Structured Forums or Enterprise Social Networking?
Viva Engage is designed for broad social communication, storytelling and organisation-wide engagement. Social Squared is designed for structured forums, questions and persistent topic-based knowledge inside SharePoint and Microsoft Teams.
The right choice depends less on feature count than on the behaviour you want: a flowing social feed, or an organised library of discussions that people can search and revisit.
- Choose Viva Engage for broad campaigns and social storytelling
- Choose Social Squared for forum groups and topic-based navigation
- Match the platform to the intended community behaviour
- Consider where employees already work day to day
- Decide whether conversations need accepted answers
- Assess how important long-term findability is
Use Social Squared for Q&A and Persistent Knowledge
Social Squared is a strong fit when each discussion needs a defined subject, contextual replies, moderation and a reusable outcome. It supports quoted and threaded replies, helpful voting, ratings, subscriptions, marked answers, PDF export and community analytics.
Because it is embedded in SharePoint and Teams, it can sit alongside the pages, documents and services that give each discussion context.
- Build employee Q&A and expert support forums
- Create communities of practice with searchable archives
- Mark accepted answers and highlight helpful replies
- Use granular forum structures and reusable templates
- Embed discussions beside relevant SharePoint content
- Analyse activity and unanswered questions
Use Viva Engage for Reach and Social Connection
Viva Engage may be the better choice for leadership communication, storytelling, broad employee networking and fast-moving organisation-wide communities. Social Squared is not positioned as a replacement for every enterprise social scenario.
Many organisations can use the two together: Viva Engage for reach and social discovery, with Social Squared for structured questions, moderated expertise and durable knowledge.
- Use Viva Engage for leadership visibility and broad conversation
- Use social feeds for discovery and informal participation
- Keep official Microsoft capabilities under regular review
- Use Social Squared where topic structure and accepted answers matter
- Link social conversations to a structured knowledge forum
- Choose both when the use cases are genuinely different
Choose the Community Experience that Matches Your Goals
See how Social Squared supports structured forums, employee Q&A and searchable knowledge inside Microsoft 365.