Engage network segmentation

Engage network managers can divide their Engage network into separate segments, each of which gets assigned to a department, branch office, campus building, or to any organization inside a larger company's umbrella organization. Members of any segment have access to fellow users in their local segment for Engage feeds, communities, storylines, and other content within their Engage segment.

A segment is a logical separation of a set of users and communities from other sets of users and communities. An Engage segment fully isolates all users in their organization to collaborate and share within and among their own communities. Segment isolation also reduces opportunities for data leakage and proprietary information loss.

Several use cases inform use of this capability:

• Business drivers for separate practices such as medical services or consultancies.
• Reduce excess public sharing of Engage resources to people or communities outside of a given department or suborganization, such as HR or finance.
• Support for business acquisitions that need their own employee engagement platform.

Beyond logical isolation for communities, Engage segments support connections to other segments that they want to engage with. This feature is called Breakthroughs.

Core benefits of Engage segments

The Engage segments feature supports the following benefits:

• Engage segments can reflect the operational boundaries of a company department or company site.
• Engage segments prevent the user base from accessing restricted resources and conversations through Engage.
• Engage admins can map their segments to Entra ID dynamic groups that reflect the same business departments in the corporate network. To maintain the integrity of organizational boundaries, admins must dedicate new Microsoft 365 dynamic groups to the Engage segments.
• In an upcoming release, Engage segments can reflect the branding identity of the user base, such as a company that's a subsidiary resulting from a merger.

Prerequisites and licensing

To enable Engage segmentation, the enabling admin must have the Yammer administrator role.

All admins must have the Viva Engage license for Engage administrators.

All users must have the Microsoft Viva Suite license or the Microsoft Viva Communications and Communities license. License changes for users cause an automatic synchronization, which can take up to 24 hours to complete.

How Engage segmentation works

Note

Engage networks have an upper limit of 10 segments for any deployment.

For any segmentation deployment, you create new Microsoft 365 dynamic groups. Admins assign one dynamic group to each Engage segment. You can't reuse existing dynamic groups that map existing Engage communities. Refer to existing Viva Engage dynamic group assignments for information on how to structure your new groups.

You use the Engage admin experience to set up your new Engage segments to the dynamic groups. Each dynamic group specifies all the included users in an Engage segment. There's a one-to-one relationship between a Microsoft 365 dynamic group and each Engage segment.

After you define the new dynamic groups, no further work is needed in Microsoft Entra ID. All segment and policy configuration is local to Engage.

Other operational elements of Engage segments include:

• The dynamic group for any Engage segment can't have overlapping user memberships. Every user must belong to only one dynamic group, and so they can only belong to one segment. If users have overlapping memberships, segment reports provide error messages so you can fix them.

• Engage segments contain one or more Engage communities. There's no practical limit on the number of communities you can include in a segment.

• When you implement Engage segments in your network, users without a segment assignment can't access Engage. Engage communities that don't have a segment also aren't visible.

• Admins can define segmentation policies that enable Engage segments to interact with each other. As noted, this networking interaction is called a Breakthrough.

• A user can access communities that reside in other Engage segments through breakthroughs, which you enable through segmentation policies. Other Engage segments that a user can reach though segmentation policies are the user’s Allowed Segments.

Some operating principles for Engage segments apply to each user base of the product experience.

Stakeholders	Experiences
Users	Users must have one assigned segment. Without that assignment, they can't use Engage. Users can @mention other users from other allowed segments. An upcoming release supports branding for Engage segments, so users can identify their community through custom headers, theme coloring, and other features.
Communities	Communities must belong to just one Engage segment. By default, communities inherit the segment of the user who created the community. An Engage segment can contain any number of communities. If an admin changes the segment assignment for an Engage community, the dynamic group doesn't migrate with them. We recommend that all existing communities receive a segment assignment before enabling segmentation for the network. Admins can change the assigned segment of a community. After the change, users lose access to the original segment.
Admins	Admins set up Engage segments and assign them to communities. Admins can change the assigned segment of an Engage community. Admins can author breakthrough policies. Admins can run reports.

Note

Admins' privileges and roles remain the same at the API level for Engage segment management, but the user's assigned segment defines their Engage user experience. If users need to migrate to a different segment, admins need to edit their dynamic group assignment in Entra ID.

Understand the breakthrough feature

Engage supports a Breakthrough feature that allows sharing of Storylines, Campaigns, Communities, and other resources across two or more Engage segments. As part of a breakthrough experience, users see @Mention references to other users and groups that belong to the partnering segments.

Segmentation breakthroughs rely on use of Engage Segmentation policies to enable communication between different segments. The policy enables use of community-shared Engage resources across different dynamic groups. Admins can define new policies to support Engage deployments.

Create Engage segments

Note

A Microsoft 365 dynamic group forms the membership foundation for an Engage segment, and the collection of users inside the dynamic group comprises the user base.

This section outlines setup and maintenance of the Engage segmentation feature.

Setup guidance

To start setting up Engage segments, set up new Microsoft 365 dynamic groups that associate with the Engage segmentation deployment. Take this as the first step in your Engage segments deployment.

The admin assigns all users and communities to segments before they enable the segmentation feature.

Note

When you convert a large Engage deployment to use segments, the back-office processing completes in about 24 hours.

Ensure that all shared Engage content (community SharePoint resources, etc.) stays fully separate and doesn't change configuration during setup, content import, and ongoing usage.

Note

Always create a new Microsoft 365 dynamic group for each Engage segment. Avoid using nested groups within any dynamic group.

The Viva Engage admin center contains all features for Engage segmentation:

• List, add and remove segments
• Assign communities to segments
• Run and download segmentation reports
• Define segmentation policies

Notes on group configuration

For your segment deployment's new groups, configure your dynamic group membership rules based on the criteria and properties in Entra ID.

Note

Before you enable segmentation, ensure the dynamic groups you need are in place for initial deployment and you create the segments you need. Add more dynamic groups and segments at any time up to the limit of 10 segments for the Engage network.

Existing Engage-mapped dynamic groups can't be used for segmentation deployments.

Create and populate a new segment

1. Go to the Viva Engage admin center.

2. Under Setup and configuration, select Engage segmentation. The feature's main page opens, listing currently active segments at the top.

   

3. Under Segmentation reports, select Run report. The reports contain actionable information that you use to create the dynamic groups to support the segmentation deployment.

4. Under Segments identified, select Create new.

5. Enter a name for the new Engage segment. All segment names must be unique within the network. Names are limited to 56 characters.

   

6. Select the Microsoft 365 dynamic group to assign to the new segment. Search by entering a group name, or select it from the dropdown.

7. Save your work. The new segment appears in the Engage segmentation page.

   

8. Select Assign communities for the new segment. The Communities assigned to... dialog provides a list of the available Engage communities. You can have as many communities as needed in a segment, but a community can belong to just one segment.

   

9. Select a community name in the Search a community... field, and select Assign community. Add more communities if necessary. You'll only see communities in the dropdown list that haven't been assigned to a segment.

10. To create your segmentation policies and breakthroughs, see create a policy for a breakthrough between segments.

Important

To add new users to an Engage segment, make sure their Entra ID identity matches the rules for the Microsoft 365 dynamic group associated with the segment.

Create a policy for a breakthrough between segments

As noted, a breakthrough establishes communication between two Engage segments in the network. The association allows both segments to share messaging, storylines, communities and content resources. The process is straightforward.

Note

Admins can only create new breakthrough policies for segments that exist in their network.

1. Go to the Viva Engage admin center.

2. Under Setup and configuration, select Engage segmentation.

3. In Segmentation policies, select Add policy.

   

4. Select the first Engage segment from the First segment dropdown.

5. Select the second segment from its dropdown.

6. Select Create. The new Engage segment policy appears in the admin center.

   

Remove a segment from the network

Warning

Avoid deleting segments with assigned users or dynamic groups, or they'll lose access to Engage.

You might remove a segment for the following reasons:

• The segment's organization might be part of a corporate merger or other transaction
• The users within the segment are moving to a different segment, or its communities need to move.

After ensuring the original segment's entire user base is assigned to a new segment, take the following steps to remove a segment from the network:

1. Go to the Viva Engage admin center.

2. Under Setup and configuration, select Engage segmentation.

3. In the Segments identified list, select the chosen segments trashcan icon. Confirm the segment removal.

Check reports on segment status

To use reports to check your network, open Setup and configuration, and select Engage segmentation.

In Segmentation reports, select Run report. To read them, select download links to download the reports' CSV files.

We recommend that you run regular reports to check on the state of segments in the Engage network. The report types include:

Reports	Fix
Users with more than one segment assignment	The reported user is a member of more than one active dynamic group.
User without a segment assignment	The reported user doesn't have a dynamic group membership.
Communities without a segment assignment	Add the community to a segment. Without that assignment, the community and its users can't reach the rest of the network.

See Also

Engage segments promote a key Microsoft concept called collaboration governance. Governance ensures the user base can all use the same collaboration tool sets and observe the correct compliance and security policies.

Find out more about Engage networks and Microsoft 365 groups.

Learn more about Engage and dynamic groups.