European Collaboration Summit 2025: The Future of Viva Engage and Microsoft Teams Integration

Introduction

At the European Collaboration Summit 2025 in Düsseldorf, Dan Holme (Principal Group Product Manager,Microsoft) unveiled groundbreaking developments for Viva Engage and its deep integration with Microsoft Teams. This comprehensive session revealed how organizations can leverage AI-powered moderation, enhanced knowledge sharing, and seamless community experiences to drive employee engagement and productivity.

Four Hero Scenarios for Viva Engage

Viva Engage has transformed from a standalone application to what Microsoft calls the “fabric application” in Microsoft 365, supporting four critical scenarios:

1. Employee Activation: Driving engagement and encouraging employees to contribute their best efforts
2. Leadership Communication: Empowering leaders to communicate vision and strategy at scale
3. Community Building: Facilitating connections across business and cultural purposes
4. Knowledge Sharing: Creating spaces for rapid knowledge discovery and best practice sharing

Key Insight: Unlike the past where users had to visit Engage directly, the platform now reaches users across Outlook, Teams, and other Microsoft 365 applications, meeting people where they work.

Native Teams Integration: Communities and Storylines

Communities in Microsoft Teams

The most significant development is the native integration of Engage communities directly into Microsoft Teams. Communities now appear alongside chats, group chats, meetings, and channels in the Teams interface.

What’s Available Now:

• Storylines are already shipped and accessible through the “Chat with Self” feature
• Community functionality will ship later in 2025
• Mobile experience is live with native Engage functionality in Teams mobile app

Benefits for Organizations:

• Reduced app switching increases engagement
• Seamless user experience within primary workflow
• Enhanced visibility for community content

Storylines: LinkedIn Inside Your Organization

Storylines function as an internal social feed where employees can:

• Share updates, ideas, and perspectives organization-wide
• Connect with colleagues they might not know
• Follow interesting content creators
• Access analytics on reach and impact

AI-Powered Moderation: A Game-Changer for Large-Scale Communities

Advanced Moderation Capabilities

One of the most impressive demonstrations was the new AI-powered moderation system, shipping in June 2025 for Viva customers:

Theme-Based Monitoring:

• AI detects conversations based on themes, not just keywords
• Supports multiple languages automatically
• Can identify sentiment (e.g., negative political discussions)
• Real-time detection and response capabilities

Agentic Capabilities:

• Auto-muting prevents problematic content from trending
• Customizable response actions (close, delete, mute)
• Dashboard for moderation teams with defined roles

Practical Example: A post saying “leadership are idiots” in Japanese would be automatically detected under a “bullying” theme, even though it doesn’t contain the exact keywords.

Moderation Roadmap

• May-June 2025: Advanced moderation and reporting features
• Later 2025: Additional agentic capabilities on regular basis
• Integration: Works with Microsoft Purview for compliance

Microsoft 365 Copilot Integration: Making Knowledge Discoverable

Copilot in Engage

Current Capabilities:

• Engage content now appears in Microsoft 365 Copilot responses
• Questions and answers from public communities are searchable
• Grounded responses with citations to Engage conversations

Coming Soon:

• Create posts using Copilot with file attachments
• Catch up with community content through AI summaries
• Enhanced search across all Engage content types

Knowledge Management Revolution

The session highlighted impressive statistics from Microsoft’s internal usage:

• 72,000 people asking questions monthly across communities
• 63% reduction in duplicate questions through AI-powered suggestions
• 13 hours faster time to get answers
• 57% of best answers come from different divisions (11 steps away on org chart)

Questions and Answers Superpowers:

• AI suggests similar existing questions while typing
• 45-65% of questions answered without completion
• Expert designation and verified answers
• Topic-based routing to subject matter experts

Communities: Beyond Employee Interest Groups

Four Primary Use Cases

1. Organizational Communications: Business divisions, departments, regions
2. Shared Services: Legal, HR, Finance, IT support
3. Communities of Practice: Cross-organizational knowledge sharing
4. Employee Interest Groups: Photography, running, pets, etc.

Copilot Adoption Community Example

Microsoft demonstrated a practical implementation using a Copilot adoption community that serves as both:

• Shared Service: IT teams scaling support
• Community of Practice: Cross-organizational learning and best practices

Technical Implementation and Availability

Current Availability

• Storylines in Teams: Available now for all Microsoft 365 customers
• Mobile Experience: Native Engage in Teams mobile app shipped
• Questions & Answers: Available to all Microsoft 365 customers
• Advanced Moderation: June 2025 for Viva customers

Admin Considerations

• Communities can be renamed (e.g., from “Engage” to “Community”)
• Frontline workers get Engage pinned by default
• Moderation roles are admin-defined
• Sensitivity labels will apply before private community content enters Copilot

Best Practices and Recommendations

For IT Administrators

1. Plan Community Structure: Align with organizational hierarchy and business needs
2. Designate Experts: Leverage expert roles for verified answers and knowledge validation
3. Configure Moderation: Set up theme-based monitoring for your organizational culture
4. Enable Mobile Access: Ensure Teams mobile app is configured for frontline workers

For Business Leaders

1. Champion Knowledge Sharing: Use communities to scale expertise across the organization
2. Leverage AI Suggestions: Reduce duplicate questions and improve response times
3. Monitor Engagement: Use analytics to understand content reach and impact
4. Integrate with Copilot Strategy: Position Engage as a knowledge foundation for AI

Looking Ahead: The Roadmap

Microsoft emphasized that this is just the beginning. The roadmap includes:

• Enhanced agentic capabilities for moderation
• Deeper Copilot integration across all content types
• Lifecycle management for verified knowledge
• Advanced analytics and insights

Conclusion

The integration of Viva Engage with Microsoft Teams, powered by AI capabilities, represents a fundamental shift in how organizations can manage knowledge, build communities, and moderate content at scale. With features like AI-powered moderation solving problems that “no human being has ever been able to do successfully,” and knowledge sharing that connects people 11 steps away on the org chart, these developments position Microsoft 365 as a comprehensive platform for modern workplace collaboration.

For organizations looking to enhance employee engagement, streamline knowledge management, and prepare for the AI-powered future of work, the roadmap presented at ECS 2025 offers compelling reasons to invest in these capabilities.

Next Steps: Talk to us at HanseVision how we can support you on this journey. Find my calendar here.