Microsoft Viva in 2026: What Survived the Retirements

If you bookmarked a Microsoft Viva rollout plan in 2024, throw it away. Two of the modules it recommends have been switched off, and the capability that made Viva interesting to a lot of businesses has moved into Copilot instead.

This is not a reason to ignore Viva. It is a reason to look at what is actually there in 2026 before committing anyone's time to it.

Key Takeaways

• Viva Topics was retired on February 22, 2025.
• Viva Goals was retired on December 31, 2025.
• Connections, Engage, Insights, Learning, Pulse and Glint remain.
• Licensing differs sharply by module, so check before planning a rollout.
• For most SMBs, Connections and Engage are the only two worth starting with.

What was retired, and why it matters

Viva Topics ended on February 22, 2025. It used AI to identify subjects across your tenant and build topic pages automatically. Topic pages that people had published manually became standard SharePoint pages; the automatically generated ones simply stopped being available (Microsoft Learn).

Viva Goals ended on December 31, 2025. It was Microsoft's OKR product, and organizations that built their goal-setting process on it have had to move to something else (Microsoft Learn).

The pattern behind both is the same. Microsoft redirected the knowledge and reasoning story into Copilot rather than maintaining standalone applications to do it. If the appeal of Viva to you was automatic knowledge organization, that ambition now lives in Copilot, and our guide to Copilot for Microsoft 365 Business is the more relevant read.

The practical lesson for a small business is worth stating plainly: employee-experience tooling from any vendor carries platform risk, and building a core process on a young module is a bet. Pick the parts that are load-bearing for Microsoft and treat the rest as replaceable.

What remains

Six modules are still in the lineup, and they vary enormously in relevance to a 50-person business.

Viva Connections is a branded home experience inside Teams: company news, resources, and a dashboard of tasks. It is essentially a front door onto SharePoint content you already have, surfaced where people already are. Low effort, and the one most SMBs get value from.

Viva Engage is the community and conversation layer, the successor to Yammer. Useful in organizations big enough that people do not all know each other, which is a real threshold. Below roughly 100 people it tends to duplicate what a Teams channel already does.

Viva Insights offers personal productivity analytics, meeting habits, focus time, and after-hours patterns. The personal view is included broadly; richer organizational analytics sit behind additional licensing. The personal tier is the part worth switching on, and it costs nothing extra.

Viva Learning aggregates training content into Teams, including your own material and third-party libraries. Its value scales with how much content you actually have. Without a content library or an LMS to connect, it is an empty shelf.

Viva Pulse runs short, targeted feedback surveys for managers, and Viva Glint handles organization-wide engagement measurement. Both address real problems, both carry their own licensing, and both are aimed considerably upmarket of a typical SMB.

What an SMB should actually do

A short, honest recommendation.

If you have fewer than about 50 people, turn on Viva Connections if you want a tidier front page in Teams, enable the personal Viva Insights view because it is free and occasionally illuminating, and stop there. The remaining modules solve coordination problems you do not have yet.

Between 50 and 300 people, Connections and Engage both start earning their place, particularly across multiple sites or a hybrid schedule where informal information flow breaks down. Learning becomes worthwhile at the point you have actual content to put in it.

Above that, the measurement modules begin to make sense, and at that scale you likely have an HR function with an opinion about which platform they want anyway.

What should not happen is a Viva rollout justified on the grounds of engagement in the abstract. Every module here needs an owner who maintains it. A Connections dashboard with news from eight months ago is worse than no dashboard, because it teaches people the tool is stale.

Licensing, briefly

This is the part that trips up planning. Viva is not one licence. Connections and Engage core functionality come with Microsoft 365; Insights and Learning have an included tier plus a premium tier; Pulse and Glint are separately licensed products. There has also been a Viva Suite bundle.

Because this mix has changed repeatedly, and changed again as modules retired, verify current entitlement in your own tenant admin centre rather than trusting any article, including this one, on the specifics. The stable statement is that you almost certainly already have Connections and Engage, and almost certainly do not have Glint.

FAQ

Is Microsoft Viva being discontinued entirely?

No. Two modules were retired, Topics in February 2025 and Goals in December 2025, and Microsoft has not announced retirement for Connections, Engage, Insights, Learning, Pulse or Glint. The direction of travel is that AI-driven knowledge features move into Copilot while the experience modules continue.

What should we use instead of Viva Goals?

Anything from a shared spreadsheet upward, depending on how seriously you run OKRs. Dedicated products exist, and Microsoft Planner or Loop cover lighter goal tracking. Most small businesses that used Viva Goals found the process mattered more than the tool.

Do we need Viva to have an intranet?

No. SharePoint communication sites give you an intranet on their own. Viva Connections surfaces that content inside Teams rather than replacing it, so the question is whether your people live in Teams or in a browser.

Does Viva Insights let managers monitor individual employees?

The personal insights view is visible only to the individual. Organizational analytics are aggregated and de-identified with minimum group sizes, specifically to prevent individual monitoring. Explaining this before deployment matters, since the assumption otherwise runs the other way and poisons adoption.

Is Viva worth it for a 30-person company?

The free parts are, because the effort is small. Paid Viva modules at that size are usually solving a problem you can solve by walking across the office. Revisit when you add a second location or move to a hybrid schedule.

Sources

• Changes coming to Topics, Microsoft Learn
• Viva Goals retirement, Microsoft Learn

If you are unsure which Viva modules your licences actually include, or whether an employee-experience project is the right use of your next IT budget cycle, our IT assessment covers what you own against what you use, and our managed IT services handle the configuration if you decide to proceed.