MC1183013 - Microsoft Viva Engage: Flexible targeting of Storyline Announcements

Updated June 24, 2026: We have updated the content and timeline. Thank you for your patience. 

We’re introducing My Team audiences and expanded targeting capabilities in Viva Engage to help leaders communicate with the employees in their organization and tailor messages to relevant teams, departments, locations, or groups. My Team provides a ready-to-use, automatically maintained audience based on the organizational hierarchy, so leaders can reach the employees who report up to them, including both direct and indirect reports. This audience helps unlock and improve leadership experiences across Viva Engage, making Storyline Announcements, audience analytics, Leadership Corner, and feed and digest distribution more relevant with less setup.

Leaders and delegates can use My Team as-is, review its membership, or further customize and save it as a reusable audience across leader communication experiences. For Storyline Announcements, they can also define recipients at the time of publish, choosing My Team, a saved audience, or a custom audience built using organizational attributes such as department, job title, or country; existing groups like M365 Groups, distribution lists, or security groups; and individual users by name. Together, My Team and flexible targeting make leader communications more relevant, scalable, and easier to manage - with a dynamic default audience and precise targeting for relevant employee groups.

This message is associated with Microsoft 365 Roadmap ID 499895.

When this will happen:

• Public Preview (Worldwide): Begins mid-November 2025 and completes by mid-March 2026 (previously early February).
• General Availability (Worldwide): Begins mid-Augustlate-July 2026.

How this affects your organization:

Who is affected: Leaders and delegates using Viva Engage Storyline Announcements in tenants enrolled in public preview.

What will happen:

• This capability is being introduced as part of the public preview for Viva Engage. During this phase, leaders and their delegates can actively experiment with flexible audience targeting for Storyline Announcements—defining a custom audience at the time of posting, rather than relying solely on pre‑configured Leader Audiences.
• Audiences can include organizational attributes (such as reporting structure, country, department, job title), existing groups (Microsoft 365 Groups, DLs, SGs), or individual users.
• Notifications and delivery channels (Teams, email, Viva Engage Inbox) remain unchanged for recipients.
• No dependency on IT or advance audience setup—leaders can act immediately when communication needs arise.
• Available only in public preview; functionality and targeting options may evolve before general availability.
• Admins should ensure organizational attributes in Entra ID or Organizational Data in Microsoft are accurate to support successful targeting.
• Available platforms: Desktop and web.
• Licensing requirements: This feature requires a premium license available through Viva or Communications and Communities (C&C). Availability may vary depending on your organization's Microsoft 365 licensing agreement.

What you can do to prepare:

No admin action is required for rollout. To prepare, you may want to:

• Validate organizational attributes (reporting structure, country, department, role, job title) in Microsoft Entra ID or Organizational Data in Microsoft.
• Confirm leader and delegate assignments to ensure the right people can use Storyline Announcements and the new targeting control.

Learn more:

• Use your organizational data in Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Viva | Microsoft Viva | Microsoft Learn

Compliance considerations:

No compliance considerations identified, review as appropriate for your organization.