Viva Engage Search Results in Microsoft Search in Bing (for Now)

News that Microsoft has decided to remove Microsoft 365 results from searches run by Bing.com (Microsoft Search in Bing) was quickly followed by an update for message center notification MC797471 (Microsoft 365 roadmap item 391669) on 24 December 2024. MC797471 originally appeared on 31 May 2024 and the update informs us that that the general availability of Viva Engage results in searches is further delayed until mid-January 2025.

What’s amusing about the announcement is that the now-deprecated Microsoft Bing at Work (aka Microsoft Search in Bing) is one of the scheduled places to surface Viva Engage results. Clearly, writing the announcement that Viva Engage items will appear in search results preceded the decision to cancel Microsoft Search in Bing. It’s the kind of thing that is almost inevitable inside such a large ecosystem where functionality often depends on multiple moving parts.

Viva Engage Search Results Include Questions, Answers, and Storylines

The announcement says that users searching in office.com and sharepoint.com (and even Microsoft Bing at Work until its demise) will see results from Viva Engage (Yammer) that they have access to. Viva Engage items are interleaved with results from other workloads on the search page. The items surfaced are currently limited to question posts from public Communities, Storylines, and Answers. I have no idea why regular conversation items don’t show up. Figure 1 shows how a Viva Engage question appears in the search results displayed by Office.com.

It’s no secret that I don’t know why Microsoft has persisted with Viva Engage for so long. My guess is that a set of very large customers bought into the enterprise networking spiel when Microsoft bought Yammer in 2012 and Microsoft felt that they needed to support Yammer to keep those customers. The great promise of fully connected and collaborative organizations didn’t quite work out as planned, largely because Yammer remained so disconnected from the rest of the Office 365 ecosystem for so long. Teams came along in 2016 and demonstrated how to build a new collaboration platform based on Microsoft’s toolkit of Azure services, Entra ID, Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and OneDrive.

Since then, Viva Engage has been a bit player in Microsoft 365, albeit one with a strong connection to Teams as the provider of apps like Q&A for meetings. Microsoft has not disclosed a recent number for Viva Engage users, which is always a sign that things aren’t going so well in terms of customer success.

In today’s environment where so much of Microsoft 365 engineering resources are dedicated to Copilot everywhere, it’s possible that Yammer would have met the same fate as Viva Topics and Viva Goals if its acquisition was more recent.

The Triumph of Outlook Mobile

In other news, I’ve seen a few LinkedIn posts reminding us that it’s ten years since Microsoft acquired Acompli in a bold move to refocus its mobile email strategy. The Acompli client became Outlook Mobile for iOS and Android and introduced features like the Focused Inbox, now available for all Outlook clients.

Microsoft replaced the original cloud processing service based on Amazon Web Services with Azure several years ago. The cloud service was a critical component for Outlook Mobile because it’s where intelligence is applied to messages to support the delivery of advanced functionality in the client. The Focused Inbox was the first such feature. The same Microsoft synchronization service also processes information for the new Outlook for Windows. Without this processing, Outlook couldn’t deliver features to users whose mailboxes are hosted on antiquated IMAP4 and POP3 servers, a point that utterly escapes people who criticize Microsoft for copying mailbox data to the cloud to be processed there.

In any case, Outlook Mobile is a huge success. The last public number given by Microsoft (April 2019) is 100 million active users. At that time, Office 365 had 180 million active users. Today, it has over 400 million active users (or paid seats), so we can conclude that Outlook Mobile has many more than 100 million users.

No Recipe for Acquisition Success

You can’t make every acquisition pay. Acompli is a great success. Yammer persists and does a job within Microsoft 365 without setting the world on fire, and Viva Goals (ally.io) tanked after 28 months. The same is true for home-grown products where Microsoft 365 SKUs like Cortana Scheduler and StaffHub disappeared soon after launch.

The important thing is that the overall ecosystem keeps on moving forward, and this is true for Microsoft 365, even if it would be nice if some of the effort driven by the current fascination with AI could be refocused on improving performance, addressing bugs, and making the UI smarter. Maybe this will all happen in 2025.

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