MC1036575 - Microsoft Viva Engage: External Networks are being modernized

Updated June 10, 2025: We have updated the timeline below. Thank you for your patience.

The modern Viva Engage user experience is available now for External,coming to External Networks starting June 1, 2025, and you are beingwill soon be asked to initiate migration. This message providesIn this communication, you will find high-level details on adopting the modern version of External Networks.about this change. Subsequent Message center posts will include additional details to plan your migration. 

In addition to the user experience changes, we are building modern External Networksexternal networks on top of native Microsoft 365 services just like your Engage home network experience.This increases the level of compliance and enhances the admin experience by enabling Microsoft 365 admin features that are available on tenants.

IMPORTANT: When requested in future communications, admins must choose to migrate External Networksexternal networks to the modern platform. Failure to respond will result in the legacy External Networksexternal networks being retireddeprecated and deleted.

New in this update: The cutoff date for filing any extension request is by June 15th. Any external network that hasn’t requested an extension by this date will no longer be accessible starting July 7th, 2025. 

When this will happen:

This retirement will occur on June 15,1, 2025. The extra 15 days is being given to allow for any networks that have not requested for the extension to perform any data export.

If you need additional time, we ask you to please contact your Microsoft Account representative and request them to submit a 60-day extension, which would then allow you to complete the move by August 15th 2025.

If you have already reached out to Microsoft and your exception has been approved, you do not need to submit or apply for the 60-day extension.

How this will affect your organization:

The impact of this update depends on your usage of External Networks.external networks. If you use external networks and fail to respond to our requests to migrate legacy external networks to the modern experience, then you will experience data loss. We recommend Engage admins review External Networkexternal network usage in their tenant.

When migrating, you will need to communicate with your users. Users may be from your tenanttenant, other tenants, or other tenants or they be using personal guest accounts. Changes to the sign-in experience may be most visible for users with personal guest accounts.

If you are considering future External Networkexternal network usage, you may want to wait to adopt the modern experience now. until after April 1st when we release External Networks v2.

What you need to do to prepare:

Actions you need to take if you want to migrate from the current implementation to the modern one:

1.

1. Identify all your External Networkexternal network usage. As an Engage administrator, you may not currently be thean administrator forof older External Networksexternal networks associated with your tenant.

   2.

2. Use the network data export to download a backup of each of your External Networks.

   3. external networks.

3. Inform users who are using the External Networks that the experience will shift from the current to the new one once the migration is complete.

   4.

4. Check the Message center for further updates.
   updates and links to documentation. We plan to release documentation for supporting the adoption of External Networks v2 before March 31st. We will also post a link to the documentation as an update to this post.

IMPORTANT: If you do not take action by June 15th or have not already requested an extension (and it has been granted), access to your External Network1st, we will be removed effective July 7th, 2025.

Documentation to configure moderndelete the External Networks is now live at: Set up modern external Viva Engage networks | Microsoft Learnas retired.

Learn more: Export and manage Viva Engage data.