TL;DR
- Integration Launch: Microsoft launched a public preview that brings Viva Engage communities directly into the Teams Chat app in February 2026.
- Unified Experience: Communities now appear alongside chats and channels in Teams, eliminating the need to switch between applications.
- AI Features: Community agents in public preview can answer repeated questions, while Copilot can reference community discussions for contextual responses.
- Zero Migration: The rollout requires no manual migration, with all existing community content and settings transferring automatically.
Microsoft has launched a public preview that brings Viva Engage communities directly into the Teams Chat app, eliminating app-switching for distributed organizations.
Communities now appear inside the unified Chat app in Teams, sitting alongside chats and channels where employees spend their workdays. Microsoft is rolling out this Communities experience inside Teams in public preview as of February 2026, marking a shift from the fragmented experience that required jumping between separate applications for company-wide discussions.
What the Integration Offers
The Communities in Teams feature includes a larger conversation pane, docked right rail, and Teams-style unread indicators that mirror the existing Teams interface.
The new experience unifies all conversation spaces into a single interface, bringing rapid 1:1 and group chats, collaborative project channels, and open communities together under one roof.
Communities support events and Q&A, long-form posts, and rich media content types, offering flexibility for different communication needs within organizations. Employees can discover communities through Teams global search and a new browse experience for finding interest groups, functional spaces, and organization-wide announcements.
Key updates and announcements from communities flow into the Teams Activity tab, keeping employees informed without requiring them to check multiple locations.
Users previously needed to switch between different applications to access team channels and broader company communities. By consolidating these experiences, Microsoft aims to reduce context switching and increase engagement with organizational discussions.
AI Integration and Copilot Grounding
Building on this unified foundation, Microsoft layers intelligent automation across the community experience. Community agents are available in public preview to help answer repeated questions using existing organizational knowledge.
The AI agents review open questions and generate suggested answers based on existing organizational knowledge, which admins can review and approve to maintain accuracy. This approval workflow provides human oversight over AI-generated answers, balancing automation with quality control.
Beyond these agents, public conversations in Viva Engage, which rebranded from Yammer in 2023, can now act as grounding sources for Microsoft 365 Copilot. This allows Copilot to surface answers with citations linking bac
k to original discussions. When employees ask questions across Microsoft 365 apps, Copilot can reference community content to provide contextual responses drawn from internal organizational knowledge rather than just external sources.
This dual approach to AI integration allows organizations to automate knowledge management while maintaining content quality through administrative oversight.
Customization for Employees and Admins
Beyond the core interface changes, Microsoft provides extensive personalization options at both the individual and administrative level. Employees can reorganize communities into custom sections, hide those they don’t need, and update sort order based on priority and relevance to their daily work.
The Your communities page provides a central location to review all memberships and adjust conversation list visibility, giving employees control over which community updates appear in their main chat list. This personalization helps prevent notification overload in organizations with dozens or hundreds of communities.
Meanwhile, community administrators gain streamlined management capabilities within the unified interface. Admins can manage membership and settings directly within Teams, handling pinned posts and key settings from the same interface where they manage other Teams features.
The Events tab provides a dedicated space for organizing community-specific past and upcoming events, centralizing event management within the Teams environment.
Seamless Transition for Existing Users
Despite these substantial changes, the rollout requires no migration, with existing community content, permissions, and governance settings carrying over automatically for Engage customers who opt into the public preview. This zero-friction approach removes a major barrier to adoption that often accompanies platform consolidations.
Communities in Teams will roll out in phases for Engage customers who opt into public preview, preserving all existing configurations without requiring manual migration work. Organizations can enable the preview through their admin settings, with all community content, user permissions, and governance policies transferring automatically to the new unified interface.
