MC830245 - Microsoft Viva Amplify: Updated authoring for distribution channels (Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Outlook)

Coming soon for Microsoft Viva Amplify: We are rolling out updates to the editors for the Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Teams distribution channels, to streamline previewing and editing. This rollout will improve editor load time and create a coherent audience selection experience across the channels.

When this will happen:

General Availability (Worldwide): We will begin rolling out early August 2024 and expect to complete by late August 2024.

This message is associated with Microsoft 365 Roadmap ID 398980.

How this will affect your organization:

Before this rollout: The Viva Amplify editors for the Outlook and Teams distribution channels differed in design and functionality from the main canvas editor.

After this rollout: Users will experience a consistent authoring experience across the main draft and the Outlook and Teams distribution channels.

Users will see the new Outlook and Teams editors when creating a new publication as part of an existing or new campaign and select the option to publish to Outlook and Teams. Then they can preview or customize the publication with the updated editor. The updates to the editors include:

• Users will be able to customize the content for Outlook and Teams using the canvas and supported set of web parts that they are familiar with from authoring the main draft.
• The improved load time for the editors will help users see their content transformed more quickly for Outlook and Teams. All main editing functionalities available in the main draft will be also available for the distribution channels editors.
• In addition to the changes to the canvas for previewing and customizing, users will be able to select their audience for the channel on the right side of the screen, independent from the editing canvas. (Before this rollout, the audience selection was above the content.)
• Users can still switch between Preview and Customize and continue to send test emails to verify how the published email will be received in different versions of Outlook or how it will be posted in Teams.

These new Viva Amplify features are on by default and accessible to all users with Authoring permissions.

The Viva Amplify distribution channel, showing the updated editor for Outlook and the audience selection on the right side of the screen:

What you need to do to prepare:

This rollout will happen automatically by the specified date with no admin action required before the rollout. You might want to let your authors know about this new capability, update your user training, and prepare your help desk.

Before rollout, we will update this post with revised documentation.