Image de blog : yammer guide for internal communications - Tryane Analytics pour la communication interne

The Yammer Estate You Inherited: A First 90 Days Guide to Viva Engage

By Nicolas Saliba · 8 min read

You have just picked up responsibility for Viva Engage. Nobody handed you a document. The person who set the network up left in 2021, the community list runs to several hundred rows, roughly a third of those communities have no post newer than the migration, and there is a standing invitation in your calendar called “ESN steering” that has not been held since March. Somewhere in your objectives for the year there is a line about relaunching it.

Resist the relaunch. The single most common failure in this situation is starting with a campaign when what the estate needs is an inventory. A campaign on top of an unaudited estate produces a spike in April and a slightly worse baseline in June, and it burns the one moment of executive attention you were going to get. Count first. Then decide. Then publish.

Why the relaunch instinct is wrong

The relaunch is attractive because it is visible. It gives you something to say in a steering committee within six weeks. The problem is that it answers a question nobody asked. Participation in an inherited network is almost never low because people forgot the network exists. It is low because the network stopped being useful, and it stopped being useful for a reason that a poster campaign cannot fix: the communities that would have answered a real question have no active owner, so questions go unanswered, so people stop asking.

There is a second reason to slow down. Whatever you do in month two, you will be asked in month twelve whether it worked. If you have not established a baseline before you change anything, you cannot answer that. The Yammer to Viva Engage transition already broke a lot of measurement continuity for internal communication teams, which we covered in the piece on what carried over and what did not. Do not compound it by making changes you cannot subsequently attribute.

Weeks 1 to 3: count what you actually have

The inventory is not glamorous and it is the highest-value thing you will do all year. Five numbers matter.

Communities with a living owner. Not the owner field in the admin centre, which is frequently a leaver or a distribution list. A living owner is a named person who has posted or moderated in the last sixty days. In most inherited estates this number is between a fifth and a third of the total, and discovering that is usually the moment the scale of the problem becomes clear.

Communities with a stated purpose. One sentence, written down, that a stranger could read and use to decide whether to join. Empty descriptions are the norm and they are why people join nothing.

Posts that received a reply. Volume tells you people are publishing. Reply rate tells you whether anyone is listening. A network where four fifths of posts die unanswered is a broadcast channel wearing a social interface.

Participation by population, not headcount. Membership counts are close to meaningless in an inherited estate because auto-join and legacy provisioning inflated them. What you need is the proportion of each function, country and site that posted, replied or reacted in the last quarter. This is the number that tells you where the network is real, and it is the one the native tooling will not give you without work.

The top-ten concentration. What share of all activity comes from the ten most active people? Above roughly half, you do not have a network, you have a small club with a large audience, and its behaviour will change entirely when two of those ten change jobs.

What the admin centre will and will not tell you

Microsoft gives you a reasonable amount of this natively. The Microsoft 365 admin activity reports cover usage volume^[1], and Viva Engage has its own analytics surface for community-level activity^[2]. Group lifecycle and expiry policy will tell you which Microsoft 365 Groups are heading for automatic expiry^[3], which is worth knowing before a community disappears on you.

What none of it does is join activity to your organisational structure. Function, grade, site, language and contract type live in Entra ID or an HR file, not in the community insights panel, so the fourth number on that list is the one you will have to construct. That is the specific gap the segmentation work exists to close, and our article on audience segmentation for internal communications covers how to structure the attributes before you start joining anything.

Weeks 4 to 6: write down what the channel is for

One page. What Viva Engage is for in your organisation, what it is not for, and who decides. The definition that holds up is narrow: Viva Engage is where a question from one part of the organisation gets answered, in public, by someone in another part who was never on the distribution list. Everything that does not need that belongs somewhere else. The full channel-by-channel logic sits in our guide to what Viva Engage is actually for.

Write the exclusions explicitly, because they are what you will be arguing about for the next two years. Viva Engage is not the document store. It is not where policy lives. It is not a substitute for a team having a Teams channel. And it is not a guaranteed-reach channel, which matters enormously if a meaningful part of your workforce has no desk. If that is your situation, set expectations before you set targets, and read measuring frontline worker communications first.

Phase	The question you are answering	Evidence you need	The mistake to avoid
Weeks 1 to 3	What is actually here?	Owner liveness, purpose statements, reply rate, participation by population, top-ten concentration.	Reporting member counts as if they meant something.
Weeks 4 to 6	What is this channel for?	One page, agreed with the digital workplace owner and signed off by your director.	Writing a definition so broad that nothing is excluded.
Weeks 7 to 9	What does normal look like today?	A frozen baseline of the same five numbers, dated and archived.	Changing things before the baseline exists.
Weeks 10 to 13	What is the one thing we will improve?	A single programme with an owner, a cadence and a named success measure.	Launching five initiatives so that none of them can be attributed.

Weeks 7 to 9: freeze a baseline you can defend

Take the five numbers, date them, and put them somewhere that will survive your own laptop. This sounds trivial. It is the step that separates internal communication teams who can prove an effect from teams who cannot, and Gallagher’s State of the Sector research keeps identifying measurement as the capability the profession names as its weakest^[4].

Two practical warnings. First, the native retention window is finite, so a baseline you assume you can reconstruct later frequently cannot be reconstructed later. Capture it now. Second, if you are planning to rebuild this in Power BI against the Microsoft Graph reporting API, know what you are taking on. The reporting API is not consistently reliable and produces days with missing data. Customers have observed KPI values in Power BI that do not reconcile with the native SharePoint reports for the same period. A dependable build needs a robust ingestion process, scheduled reconciliation against native figures and a named pipeline owner, so budget for the pipeline rather than the dashboard. The detail is in our honest guide to SharePoint analytics in Power BI.

Weeks 10 to 13: choose one thing

By now the inventory has told you where the problem is, and it is usually one of three. If most communities have no living owner, your work is the community portfolio: consolidate, hand over, and close what cannot be saved. If the communities are healthy but nothing is published on a rhythm, your work is the editorial programme. If the network is active but leadership is absent or purely broadcasting, your work is executive participation.

Pick one. Gallup’s workplace research is consistent that engagement moves through managers and immediate work groups rather than through corporate campaigns^[5], which is a useful corrective when the temptation is to do everything centrally at once.

Tryane exists for the measurement half of this. It reads Viva Engage alongside SharePoint, Teams and your newsletter platform, joins that activity to your organisational structure through Entra ID or an HR file, and holds history across product transitions so a baseline taken today still compares against the Yammer years. It is SOC 2 Type 2 certified and GDPR compliant by design, hosts in the EU by default with US data residency on request, deploys in a couple of hours over single sign-on with Azure AD or Entra ID, and installs no agent.

Frequently asked questions

Is Yammer still a product?

No. Yammer became Viva Engage and the standalone Yammer branding and experience have been retired^[6]. Communities, posts and membership carried across. The governance model underneath changed more than the interface did, and we set out what changed in the article on the difference between Viva Engage and Yammer.

Should I archive dormant communities straight away?

Not in week one. Some dormant communities hold a genuinely valuable archive of problem solving, and deleting them destroys institutional knowledge that nobody will notice missing until they need it. Inventory first, identify which dormant communities contain answers people still search for, and only then decide between closing, merging and archiving.

How do I know whether frontline staff are participating?

Not from the native panel, which reports activity inside a community and does not join to workforce attributes such as site, function or contract type. You either export and join the data to your HR structure yourself, or you use an analytics layer that performs the join. Either way, the question is answerable, but not from the default reports.

What if my organisation genuinely does not need Viva Engage?

That is a legitimate conclusion, and the inventory is how you reach it defensibly. If nothing in your organisation needs cross-boundary conversation, the channel is overhead. That case is rare above a few thousand people, but it exists, and an evidenced recommendation to wind the estate down is better work than a relaunch nobody wanted.

Does Tryane replace Viva Engage analytics?

No. Viva Engage keeps recording what it records. Tryane sits above it and joins Viva Engage, SharePoint, Teams and newsletter activity to your organisational structure so segmented and cross-channel questions become answerable. You keep the Microsoft 365 investment and add the layer native reporting does not provide.