Microsoft Viva Engage will roll out smarter Community Announcement notifications in September 2025, delivering alerts via the user's most engaged channel (Teams, Mobile Push, or Email) to reduce notification fatigue. Secondary notifications follow if unopened. This uses recent user behavior data and respects notification preferences.
Introduction
We hear your feedback about ways we can improve the notifications experience in Viva Engage. It's always a fine balance between ensuring your users are notified of relevant content without notifications feeling too overwhelming or noisy. In response to your feedback, we're rolling out an intelligent notifications experience. Specifically, this change will improve how Community Announcement notifications are delivered. This smarter delivery approach optimizes notifications delivery based on a user’s engagement behavior, helping to reduce notifications fatigue while ensuring timely visibility of announcements.
When this will happen
General Availability (Worldwide): We will begin rolling out this change in early September 2025 and expect to complete the rollout by the end of September 2025.
How this affects your organization
Previously, when an admin created a new Community Announcement, this would send a notification in Teams and Mobile Push immediately, followed by an email notification two hours later if the announcement was not opened already in Teams and/or Mobile Push. With this new update:
We will continue to respect all user notification preferences and settings where applicable. If a notification channel is disabled or the app is not installed, it will not be selected as a potential notification channel for the Community Announcement delivery.
Note that this change applies only to regular Community Announcements in Viva Engage and does not affect the "essential" Community Announcement feature (where admins can still select the checkbox to send emails immediately —this functionality remains unchanged).
What you can do to prepare
No admin action is required. However, we recommend:
Compliance Area | Explanation |
---|---|
Does the change alter how existing customer data is processed, stored, or accessed? | Yes. Notification delivery logic now uses user behavior data (last 30 days of notification engagement) to determine delivery channels. This data is used to personalize delivery but is not stored permanently. |
Does the change introduce or significantly modify AI/ML or agent capabilities that interact with or provide access to customer data? | Yes. The system uses behavioral data to determine the most effective notification channel, which is a form of machine learning-based personalization. |
Does the change provide a new way of communicating between users, tenants, or subscriptions? | Yes. The change modifies how users receive communications (Community Announcements) by introducing a dynamic, behavior-based delivery method. |