Microsoft Viva Engage: The External users feature retires October 1, 2024

Microsoft Viva Engage is retiring the External users feature effective October 1, 2024. This action is aimed at maintaining compliance and supporting Native Mode networks. For users who were invited before Native Mode, they are required to be reinvited as Entra B2B users with Office authentication enabled. To ensure full integration of Microsoft Viva Engage into Microsoft 365 and to maintain the highest level of compliance, the external users feature will be retired. This is essential as the external users feature is incompatible with Native Mode networks and needs to be removed to support all customers being fully Native.

If you're looking to locate external messaging participants, you can follow the instructions in Find external messaging participants in a Viva Engage network to locate them and reinvited them as Entra B2B users. Please note that Office authentication must be enabled to invite these users as Entra B2B users, and only Global admins can modify this setting.

Customers in Native Mode will eventually see the feature disabled in the Viva Engage admin center, while customers in Legacy mode will see the feature disabled and removed from the Viva Engage admin center. Admins need not take any action to prepare for the deprecation of the external users feature, but if desired, they can turn off the feature before October 1, 2024.

After the feature is fully disabled, historical threads of users who do not have a Microsoft Entra identity will display 'Former User.' If you're an admin on the Microsoft Viva Engage platform, it is vital to keep abreast of these changes to maintain compliance and avoid disruptions.

The post Microsoft Viva Engage: The External users feature retires October 1, 2024 originally appeared on M365 Admin.