Add external messaging participants to your Viva Engage conversations
Sometimes you need to communicate with outside partners, suppliers, or customers. You can include participants outside of your network to a conversation in Viva Engage so that you can work with the people you need to. For example, you can add an external participant to a discussion or use instant messaging to get a quick response. External participants can view and download files that have been uploaded to the conversation, and upload files. You can see when a conversation includes an external participant, and remove them when you need to.
If the external participant belongs to an Office 365 Tenant, you need to get a Viva Engage Enterprise license for the user. If the external participant doesn't belong to an Office 365 Tenant, they need a valid work or school email account. In this case, the email account must be an email address and account used to sign in to Office 365 for business for work or school (not a public account such as @hotmail.com, @outlook.com, @gmail.com, or @yahoo.com).
Note
This feature is not available for Viva Engage Enterprise networks in the EU Geo or in Viva Engage mobile apps.
Here's how to work with external participants in Viva Engage:
Add an external participant
As a Viva Engage user, you can add an external participant to a discussion, and you can send a private message or instant message with an external participant.
Add an external participant to a discussion
In Viva Engage, type your message or reply to an existing message.
On the Cc line, type the email address of the person you want to invite to the conversation.
When you add an external participant, you see a notification confirming that you're adding someone to the conversation.
Choose Post to send your message.
The external participant's name and email address appears.
For all future messages in the conversation, the globe symbol is added, along with a note that your reply will be visible to people outside your network.
Send a private message to an external participant
In Viva Engage, choose Inbox.
Choose Create Message.
Select Send via Private Message, and in the Add participants box, add the email address of the person you want to add as an external participant.
When you add an external participant, you see a notification containing a globe icon, confirming that you're adding someone to the conversation.
Choose Send Message to send your message.
Remove an external participant from a conversation
You can remove an external participant from a conversation. When you remove them, they can no longer see that conversation in their Viva Engage inbox. However, their comments remain in the conversation.
Who can remove external participants?
All members of a network can remove individual external participants that they have added to a conversation or private message.
The conversation starter can remove all external individual participants that they have added to a conversation.
Group admins can remove all external participants from conversations in groups that they administer.
Verified admins of a network can remove all external participants from any conversation.
Remove an external participant from a conversation
Within the comment announcing that an external participant has been added to the conversation, select Remove Participants for the member you would like to remove.
When prompted to confirm that you to remove people from the conversation, choose OK.
Verified admins can find all external participants in a Network. See Find external participants in a Viva Engage network.
How do external participants reply?
An external participant gets an email inviting them to Viva Engage. They can accept the invitation and go to the Viva Engage registration page to sign up for their organization's Viva Engage network.
They also get an email with the body of the conversation or message. They can reply to the email to contribute to the discussion, or select the link to Reply on Viva Engage. If they choose to Reply on Viva Engage, they'll go to the Viva Engage registration page.
If an external participant no longer wants to participate, they can unsubscribe from a conversation by using either:
Email: choose the Unsubscribe from this conversation link in their email message.
Viva Engage inbox: choose Stop following in inbox for the conversation in their Viva Engage inbox.