Internal communications at large companies has a superpower: publishing the same story on four channels and not knowing whether it was read on any of them. Email, Teams, intranet, Viva Engage. Four places, four slightly different versions of the same text, zero certainty.
For that problem, Microsoft has a product named like a speaker: Viva Amplify. And since September 2026 you no longer have to open it in a separate app. It now lives inside SharePoint.
The amplifier few people plugged in
Viva Amplify is Microsoft's tool for people who run internal communications at scale. Instead of publishing loose news posts, the team builds campaigns: define the message, write once, distribute to Outlook, Teams, SharePoint and Viva Engage, run it through approval workflows, schedule delivery, then measure results by channel and audience. It even has AI writing assistance, because in 2026 nothing ships without it.
On paper, it is the control panel every communications director asked for at Christmas. In practice, it had a simple flaw: it was one more app. The news post was born in SharePoint, the campaign lived in Amplify, and the team spent its days going back and forth between the two.
Between July and September 2026, Microsoft rolled out campaigns inside SharePoint worldwide. The amplifier got plugged straight into the intranet.
A folder with a fancy name
Strip away the marketing and a SharePoint campaign is this: a news post grouper. You open the site settings, go to Site campaigns, give it a name, a description, a thumbnail, and start hanging posts inside it.
There is no goal field, no defined audience, no success metric. Funnily enough, everything the original Amplify did have. The SharePoint version is the amplifier without the equalizer.
The good part is that the campaign inherits the site permissions. Members create, visitors read. Simple. Too simple, as we will see.
Write once, spread across four
Here is the part that is actually worth something. A news post published in SharePoint can be distributed to Outlook, Teams, Viva Engage and other sites from the same screen, with the format adjusted for each channel.
Goodbye to the ritual of copying the text into an email, trimming it for Teams and rewriting it for Engage, with a different version in each place because someone changed the date halfway through. That alone saves communications teams hours every month.
Numbers, finally. For those who pay
The campaign dashboard shows unique viewers, total views, average reading time, traffic by hour, shares, reactions across all channels and link clicks.
Nothing a digital marketing analyst has not had for fifteen years. But for internal communications, which until yesterday answered "did people see it?" on faith, it is a leap. And a dangerous one: for the first time, leadership will see in numbers how many people ignore the CEO's announcement.
Measuring readership is great. Until the day the number shows up in the board meeting.
What nobody put in the announcement
The first version comes with restrictions that say a lot about how mature the product is:
- News only. Regular pages do not go into a campaign. Yet.
- Marriage with no divorce. Once a news post is tied to a campaign, there is no undo.
- Two Amplifys. Campaigns created on a site and campaigns created in the Amplify app do not talk to each other. Anyone already using the app now has two places for the same thing. Integration, Microsoft style.
- Optional governance. The admin setting that controls who can create campaigns applies only to the app, not to sites. In other words: every site member is potentially a campaign manager.
That last point is the kind of detail that turns an intranet into a fair of "campaigns" that are really air conditioning maintenance notices with a thumbnail.
The turnstile is still at the door
Now for the fun part. Campaigns in SharePoint only work for people with a Viva Amplify license. And Amplify is not sold on its own: it comes in the Viva Employee Communications and Communities bundle at 2 dollars per user per month, or in the Viva suite at 12 dollars. Annual commitment, of course.
Two dollars sounds like pocket change. Until you read Microsoft's own FAQ, which says a license is needed not only to create campaigns but also to receive communications through Amplify. If that is how your contract reads, the one paying is not the communications team. It is the whole company.
| Employees | Communications and Communities (US$ 2) | Viva suite (US$ 12) |
|---|---|---|
| 500 | US$ 12,000 per year | US$ 72,000 per year |
| 3,000 | US$ 72,000 per year | US$ 432,000 per year |
| 10,000 | US$ 240,000 per year | US$ 1,440,000 per year |
Seventy-two thousand dollars a year for a three-thousand-person company to find out how many of them read the holiday party announcement. The tool lives in SharePoint, which the company already pays for. The measuring stick does not. (Confirm the exact model with your licensing partner. With Microsoft, the fine print usually has its own fine print.)
Who the math works for (and who it does not)
It works for large companies with professional internal communications, real campaigns with a beginning, middle and end, and audiences spread across offices, plants and the field. For them, consolidating distribution and measurement has real value.
It does not work for the intranet that publishes three notices a month and whose home page nobody opens. A well-measured campaign on top of an abandoned intranet just produces a neat chart of low numbers.
And if all you want is to know who read the news, the new SharePoint HTML pages already let you build a readership dashboard over a list with Copilot. It does not replace Amplify, but viewers do not need a new license.
The point
Microsoft got the location right: internal communications lives in the intranet news post, not in an app nobody remembers to open. Bringing campaigns into SharePoint is the right call, about three years late.
What has not changed is the habit of charging per head for a feature that should be part of the product you already pay for. Before you turn it on, do the math. And get leadership ready for the numbers. The tool measures reading. It does not improve the writing.
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Sources
- Campaigns in SharePoint (MC1454394), M365 Admin
- Microsoft Viva: Campaigns in SharePoint (RM568073), Merill
- Manage campaigns in SharePoint, Microsoft Support
- Getting started with Publish in SharePoint, Microsoft Support
- Distribute SharePoint news posts with Viva Amplify across Outlook, Teams, and Engage, M365 Admin
- Microsoft Viva Amplify, Microsoft