Viva Engage: what happened to Yammer, and what you have now
Viva Engage is Microsoft’s enterprise social network, the place inside Microsoft 365 where people join communities, ask questions across departments, and hear from leadership without it arriving as another all-staff email. If that description sounds familiar, it should. Viva Engage is Yammer, renamed.
The rename happened in 2023, and Microsoft retired the Yammer brand entirely. Your communities, conversations and history carried over untouched. Yet nearly three thousand people a month in the UK still search for Yammer, which tells you how thoroughly that message failed to land. If your organisation has a Yammer network gathering dust, you do not have a legacy product, you have Viva Engage, and it has gained a fair amount since you last looked.
What follows is what changed beyond the name, what the five parts of Engage actually do, what your licence already covers, one architectural detail that catches internal communications teams out repeatedly, and a straight assessment of whether an enterprise social network is worth running at all. That last question is the one worth answering honestly, because plenty of these networks are ghost towns.
Quick summary
If your last real look at this was during the Yammer era, five things have changed that are worth knowing before you evaluate it:
The rename was the least interesting part of the change. Where it sits and what it creates matter far more.
What is Viva Engage?
Viva Engage is an enterprise social network built into Microsoft 365. Employees join communities around a project, a department, a location or simply an interest, post questions and answers, share updates, and follow colleagues and leaders. It is deliberately open by default, which distinguishes it from Teams, where conversation happens inside closed groups of people who already know each other.
That distinction is the whole point of it. In Teams you talk to people you work with. In Engage you reach people you do not, which is how someone in finance discovers that the problem they are wrestling with was solved last year by someone in operations they have never met. Microsoft’s Viva Engage product page sets out the official positioning.
It is delivered mainly as an app inside Microsoft Teams, sitting in the left rail, and is also available on the web and on mobile. For most organisations that means adoption does not require anyone to visit a new website, which was one of Yammer’s persistent problems.
What actually changed from Yammer
The rename is the part everybody knows and the least important. Four substantive things changed.
It moved inside Teams. Yammer was somewhere you went. Engage is somewhere you already are. That single change does more for adoption than any feature.
Storyline arrived. Every person gets a personal feed, rather than posts only existing inside communities. It works much like a professional social feed, and it is what makes leadership posts read as a person speaking rather than a corporate announcement.
Answers in Viva formalised the Q&A. Questions are routed to people likely to be able to answer, and 2026 updates add designated community experts and verified answers that have been approved rather than merely upvoted.
Compliance became native. Content sits in the Microsoft 365 substrate, so Purview retention, eDiscovery, DLP and sensitivity labels apply to it exactly as they do to everything else. For regulated organisations this was the change that made it usable at all.
The five parts of Viva Engage
Engage is easier to understand as five distinct surfaces than as one app.
Communities are the foundation: open groups people join around a topic, project, function or interest, with posts, replies and reactions.
Storyline is each individual’s personal feed, where posts appear under a person rather than inside a community.
Answers in Viva is crowdsourced question and answer, with AI-assisted suggestions surfacing existing content before somebody re-asks a solved question.
Leadership Corner is a dedicated space for executive communication, including ask-me-anything sessions. This one is premium.
Campaigns organise posts across communities around a single theme, such as a rollout or a culture initiative. Also premium.
Most organisations only ever need the first three, and those are the ones included.
What your licence already covers
The licensing is simpler than the rest of the Viva portfolio, though it is still routinely misunderstood at procurement.
Core is included in every Microsoft 365 commercial plan that includes SharePoint Online, which means E1, E3, E5, Business Basic, Business Standard, Business Premium, F3 and the Office 365 equivalents. Core gives you communities, storylines, questions and answers, polls, praise and basic analytics. For most businesses that is the whole product.
Premium requires an add-on, either the Viva Employee Communications and Communities licence or the full Viva suite. Premium adds Leadership Corner, ask-me-anything events, campaigns and advanced analytics.
Mixed licensing works, which is the useful detail. You can license only your communicators and leaders for premium, and everyone else continues to see and join the resulting conversations on core. You do not need to buy premium for the whole organisation to run a leadership campaign.
If your agreement still lists Yammer licences, those map to Viva Engage core. Nothing needs doing unless you want premium features.
Pricing note for Matt, remove before publishing: third-party sources quote the Communications and Communities add-on at around £3 to £5 per user per month, and the full Viva suite at 12 US dollars. Neither is from Microsoft’s own UK pricing, so per our standing rule I have not published a figure. Confirm the UK list price and I will add it, since cost transparency is exactly the Big 5 approach.
Worth knowing
Every community you create in Viva Engage is a Microsoft 365 Group underneath. Creating one also creates a group mailbox, a SharePoint site, a Planner plan and a set of permissions. Two consequences follow, and both catch teams out. First, if your tenant restricts Microsoft 365 Group creation to a named security group, which most well-run tenants do to prevent Teams sprawl, your internal communications team cannot create communities and will need to raise a ticket every time. Second, every community adds to the same governance surface as your Teams and SharePoint estate, so naming conventions, lifecycle policies and ownership rules should cover it from the start rather than being retrofitted. Agree this with whoever owns Microsoft 365 governance before you launch, not after.
Is an enterprise social network worth running?
This is the question that matters, and it deserves better than a feature list. Plenty of these networks are ghost towns, and the reasons are consistent.
It works when the organisation is large enough that people genuinely do not know each other, when leadership will actually post rather than delegating it, when there are real communities of practice with something to discuss, and when someone owns it as part of their job rather than as a favour.
It fails when it is launched with an announcement and no plan, when leadership posts twice and stops, when every community is created top-down rather than by the people who want one, or when the organisation is small enough that everyone already talks to everyone. Below roughly a hundred people, Teams usually covers it.
The honest test is whether you can name three questions that get asked repeatedly across departments and are currently answered by someone forwarding an email. If you can, Engage has a job to do. If you cannot, launching it will produce a welcome post, a tumbleweed and a quiet retirement.
Where it sits alongside Teams, SharePoint and Loop
The overlap confuses people, and picking wrongly scatters information.
| Conversation with | Typically about | |
|---|---|---|
| Viva Engage | People you do not work with directly | Open questions, communities, company-wide news |
| Microsoft Teams | Your immediate team | Day-to-day delivery |
| SharePoint | Nobody, it is a destination | Published, authoritative documents |
| Microsoft Loop | Whoever needs the same live content | Working content that changes across apps |
The rule of thumb is the audience, not the format. If the people who need to see it are already in a Teams channel, post it there. If the value is that somebody you have not thought of might see it, that is Engage.
Common mistakes worth avoiding
- Launching without leadership committed. If executives will not post consistently for six months, do not launch. A quiet leadership presence is worse than none.
- Creating every community centrally. Communities people asked for get used. Communities assigned to people do not.
- Ignoring the Microsoft 365 Group implications. As above, agree governance first.
- Treating it as a broadcast channel. If every post is an announcement and nobody replies, you have built an intranet news page with comments disabled in spirit if not in fact.
- Assuming your Yammer knowledge is current. Storyline, Answers, native compliance and the Teams integration all postdate the rename.
- Buying premium before using core. Communities, storyline and Q&A are included, and cover most needs.
Got a Yammer network nobody has opened since 2022?
You are not sitting on a dead product, you are sitting on Viva Engage with the lights off. Our Microsoft 365 training covers the communication and collaboration tools already inside your licence, and how to get people using them rather than working around them. Have a look at what we cover, or get in touch and we will point you at the right starting place.
The bottom line on Viva Engage
Viva Engage is the most capable version of the tool your organisation has probably had since 2015, and the least understood, because the rebrand landed quietly and a great deal of published advice still refers to Yammer. Core is included in the licence you hold. It lives inside Teams rather than somewhere people have to remember to visit. Compliance is native. Storyline and Answers are genuinely new.
None of which means you should launch it. An enterprise social network lives or dies on whether leadership shows up and whether real communities exist to serve. Get those right and it becomes the place cross-departmental knowledge actually moves. Get them wrong and you have added another empty room to the estate.
If you want to understand how these tools fit together before committing to any of them, our Microsoft 365 training courses work through exactly that, and our post on Viva Insights covers what happened to the rest of the Viva suite, which has changed more than most people realise.
STRAIGHT ANSWERS
Frequently asked questions
Is Yammer still available?
No. Microsoft retired the Yammer brand in 2023, and the service continued under the name Viva Engage. Existing networks, communities, conversations and history all carried over unchanged. If your agreement still references Yammer licences, they map to Viva Engage core.
Is Viva Engage free?
The core experience is included at no extra cost in every Microsoft 365 commercial plan that includes SharePoint Online, covering Business Basic through to E5 and F3. That gives you communities, storyline, questions and answers, polls, praise and basic analytics. Premium features such as Leadership Corner and campaigns need a paid add-on.
What is the difference between Viva Engage and Microsoft Teams?
Audience. Teams is for the people you work with day to day, in closed channels and chats. Engage is open by default and designed for reaching people across the organisation you do not already work with. They complement each other, and Engage runs as an app inside Teams.
What is Storyline in Viva Engage?
A personal feed belonging to an individual rather than a community. Posts appear under the person, and colleagues can follow them. It did not exist in Yammer, and it is the main reason leadership communication on Engage reads as a person talking rather than a corporate broadcast.
Do Viva Engage communities create anything else?
Yes, and this surprises people. Each community is a Microsoft 365 Group, so creating one also creates a group mailbox, a SharePoint site and a Planner plan. If your tenant restricts group creation, community creation is restricted too.
Is Viva Engage covered by compliance tools?
Yes. Engage networks run in native mode, meaning content is stored in the Microsoft 365 substrate and falls under Purview retention, eDiscovery, DLP, sensitivity labels and audit in the same way as Teams and SharePoint content.
