This already existed. It was called Yammer, and nobody used it, and then Microsoft bought it anyway. Apparently it's rolled into Teams now, but since my last few companies were Slack shops I don't know how many people use the Teams-branded Yammer feature. Probably still nobody. Unlike chat, email and wiki, I don't think microblogging has ever proved to be useful in the workplace.
> I don't know how many people use the Teams-branded Yammer feature.
So this has only gotten weirder recently. Microsoft decided to rename Yammer when inside of Teams to Viva Engage. Nothing about this branding decision makes sense. It's still Yammer if you open a link to the web version. It's still Yammer.com if you want to go to the public web version. It's just called Viva Engage inside of Teams and now Outlook. (To use an ancient dumb aphorism, apparently it is now called Yammer in the streets and Viva Engage in the sheets.)
On top of different brand name (for the same app!) there's also a different UI design. It's almost the most confusing you could possibly make it.
Whoever is at Microsoft in charge of these marketing decisions has either lost their mind or this is some sort of long con that doesn't make sense yet. (There's hints that Microsoft is trying to rename Cortana to Viva, and they did rename what used to be Cortana Insights emails to Viva Insights, all of which are also dumb brand names. This seems an effort play up that these various inside-Teams and inside-Outlook sub-services are some sort of "intelligent business assistant for business users only" to jettison the final remaining ties to consumer Cortana [RIP] and the fun gaming-originated name for something bland and soulless and not-fun capital-E Enterprise, sigh.)
Anecdotally, the rebrand so far seems to be diminishing use of Yammer inside of Teams at my employer. They had Yammer as a default app in the default sidebar of Teams but when the branding switched Viva Engage is no longer in the default list. There's still something of a "well, post it on Yammer" culture here and people don't even seem to realize they can do it directly in Teams anymore because Teams no longer has a "Yammer app" and no one knows to look for "Viva Engage".
This is all just really wild and feels a bit like Microsoft has lost some of its mind here.
The comms team religiously using it, and the ‘what’s happening’ digest being on by default meaning posts are surfaced in to people’s inboxes regularly until they unsubscribe means everyone knows about it.
Teams is already more structured and formal than slack. And it's an absolute pain to send team messages.
Everyone always just starts a group chat instead, as the reply is always so small and hidden, and the card system makes it hard to manage more than one or two threads at a time.
