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Communities Show Up in Teams Navigation View
In message center notification MC1218423 (16 January 2026, Microsoft 365 roadmap item 513274), we hear that Teams is adding Viva Engage (the rebranded Yammer) communities to its navigation view. The change applies to all Microsoft 365 tenants that have Viva Engage communities and will roll out in general availability from March 2026.
If you use the unified chat and channels view, communities appear in a new section within the Chat list. If, like me, you prefer to keep chat and channels separate, the communities show up in a new section after the set of teams (Figure 1). If any communities are favored in Viva Engage, they show up in Teams favorites and notifications for posts to communities show up in the Teams activity feed. The idea is to make it quicker and easier for Teams users to collaborate through Viva Engage communities.
Using Viva Engage in Teams
Clicking on a community in the Teams navigation bar opens the community in much the same way as when using the Communities app. The communities app first appeared in 2020 and essentially presents the Viva Engage web site in a pane within Teams (Figure 2).
Figure 3 shows the app with the same community open. Some minor differences in layout and presentation are obvious, but users won’t find it difficult to move from one to the other.
Just like with the community app, administrators can update community settings. For instance, I changed a community name, picture, description, and membership through Teams. (Figure 4). Including the updated community name (Microsoft 365 Questions to replace Office 365 Questions), everything synchronized without a hitch.
Enabling or Disabling the Viva Engage Integration
By default, Microsoft enables the integration. To disable the integration, go to the settings and policies section of the Teams admin center, open messaging settings, and set the slider control to off (Figure 5). Remember to save the updated setting.
Like the changes for most Teams settings, it can take several hours before the change is effective across a tenant. Disabling the integration does not affect the Communities app, so Viva Engage users can still participate in discussions from Teams.
The setting doesn’t seem to be manageable through PowerShell. However, given that it’s two months since Microsoft last updated the MicrosoftTeams module (to 7.5), an update to support the Viva Engage integration will probably be available soon.
Who Wants a Viva Engage Integration with Teams?
I suspect that the demand for the integration comes from within Microsoft, and primarily for internal political reasons. For the past several years, we’ve seen several initiatives to integrate Viva Engage more closely with Teams (for example, to power the Q&A app for meetings). At times, it seems like these attempts are to justify the existence of Viva Engage and to stop it becoming the third application in the Viva suite to receive its retirement papers.
There’s no doubt that some large organizations love the way that Viva Engage works. These organizations usually adopted Yammer either before or just after its 2012 acquisition by Microsoft and invested heavily in exploiting the platform. The 2012-2015 period was an impoverished period for collaboration within Office 365 (Microsoft 365). Things are very different today, especially because of the success of the Teams juggernaut. Once Teams came along in 2017, it seemed like Yammer’s days were limited. Its survival is impressive, but how long can it continue? Integrations like this might help some organizations who use both Viva Engage and Teams, but it’s unimportant in the grand scheme of Microsoft 365 and you’d wonder why engineering time was dedicated to this work instead of fixing more important issues.
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