Engage communities in Teams make it simple to connect, share, and learn across your organization — all in the flow of your work. Communities bring discoverable, asynchronous conversations and leadership engagement into Microsoft Teams, to help you go beyond your immediate team to explore new ideas and perspectives.
Unlike Teams channels, which focus on project or team-based collaboration, communities open the door to broader knowledge sharing and open dialogue across organizations and shared interests.
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Connect with colleagues and leaders across your organization
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Share ideas, ask questions, and spark meaningful discussions
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Learn from peers in open, asynchronous spaces
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Discover communities that match your passions
Communities sit alongside your Teams chats and channels, so you can stay connected with your projects, leaders, and what’s happening across your organization, in one place. Teams settings let you manage where communities appear and adjust your notifications.
Communities provide the following useful features:
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Dedicated SharePoint libraries and sites as a common resource for all community members
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An AI-driven Catch me up feature that offers summaries of everything that's happened since you last visited
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Search and find communities of people with whom you share common ground
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Post discussion threads, ask questions to the team, and offer praise, polls and articles of interest
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Lists of Top questions and Pinned questions
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The ability to nominate community experts
When you join a community, you can participate in that community's feed.
Find your communities
Open Teams, select the Chat tab, scroll down the left navigation, and select Communities. From here you can see your top communities, access the community list, and browse communities or join new ones.
Not immediately seeing every community of which you’re a member? To view your full set, select Your communities from the More menu in the Communities section.
To find more communities to join, select the Join communities link in the Communities section's More menu and browse recommended, official, or all communities in your network.
Organize your communities
Customize your Engage community experience in Teams to match how you work best.
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Use the Show or Hide features for each community to control which ones appear in your Chat list. It's a quick way to keep your most relevant communities front and center—and hide the ones you don’t need every day.
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Select the More menu next to any community to move, manage, or organize it. You can even create custom sections to group related communities together.
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When you mark communities as favorites in Engage, it appears at the top of the Teams Favorites section after the Communities feature is enabled in Microsoft Teams. Move them to new sections in the Teams left rail, or choose Remove from section to add it to the Communities section.
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Sort the Communities section by Most recent or A–Z according to your preference.
Tip: Use Show/Hide and folders to create a personalized view that keeps your most important communities just a click away. If you don't see the More menu next to your community entry, hover the mouse over the community name.
Create a new post
To start a conversation in a community, select the community to open its page. Start a discussion, ask a question, post a poll, or include images, links, or attachments in your message. If you're a community admin, you have the choice to share announcements with all community members. Nearly all the same capabilities are available in the Communities publisher in Teams as those in Engage web.
Note: Learn more about writing community posts in Write and schedule posts, articles, and announcements in Engage.
Post or comment as a delegate
If you're assigned as a delegate for someone, you can post or comment on their behalf directly from Teams.
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To post as a delegate: In the community, type your message in the chat box, open the dropdown next to your name, select the person you're posting for, and click Post.
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To comment as a delegate: Find the comment you want to respond to, open the dropdown in the comment box, select the leader/delegator's name, type your reply, and select Post.
Manage activities and notifications
Watch and respond to your Engage notifications directly in your Teams Activity feed.
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You receive Engage notifications for new announcements, replies, and @mentions.
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Unread items appear in bold, so you can spot what’s new at a glance and keep up with everything that's happening in your communities.
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React and reply directly from the notification and stay engaged without missing a beat.
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Adjust your notifications from the activity app. Select the More menu, choose notification settings, and go to the Communities and storyline app.
Select any item in the activity feed, including Engage announcements and posts, and you'll see them in detailed view.
Search for and search in communities
Use the Teams search bar to search for communities. You can use the filter options to filter results to communities only.
Looking for something specific within a community? Select the community of interest, then use Ctrl+F (Windows) or Cmd+F (Mac) to search for keywords in posts, replies, or announcements.
The community search uses AI-driven Copilot support to power content searching throughout your Engage social network and associated resources.
Community analytics for admins and communicators
Curious about how your community is engaging? Select your community and open the Analytics tab to explore insights on member activity, posts, replies, and overall engagement.
Analytics are visible to all community members. They enable community admins and communicators to monitor trends, track participation and engagement, and guide strategy.
Events in communities
Communities in Teams makes it easy to join live, upcoming, or past events. Just select your community, open the Events tab at the top, and toggle between what’s happening now and past events. Events open in a new window, so you can keep working in Teams while you participate. Attend a live event in Viva Engage and organize your own events.
FAQ
Communities are generally larger, public forums compared to small work group spaces. To scale to this broad usage, the conversation model also needs to scale. You can do the following unique tasks in Engage communities:
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Go deep on the conversation: Reply to replies in Engage community posts;
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Use different post types: Post questions, praise, and pollsto capture information tied to the purpose of the post. For example, a praise post lists the specific people to praise, and a question post allows for upvoting answers, marking best answers, and marking verified knowledge from community experts. Community admins can also post announcements, which generate a notification to the community.
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Manage and moderate the community space: Community admins have tools to prevent moving posts and to delete messages or whole threads in their communities that are inappropriate. They can also work with their network admins to restrict posting in a community and to set global keywords or AI-theme monitoring for inappropriate content.
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Designate people as experts in the community: Experts help to answer questions and ensure that community members get the best information.
Most people will see all their communities listed in the Communities section. If you have favorites or a large number of communities, you will see something different.
Any favorite communities appear in the Teams Favorites section.
If you have more than 5 non-favorite communities, your top communities, your official communities and the communities in which you’re an admin or expert will be shown in the navigation.
Select the More menu next to the Communities folder name to see all the other communities on the Your communities page. You can adjust which communities appear by selecting show or hide in that list; you can use the Move function to customize the nav to your liking.
After your admin turns on the Teams communities feature, Teams automatically imports the existing favorite communities from Engage into the left side of your Teams app. Any new favorites you mark in Engage appear only in Engage. You'll have to set the new favorites in Teams as well.
In separate view, communities will be part of the “Teams and channels” app.
If you do not want to see communities at all in your navigation, you can hide all the communities. There is no switch to turn off communities for yourself.
If you previously had the Viva Engage app installed in Teams, you see the same notifications now in Teams, which point to the new native integrations instead of loading the Engage app. If you didn't previously install the Engage app, you didn't see Engage notifications in Teams, so these notifications will be new for you.
The notification settings for the Engage app are similar to the settings for communities in Teams, but they don't carry over from one to the other because they are separate apps. You'll need to set them in Microsoft Teams.
You can adjust your notifications from the activity app. Select the More menu, then Notification settings, and look for the “Communities and storyline” app.
As with Teams chats and channels, a community will show as bold when there are new posts to read in a particular community. New replies don't change the bolded or un-bolded state of the community.
Currently, drafts and scheduled posts aren't supported for communities.
Not yet.
Not yet.
