The Microsoft 365 Community Conference brings people together from all around the world to learn about the latest Microsoft. This year included a dedicated track for communicators, leaders, and IT pros to leverage the latest investments in Microsoft 365, Viva, and Copilot technology. Here’s a detailed look at what’s new and what’s next:

A unified platform

We are committed to bringing popular Microsoft 365 and Viva productivity apps into a flexible, unified platform for communicators that can reach every employee. We’ve released a new home experience that connects everybody to the tools, knowledge, and people they need to get their job done.

This updated News tab allows you to easily view SharePoint news from across your organization, find personalized news based on sites you follow, and catch up on the top daily news items through a Copilot-powered news summary.

Engage content in the employee app

A variety of Engage content is now landing on the company home, including banner announcements, the ability to spotlight news, a new feed dashboard card that features the latest community updates. 

We’re also bringing community experiences to other productivity hubs to ensure everyone stays connected.

Storylines in Teams

Storyline from Viva Engage is now integrated into Microsoft Teams, enabling leaders to reach their organizations and share personalized updates. You can use storyline to share experiences, celebrate milestones, propose ideas, and discuss interests – ensuring that your content gets to the people who need to see it.

Learn more about how to start using Storyline in Teams.

Communities in Teams

We’ve also shipped a native communities experience when using Teams and Engage together in the mobile app. 

The new integration is built from the ground up using Teams styling and brings our top features to your fingertips. Check it out.

New ways to work with Copilot

The pace of innovation with Copilot continues to accelerate, and we are delighted to share some new ways that we are building AI into our apps and vice versa.

Community Q&A coming to M365 Copilot Chat

See Answers, top responses, and relevant conversations in your Copilot experiences. Answers content shown directly when an exact match answer is available for a user’s question Copilot will show you which of those answers have been verified by experts.

And of course, you can always see the conversation and answer sources to click into the original thread for additional context and verification.  

Copilot Drafting

We’re bringing the super powers of Copilot to the SharePoint news text editor for help with drafting, tone, and style. The smart Copilot section offers suggestions of what to write next and it can even pull info from a document or meeting.

Catch up on news with Copilot

Copilot will soon be able to help keep you up to date with the latest news through news summaries and briefings. And to make it even easier, you will be able to listen to news while on the go with Copilot-powered news podcasts. More to share soon!

Get summarized news in digestible formats that includes podcasts.

Viva Connections Cards in Copilot

Stay connected to your interactive dashboard cards when working in Copilot. Now, dashboard cards will surface in Copilot chats.

Interact with dashboard cards directly from Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Additional innovations for Communicators

That’s not all! In the coming weeks we will be rolling out a variety of new features to help streamline your campaigns.

Communications dashboard in Engage

The new communications dashboard helps streamline multi-channel messaging, target specific audiences, and gain valuable insights into engagement metrics. Plus, it supports leadership engagement, advanced moderation, and it integrates seamlessly with other Viva apps.

Publish to Engage from Amplify

Publish to Engage communities and storylines directly from Viva Amplify. From the editing experience, you can choose the sender, post on behalf of someone, select the communities or storyline(s), tag people, and even select to send as an announcement.

This capability also brings analytics from these posts into the Amplify reporting dashboard so you can better track multi-channel performance and engagement. This much awaited feature is rolling out to general availability.

Amplify from SharePoint

Amplify a SharePoint News post to Outlook, Teams, Engage & other sites. Kick off a post or news right from your SharePoint page to broadly communicate while still associating it with a campaign and capturing analytics across channels.

Campaign association / Campaign & publication analytics

Communications for Different Segments

Often times, organizations have complex makeups and require different communications environments for different employees. Historically, this has been a challenge for employee bases that are on the same tenant, but we are excited to announce segmentation in Viva Engage, allowing users to view and engage with content specific to their assigned segment. This ensures that communities and people are scoped to relevant segments, enhancing the relevance of content while preserving security and established boundaries.

Stay tuned

Be sure to follow along with all of the action at Microsoft 365 Conference and on social. We’re counting down the days until Microsoft Build so keep an eye out for more announcements including timing, rollout, and availability for the items shared in this blog. In the meantime, check out our new website for communicators filled with best practices, playbooks, and resources. See you soon!

-Michael Holste

Michael is a Senior Product Marketing Manager