it for direct updates that reach the whole organisation; employees use it to share work in progress.
• Answers in Viva. Questions posted to the organisation rather than to a team, with the accepted answer surfaced back into search.
• Leadership Corner. A dedicated executive space with AMAs and scheduled leader communications. Premium.
• Campaigns. Hashtag-driven programmes — safety week, a values launch, an engagement drive — with publishers, goals and participation reporting. Premium.

What has changed recently

Three dates matter if you are planning around Engage, and two of them are about other products people confuse with it.

• Viva Topics retired, 22 February 2025. Inside Engage, topics reverted to a simpler public topics model and the AI-generated topic cards disappeared. Published topic pages became standard SharePoint pages.
• Viva Goals retired, 31 December 2025. Nothing to do with Engage, but it is the main reason people ask whether the whole Viva family is being wound down.
• Engage live events retired, 15 April 2026. This one is inside Engage. Live events powered by Teams Live Events stopped being available for new scheduling; existing scheduled events are supported until 28 February 2027. New broadcasts should use Teams town halls.

Viva Engage and Microsoft Teams

This is the question most rollouts stall on, and the answer is about audience rather than features.

Most organisations run both. Engage typically carries announcements, cross-department questions, recognition and communities of practice, while the day-to-day work stays in Teams.

How Viva Engage fits into Microsoft 365

• Microsoft TeamsEngage runs as a left-rail app and as a channel tab, so company-wide communities sit one click from daily chat.
• SharePointThe Conversations web part embeds a live community or topic feed on any intranet page — the usual way Engage reaches people who never open the app.
• M365 GroupsEvery community is backed by a group, giving it the same membership, mailbox and governance model as a Team or a SharePoint site.
• Viva ConnectionsSits alongside Engage in the Viva family. Connections brings the intranet into Teams; Engage supplies the conversation inside it.
• OutlookInteractive notification emails let people read and reply to Engage conversations without leaving the inbox.
• Microsoft PurviewEngage networks in native mode store content in the Microsoft 365 substrate, so retention, eDiscovery, DLP and audit apply as they do to Teams and SharePoint.

Licensing and limits

The core network costs nothing extra on a standard commercial plan. What catches teams out is that the features a communications lead actually wants sit behind a separate licence — one that only needs to go to the handful of people publishing.

Rollout notes

• Check native mode first. Only networks in native mode inherit full Purview coverage. Tenants migrated from older Yammer configurations should confirm this before compliance sign-off.
• Licence the publishers, not the population. Premium features are about who posts, not who reads.
• Communities create groups. Each new community adds a Microsoft 365 group to the tenant, so community creation belongs inside your group governance policy, not outside it.
• Seed before you launch. An empty feed embedded on the homepage reads as a dead intranet. Have communities and posts in place before the web part goes live.
• Check your domain. If your intranet runs on a vanity domain, the Conversations web part will not render — and no amount of configuration fixes it.

Getting Engage in front of people

Adoption almost always comes down to one thing: whether the conversation reaches employees who never open the Engage app. Communities that live only inside Engage are read by the people who were already going to read them.

The Conversations web part is the native answer. Place it on a homepage or department site, point it at a community, a topic, one person’s activity or each viewer’s own feed, and people can read, reply and post questions and praise without leaving the page. For a lot of intranets that is genuinely enough, and there is nothing else to buy.

Its constraint is the same one every built-in web part has. The feed renders in its own fixed layout and inherits the site theme, so it looks like Engage sitting on your page rather than part of the page. On a homepage designed around a specific grid, hierarchy and brand — the kind most organisations want on their front door — that difference is visible, and it tends to be the thing that makes a homepage feel assembled rather than designed.

Common questions about Viva Engage