How to Publish to SharePoint, Teams and Outlook at Once with Viva Amplify

Viva Amplify lets you write a communication once and publish it as a SharePoint news post, a Teams channel post and an Outlook email at the same time. You create a campaign, write a publication in an editor that works like a SharePoint page, check how it looks in each channel, adjust each version if you need to, then publish, schedule or send it for approval. In my demo I took a Copilot launch announcement from a blank campaign to all three channels inside a 21 minute recording, with Copilot drafting most of the words.

I don’t think Viva Amplify gets the attention it should, partly because it sits behind a Viva licence rather than coming with Microsoft 365. If you’ve ever copied the same announcement into an email, a Teams post and a news page, then tried to work out which one people actually read, Amplify does both jobs from one screen, with reporting for each channel.

Before you start

• A Viva licence. Amplify is switched on for people licensed for Microsoft Viva (the suite), Viva Employee Communities and Communications, Viva for Faculty, or the Viva with Glint add-ons. It isn’t part of a standard Microsoft 365 licence.
• OneDrive and an Exchange mailbox for whoever creates campaigns. Amplify is built on SharePoint and needs both.
• Approvals in Teams, if you want to route publications for sign-off.
• Permission to create campaigns. By default everyone with a licence can. Your admin can limit it to specific people or a security group in the Amplify settings, which needs the SharePoint admin role.

How to set up a campaign

1. Create the campaign. From the Viva Amplify home page, create a new blank campaign. When I recorded there were two pre-built campaigns to browse as well, a Copilot deployment kit and Viva for AI transformation, but I started from scratch.
2. Name and describe it. Mine was “Copilot is now live”. Give it a description, a language and a thumbnail colour (the colour only helps you tell campaigns apart).
3. Add campaign members. Choose a role for each person: an editor, or an approver who can edit and approve content. I added Frankie as an approver.
4. Fill in the campaign brief. The brief has goals, objectives and key messages. The rich text editor has Copilot built in, so I asked it to outline objectives for a campaign about Copilot being live, inserted the result, then pasted those objectives into a second prompt to write the key messages.

How to create and publish a publication

1. Create a publication from a template. Amplify offers its own templates (newsletter, events, status updates, messages and some built for video) plus templates you save for the campaign. I used the newsletter template.
2. Write the content. The editor works like a SharePoint page, with sections, columns and web parts. You get a smaller set of web parts than SharePoint, because everything has to render in Teams and email too. I used Draft with AI for a description of Copilot, a set of starter prompts and three productivity benefits, then rearranged them into a two-column layout and fixed the formatting.
3. Preview each channel. Select Next and you can preview the publication as an Outlook email, a SharePoint page, a Teams post and a Viva Engage post. Turn off any channel you don’t want. I turned Viva Engage off.
4. Set the destination for each channel. For Teams I picked a team and its General channel and posted as myself. For SharePoint I picked the campaign’s site (you can choose up to five). For Outlook I added a recipient and could have imported a list from a .csv, .txt or .xlsx file, into To, CC or BCC, up to 200 addresses or groups in total. Outlook also lets you set a sensitivity label.
5. Send a test. Teams and Outlook both have a test option. I’d normally send the Teams test to a different channel from the real one.
6. Customise per channel. Select the pencil icon on a channel to edit only that version. I added a banner to the Teams post, a different banner to the SharePoint page, and removed it from the Outlook email.
7. Publish, schedule or request approval. Publish now sends it straight away. Schedule to publish lets you pick a date and time up to 30 days ahead. Request approval sends it to the approvers you choose.

After I published, the status showed it posted to SharePoint and Teams and sent in Outlook. The news post was on the site’s home page with its SharePoint banner, the email arrived without one, and the Teams post carried its own banner.

Who should be allowed to publish with Amplify?

Amplify makes publishing to every channel so easy that I’d settle the controls before anyone builds a campaign. The first thing I’d do is decide who can create campaigns. Left at the default, anyone with a licence can start one, and you end up with the same sprawl I warn people about with Outlook Newsletters. Restricting creation to the comms team’s security group takes one setting.

Then switch on the campaign setting that requires approval by default for anything going to the whole organisation, so a publication can’t skip the approver role you’ve set. Approvers should check the per-channel versions, not only the main draft, because each channel can be edited separately and the Outlook version can drift from the news post.

Treat Copilot’s drafts as a starting point. Copilot in Amplify only works with the text in the editor. It can’t read your rollout plan, your documents or anything in Microsoft Graph, so dates, licence counts, support contacts and training links have to come from you. The objectives and messages it wrote for my brief were sensible and general. For the publication itself, I’d add the specifics people will act on before it goes to anyone.

Finally, write the whole sequence of a campaign in one sitting (announcement, reminder, tips, follow-up) and schedule each one, up to 30 days ahead.

What to watch for

• Reporting is per campaign and per channel. Open a publication’s report from the campaign dashboard to see unique viewers and reactions, broken down by Outlook, SharePoint and Teams.
• Unsupported destinations. Amplify won’t publish to private Teams channels or to SharePoint subsites.
• Big audiences. For more than five sites, publish in batches. For a large email audience, use a group rather than a list of 200 individual addresses.
• Copilot is on by default. It can rewrite, change tone, condense and elaborate in any rich text editor in Amplify. To turn it off, your admin raises a support request with Microsoft.

Frequently asked questions

Do people reading Amplify publications need a Viva licence? Microsoft’s licensing FAQ for Viva Employee Communications and Communities says to license every user you want the premium Amplify capabilities available to, including employees who receive Amplify communications, and that the product is priced with tenant-wide coverage in mind. Check this with your licensing partner before you budget for a comms team only.

Can I publish an existing SharePoint news post through Amplify? Microsoft is bringing Amplify into SharePoint itself. The roadmap includes distributing SharePoint pages to multiple channels with Amplify reporting, and Campaigns in SharePoint (roadmap ID 568073), which groups news posts into campaigns inside a site for Amplify users.

Where are Amplify campaigns stored? Amplify is built on SharePoint, and campaigns are private by default. Microsoft recommends leaving that privacy setting alone. Deleted campaigns follow your retention policies, and restoring one needs a SharePoint administrator.

When should I use Outlook Newsletters instead? When the update is email only and goes to subscribers. Outlook Newsletters is included in new Outlook, while Amplify is a paid Viva product built for multi-channel campaigns with approvals and cross-channel reporting.