Collaboration via communication: How your company can efficiently use Microsoft 365 tools

Karoliina Kettukari 5 September 2023 7 min read

Collaboration via communication: How your company can efficiently use Microsoft 365 tools

Use each Microsoft 365 communication tool for one purpose: SharePoint for official news, Teams chats for current events, Teams channels for project work, and Viva Engage for open, organisation-wide discussion. Collaboration works when employees know which message goes where, so define one purpose per tool and document it in a positioning chart.

Organisations have different needs and tools for communicating about official news, fostering discussions around themes and topics, driving strategy, and sharing information within teams and projects. In Microsoft 365 alone, we have several communication tools, including Outlook (e-mail), SharePoint (intranet), Teams and Viva Engage (ex-Yammer). What tool to use when? What are the best practices for different use cases and different sizes of companies? This article gives you a simple framework and concrete tips for positioning your communication tools.

Simplicity is the key

The sheer number of messages, bits of information, and pieces of news we send and read daily is enormous. The ways and amount of communication in the workplace have been rising since the pandemic. While Microsoft gives us the freedom to use our communication tools in varying ways, for most organisations and employees, it’s just too much. Our fast-paced work life needs simple guidelines: what message goes where.

What and to whom?

Let’s look at different forms of communication at a workplace based on the purpose and the audience. “Communication” can be a page in the intranet or a message in different tools. It is usually a written text, but communication can also be a voice mail, video or just a simple picture. To keep things simple, I have ruled out document management and physical communication such as meetings. This list might not cover all of your use cases, use this as a base and add your own!

Official communication

Official news and information about the company, usually written by the communications department or support functions such as HR or IT. This communication is generally aimed at everyone at the organisation, a certain location, or a certain role. Stored and archived for months or years.

Project-focused, official communication

Official information about projects, products, goals or assignments you work on alone or with a team. Instructions, questions, answers and discussions to get the job done. Usually relevant for days, weeks or even longer.

Project-focused, unofficial communication

Chats and fast-paced communication about projects and work which is only relevant in the current moment. This can be aimed at the whole team, a project group, or only certain team members.

Discussions of themes and topics in the workplace which are interesting to people across the organisation, not tied to a single project or a team. For example: sharing interesting articles on sustainability, gathering together all the AI people in the organisation, or creating a learning group for Power Apps.

Unofficial communication

Chats and water-cooler-type discussions about lunches, pets or hobbies. All those non-work-related things help to build a community and sense of belonging. Do you think this is not suitable or important for a workplace? Think again. Microsoft’s WorkLab research shows that employees with good relationships at work are more engaged, more productive and stay at the workplace longer. Taking those micro-breaks to have fun at work really pays off.

Organising our toolbox

Now we’ve cleared out different forms of digital communication at the workplace, it’s time to dive into the vast communication toolset at Microsoft 365.

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Organisations are different, they work in very different fields, with various regulations and communications needs, and they can be anything from ten people startups to half-a-million-employee corporations. Does one size fit them all? There are a few different recommendations regarding especially open and closed groups in Teams and Viva Engage and individual guidelines with e-mails.

SharePoint

Let’s start with the simplest one. SharePoint intranet is the place to publish official news. This information can be company-wide or targeted to a specific location or role. In small companies, the intranet can be a few pages and a piece of news now and then, but SharePoint is flexible enough to be a full-blooded communication system for the largest of organisations as well.

Suppose you want employees to be able to comment and discuss the news. In that case, you can use the comment web part in SharePoint or make an automation to publish the news in the relevant groups in Teams or Viva Engage, where the discussion can then continue. You could even build a web part to show that discussion feed on the news page!

Teams

Teams is the most versatile tool in our box, and it’s also the hub for teamwork, the hub where you can also find your SharePoint intranet and Viva Engage. Luckily, positioning Teams can be simple. You just have to understand the different ways of communication in Teams and define the purposes for each. These definitions are best practices for many customers and are a good starting point for any company struggling with understanding Teams’ different capabilities.

Teams chat is the oldest of them all, deriving a long way back from Lync and Skype. It’s also the most familiar, which makes it usually overused against teams in Teams. The best practice for 1-1 and group chats in Teams is to position them for an ongoing and chat-like flow around current events. They are only relevant at that point in time and don’t need to be dug up later on.

Teams channels are for work. That’s your workplace, your team. Teams channels are usually private, created for a restricted group of people in a specific team or working together on a project. You can also collaborate with external partners in Teams with shared channels!

How about those open and organisation-wide teams in Teams? For smaller organisations, up to 200-300 people, open teams could be utilised the same way as open communities around themes in Viva Engage. The general tipping point is that when you realise you don’t know everyone in your organisation, then it’s the time to launch Viva Engage in addition to Teams. For even smaller organisations, up to 100 people, you could use an org-wide team for company-wide communications. For larger organisations, the simplest way is to define Teams for closed groups only, to use Viva Engage for open groups, and to keep the official communications in SharePoint.

Viva Engage

Viva Engage is an excellent rebranding of the good ol’ Yammer. The purpose of Viva Engage is to engage people across the organisation. It’s the place for sharing information and discussing topics and themes across the organisation. Those themes can be related to work, or they can be more about hobbies and free time. With new features like the Leadership Corner, Campaigns, and Viva Amplify, Viva Engage is also a powerful tool to lead, drive strategy and implement company-wide initiatives.

You can have open or closed communities in Viva Engage. To encourage breaking silos and active discussion, push open communities policy. I suggest not using the chat in Viva Engage for anything. Just forget it even exists.

E-mail

This one may be the most complex of them all. E-mail is still a powerful tool in all communications, which is one of the main reasons people get confused. The information, and documentation! scatter around private e-mail inboxes as well as all the other communication channels, making our toolbox a mess again. While I know several small and large companies that have made a successful decision not to use e-mail in any internal communications, I also know it’s not that simple. I would still recommend limiting internal e-mails to only specific use cases: for example, legal or HR reasons.

How does this all come together: The Positioning Chart

This is an example based on best practices. The key is to make things straightforward for the employees and use only one tool for one purpose.

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Take this chart as an example, and build your own according to your company size and use cases. After you have the guidelines in place, you can start the actual work: adoption, but that’s a story for a whole other blog post!

Conclusion

Before you can envision the future, you need to know the current state: what tools employees use right now. It’s easy to get an overview of the amount (and trend!) of messages in different tools and channels with Microsoft 365 admin centre reports. You can also use a governance tool with declutter abilities such as in Rencore. You’ll be amazed how many teams without owners, SharePoint pages with no readers and abandoned Viva Engage communities there is. A proper manual or automated clean-up of orphaned teams and groups is a great starting point for your positioning work.

Try Rencore Governance

The original article was written by a human; the opening summary and the FAQ were added later. The categorisations are examples and best practices, not official documentation by Microsoft.

Merken

Common questions on this

How many Microsoft 365 communication tools does a company actually need?

Fewer than it has. Microsoft 365 offers Outlook, SharePoint, Teams and Viva Engage, and each of them can carry almost any message, which is exactly why employees stop knowing where to look. A workable setup gives every tool one purpose: SharePoint for official news, Teams chats for current events, Teams channels for project work and Viva Engage for open discussion across the organisation. E-mail stays for specific cases such as legal or HR messages.

When should a company add Viva Engage on top of Teams?

A practical tipping point is the moment you realise you no longer know everyone in the organisation. Until then, open teams in Teams can serve as open communities, for smaller organisations up to around 200 to 300 people, and for organisations of up to 100 people an org-wide team can carry company-wide communication. Beyond that, Viva Engage gives open themes and company-wide discussion their own place, while Teams stays the home for closed groups and project work.

Should employees still use e-mail for internal communication?

Sparingly. E-mail is the hardest tool to position, because information and documentation scatter across private inboxes and make the toolbox a mess again. Some companies have successfully stopped using e-mail internally, but that is not realistic everywhere. A sensible middle path is to limit internal e-mail to specific cases, such as legal or HR reasons, and to move everything else into Teams, SharePoint or Viva Engage, where other people can find it later.

How do we find out which communication tools people use today?

Start with the Microsoft 365 admin center reports, which show the amount and the trend of messages across the different tools and channels. That gives you the current state before you write any guidelines. The reports show activity, though, not whether a team has an owner or whether a Viva Engage community has been abandoned, so pair them with an inventory of the teams, sites and communities that exist.

Does a positioning chart still work if old teams and communities have no owner?

Only partly. A chart tells people where new messages belong, but it does not clean up what already exists: teams without owners, SharePoint pages with no readers and abandoned Viva Engage communities keep cluttering search and notifications. Rencore Governance inventories teams, sites and communities with their owner, so orphaned ones can be found and cleaned up, manually or automatically, before or alongside the rollout of the new guidelines.

Does Microsoft say which tool to use for which kind of message?

Microsoft gives organisations the freedom to use its communication tools in many different ways, so there is no single official rule. The positioning in this article is an example based on best practices from customer work, not official documentation by Microsoft. Use it as a base, adapt it to your company size and use cases, and write it down so employees get one simple answer to the question of what message goes where.

Last updated 12 November 2026

About the author

Karoliina Kettukari

Karoliina is Head of Modern Work at Meltlake and a Microsoft MVP, whose passion is to empower every employee with smart use of digital technology. Karoliina's specialty is inspiring the c-level and co-creating sustainable change. In the end, it's all about excellent employee experience. Karoliina loves to share knowledge and learn from others, and she speaks actively at conferences. Community rocks!

Collaboration via communication: How your company can efficiently use Microsoft 365 tools

Simplicity is the key