Microsoft Teams Gets Unified Communities Experience with Viva Engage Integration

Microsoft has announced the public preview rollout of Communities in Teams, a unified experience that brings Viva Engage communities directly into Microsoft Teams. This integration aims to strengthen organizational culture and connect distributed teams by making community engagement accessible in the flow of work, right alongside chats, channels, and meetings.

Unifying Communication Spaces

The new Communities in Teams experience consolidates all conversation spaces into a single interface. Employees can now access rapid 1:1 and group chats, collaborative project channels, and open communities that support broad connection and shared learning across the organization. This unification unlocks all-in-one value for every employee through deeper context, richer conversations, and a more connected workday.

Native Teams Experience

Communities have been designed to feel native to the overall Teams experience. The layout features a larger conversation pane, a docked right rail, and Teams-style unread indicators both in the feed and left navigation. Communities now appear in the default unified Chat app in Teams, right alongside chats and channels, making them visible and reachable throughout the workday.

Enhanced Discovery and Management

Employees can curate their experience by:

• Reorganizing communities into custom sections
• Hiding communities they don't need in navigation
• Updating sort order to keep high-priority conversations within easy reach

The Your communities page provides a central location to review all memberships, adjust conversation list visibility, and ensure Teams reflects what employees rely on most. Discovery is simplified through Teams global search and a new browse experience.

Rich Content and Engagement

Communities support a rich mix of post types including discussions, Q&A, rich media, and long-form articles. This flexibility allows employees to share knowledge in the format that works best for their needs. Key updates and announcements flow into Teams' Activity tab, helping people stay up to date across their work.

AI-Powered Assistance

The integration includes AI agents available in public preview. These agents review open questions and generate suggested answers based on existing organizational knowledge. Community admins can quickly approve these responses, helping employees receive accurate information faster while reducing repeated questions.

Additionally, public community content in Viva Engage contributes to the grounding sources that Microsoft 365 Copilot can reference when employees ask questions across Microsoft 365 apps. Copilot draws from conversations in public communities with citations that link directly back to the original conversation.

Event Management and Administration

The Events tab provides a dedicated space for organizing and returning to community-specific past and upcoming events, such as AI learning sessions or company-wide meetings. This helps key moments live beyond the event itself.

For community admins, membership management, pinned posts, and key settings are accessible directly within the Teams experience. The design supports organization-wide reach, bringing together large audiences for leadership updates, shared knowledge, and open communication.

Getting Started

Communities in Teams will roll out in phases for Engage customers who opt into public preview, with no migration required. All existing community content, permissions, and governance settings carry over automatically.

To prepare for this change:

1. Review network and tenant requirements to ensure your network meets the criteria
2. Make sure the engage experiences in Teams toggle is on for your tenant
3. Opt-in to the public preview through Teams
4. Optionally inform community admins, corporate communicators, and employees about the upcoming change
5. Review your All Company Community and designate other communities as official for them to show up in Teams experiences for employees

This integration represents Microsoft's continued effort to create a unified collaboration experience that brings together communication, learning, and engagement in a single platform. By embedding communities where people already collaborate, Microsoft aims to make organizational connection more accessible and impactful than ever before.