In short
Viva Engage is the social layer of Microsoft 365: communities, storylines, leader content and questions answered across the whole organisation. Most employees read it rather than post, so plan it as a reach channel first and a conversation channel second. This guide explains what it is, how it differs from Teams and Viva Connections, which features need a premium licence, and how to tell whether your posts actually reach people.
Key takeaways
- Microsoft describes Viva Engage as the social fabric for Viva and Microsoft 365, while Viva Connections is the gateway where people catch up with news.
- The Viva Engage Core service plan, included with Microsoft 365, covers communities and storylines; Leadership Corner, AMAs, storyline announcements, campaigns and full analytics need Viva Suite or Employee Communications and Communities.
- In Tryane’s Viva Engage Benchmark 2026, organisations with fewer than 2,500 employees averaged 78.49% monthly active users, against 49.48% above 50,000 employees.
- Native network analytics only appear when at least 50% of the network’s users hold a premium licence.
- Native analytics stay inside Viva Engage, so comparing its reach with SharePoint news and email needs a cross-channel view.
What is Viva Engage, and how is it different?
Viva Engage is Microsoft’s employee community platform. It brings people together to connect with leaders, coworkers and communities, crowdsource answers and ideas, and share their work, and it is part of the Microsoft Viva employee experience built into Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams.[1] It is the product formerly known as Yammer, which Microsoft acquired in 2012 and which evolved into Viva Engage as of February 2023.[2] If you inherited a Yammer network, our article on what the rename changed for governance covers the transition.
Employees reach it as an app in Microsoft Teams, on the web, through a desktop app and on iOS and Android.[3] The two products it is most often confused with do different jobs:
- Viva Connections is where people start their workday and catch up with organisational news, tasks and resources. Microsoft calls it the gateway to the Viva experience, and Viva Engage the social fabric for Viva and Microsoft 365.[1] Microsoft has since renamed the Viva Connections app the SharePoint app in Teams, built on your SharePoint home site.[4]
- Teams channels serve a team whose membership is already defined: fast coordination among people who work together. Viva Engage is the place Microsoft recommends to connect with people across the organisation beyond the boundaries of projects, functions and departments.[5]
That boundary-crossing is the whole proposition. Viva Engage is the only Microsoft 365 channel where a question from one site can be answered, in public, by an expert at another site who was never on the distribution list. For a closer comparison, read our piece on Teams and Viva Engage for internal communication.
| Channel | The job it does best | Where it fails | Signal that it is working |
|---|---|---|---|
| SharePoint intranet | Durable, findable, authoritative publishing: the version of record | Anything that needs a reply; comment threads on news pages go stale | Return visits and search-driven arrivals weeks after publication |
| Viva Engage | Open conversation across the organisation, leader visibility and questions answered by colleagues you do not know | Reference content: nobody finds a policy in a feed six months later | Reach across departments and replies from outside the poster’s own team |
| Teams channel | Fast coordination inside a known team | Reaching anyone outside the membership | Decisions closed quickly without a wider audience |
| Email newsletter | Delivery to a named list, including people who never open a portal | Dialogue, and content that must stay current | Reach into populations absent from portal analytics |
If a piece of content does not need a reply from someone outside the author’s own team, it probably does not belong in Viva Engage. Publish it on the intranet and use Viva Engage to point to it and ask a question about it.
Communities, storylines, Leadership Corner and Answers explained
Comms teams use four building blocks. Each does a different job in your channel mix.
- Communities are groups built around interests, job types, departments or topics. They are where most network activity happens, and where your community managers work. Viva Engage communities are also arriving inside Teams: storylines in Teams are generally available, while communities in Teams were still in public preview at the time of writing.[6]
- Storylines are personal feeds: anyone can post to their own storyline and follow others. Storyline content is visible to any internal user who has access to Viva Engage, and guests cannot see it.[7] For leaders, the storyline is the natural home of a regular, informal update.
- Leadership Corner gathers your leaders’ storyline and community posts and their upcoming Ask Me Anything (AMA) sessions in one place, so employees can get to know leaders and ask them questions directly.[8]
- Answers in Viva lets employees ask and answer questions, connect with subject-matter experts and find related questions, with natural language processing matching questions to existing answers.[9] It turns repeated questions into a searchable record.
For comms teams, the practical split is simple: communities for ongoing topics and audiences, storylines and Leadership Corner for leader visibility, Answers for knowledge that would otherwise disappear into private chats. Getting leaders to use those surfaces is its own discipline, which we cover in getting executives genuinely active in Viva Engage.
Which Viva Engage features need a premium service plan?
Check licences with IT before you build an editorial plan around a feature. Microsoft splits Viva Engage into three service plans:[3]
| Service plan | What it enables | Comes with |
|---|---|---|
| Viva Engage Core (formerly Yammer Enterprise) | Core experiences, for example communities and storylines, plus the core Answers in Viva experience | Microsoft 365 |
| Viva Employee Communities and Communications | Premium experiences, for example Leadership Corner, AMAs, storyline announcements, delegation, analytics and campaigns | Microsoft Viva Suite; Microsoft Viva Employee Communications and Communities |
| Viva Engage Knowledge | The premium Answers in Viva experience | Microsoft Viva Suite; Microsoft Viva Employee Communications and Communities |
Three details catch comms teams out:
- Leadership Corner requires the Viva Suite licence or the Microsoft Viva Employee Communications and Communities licence.[8]
- Answers without Viva Engage Knowledge is partial: users can ask questions and view, vote on and respond to questions in communities they belong to, but do not get the full Answers experience.[9]
- Analytics: to use all analytics features, users need Viva Engage Premium, bundled with Viva Suite and Employee Communications and Communities. Users without those licences can still access conversation, live event and some community analytics.[10]
Admins do not need a premium licence to configure premium features, so a feature can be switched on in the admin centre and still be invisible to the employees you want to reach.[3] Our comparison of Viva Engage and Viva Engage Premium helps you decide whether the upgrade is worth it for your network.
How many employees actually use Viva Engage each month?
Fewer than the licence count suggests, and the share falls as organisations grow. Tryane’s Viva Engage Benchmark 2026 analyses the activity of more than 3.5 million Viva Engage users across industries and company sizes. Average monthly active users by organisation size:
| Organisation size (employees) | Average monthly active users |
|---|---|
| Fewer than 2,500 | 78.49% |
| 2,500 to 5,000 | 73.30% |
| 5,000 to 10,000 | 66.02% |
| 10,000 to 25,000 | 75.29% |
| 25,000 to 50,000 | 56.36% |
| More than 50,000 | 49.48% |
The spread inside each band matters as much as the average: for organisations above 50,000 employees, the benchmark prints a minimum of 18.91% and a maximum of 84.65% monthly active users, so size alone does not decide the outcome. Activity is also not the same as participation. In the same benchmark, 83% of communities were active in organisations above 50,000 employees, against 95% to 99% in every smaller size band, and the report’s conclusion is that readership remains strong while active contribution remains limited. That is why we recommend planning Viva Engage as a reach channel first: most of your audience will read, and a smaller group will react or reply.
Download the full Viva Engage Benchmark 2026 to compare your network by industry and company size. For posts, reactions and comments by company size, see average Viva Engage engagement rates.
How should a comms team run Viva Engage?
A healthy network needs four roles, and the most common failure is one person trying to hold all four:
- Channel owner: decides what Viva Engage is for and defends that definition when a project team asks for a community to store documents in.
- Community managers: run individual communities and answer for their health.
- Executive sponsors: lend credibility to specific communities and show up in AMAs and storylines when it matters.
- Moderators: handle the small volume of content that needs a human decision.
Viva Engage is weak at three things, so plan around them. It is poor for reference content, because the feed is chronological. It cannot guarantee reach, because reading is voluntary. And it struggles to reach people without a desk unless you make it part of their mobile routine; our note on measuring communications that reach frontline workers covers how to check. If you have just taken over an estate you did not build, start with the first 90 days for a new Viva Engage owner, then shape the community portfolio with a community strategy for launching, sustaining and closing communities.
How do you see who your posts really reach?
Native Viva Engage analytics are a good starting point. Every licensed user sees personal analytics for their storyline and community posts, community admins see community analytics, leaders with an assigned audience see audience analytics, and network admins and corporate communicators get network analytics with organisational attributes as filters.[10] Two conditions limit that picture: the full set needs premium licences, and the network analytics dashboard only appears when at least 50% of the network’s users are licensed for Viva Suite, Employee Communications and Communities or Viva Engage Premium.[10]
The bigger limit is scope. Native analytics describe Viva Engage only. They cannot tell you whether the people who read a leader’s storyline also opened the SharePoint news post it pointed to, or whether the plant that never appears in Viva Engage read the newsletter instead. Three measures are worth more than member counts and post volume:
- Reach by population: not 1,400 members, but the share of each department or country that read your posts this month. The first is a fact about a database; the second tells you where to act.
- Cross-boundary replies: the share of replies that come from outside the poster’s own function or site. It tests whether Viva Engage is doing the job no other channel can.
- Answered-question rate: the share of questions that get a substantive reply within two working days. A network that swallows questions teaches people to stop asking.
Our article on the limits of Viva Engage native analytics sets out the gaps in detail. Track reach over time and across channels, and use it to adapt your strategy: move content that nobody outside head office reads, and invest in the communities that cross boundaries.
This is the job of Analytics for Viva Engage, part of our Communication Insights platform: it shows reach and participation across your Viva Engage network by department and country, alongside SharePoint, the SharePoint app in Teams (formerly Viva Connections) and email in one dashboard. To see how your network compares, book a 15-minute call with Jérémy via his Calendly.
Frequently asked questions
What is Viva Engage used for?
Viva Engage is used for open, organisation-wide conversation in Microsoft 365: communities around topics and roles, leader updates through storylines and Leadership Corner, AMAs and live events, and questions answered by colleagues through Answers in Viva. Comms teams use it to reach employees beyond their own team and to hear what they think.
Is Viva Engage the same as Yammer?
Yes, Viva Engage is the successor to Yammer. Microsoft acquired Yammer in 2012, and it evolved into Viva Engage as of February 2023. Existing communities and conversations carried over, and the core service plan is still listed as “Viva Engage Core or Yammer Enterprise”.
What is the difference between Viva Engage and Microsoft Teams?
Teams channels are for coordination inside a team whose membership is defined. Viva Engage connects people across the organisation beyond the boundaries of projects, functions and departments, so a question can reach an expert who was never invited. The two increasingly meet: storylines are available in Teams, and Viva Engage communities in Teams are in public preview.
Is Viva Engage included in Microsoft 365?
The Viva Engage Core service plan comes with Microsoft 365 and covers communities, storylines and core Answers. Premium features such as Leadership Corner, AMAs, storyline announcements, campaigns and full analytics need Microsoft Viva Suite or Microsoft Viva Employee Communications and Communities.
What is a good monthly active user rate for Viva Engage?
It depends on company size. In Tryane’s Viva Engage Benchmark 2026, average monthly active users ranged from 78.49% in organisations with fewer than 2,500 employees to 49.48% above 50,000 employees. Compare yourself with your own size band, not with the overall average.
Can Viva Engage analytics show reach by department?
Network analytics let network admins and corporate communicators filter by organisational attributes, but only with premium licences and when at least 50% of users are licensed. They also cover Viva Engage alone, so comparing a department’s reach across Viva Engage, SharePoint and email needs a cross-channel analytics layer.
Sources
Further reading
• Viva Engage in the Internal Communication Mix, and When It Is the Wrong Channel
• Tryane vs Viva Engage Native Analytics: What the Native Dashboards Cannot Show
• Benefits of Viva Engage: What It Is Genuinely Good At, and What It Is Not
• Dashboards for Yammer Managers: What a Viva Engage Community Dashboard Should Actually Contain
• Teams vs Viva Engage: Which One for Internal Comms?
If you want to see what cross-channel reporting looks like against your real data, Tryane runs a 15-minute walkthrough with no slides. Book a slot with Jérémy.