Viva Amplify: Mandatory Content Review Before Publishing

With the latest update of Viva Amplify, a long-awaited feature has arrived: mandatory content review before a campaign is published. It is designed to improve quality assurance in communication processes within larger organizations. Content can now be approved by designated approvers before it goes out, which keeps communication within clear guidelines and avoids misunderstandings or errors.

The new approval process in detail

The setting for mandatory content review is made by admins or campaign owners directly in the campaign settings, via the gear icon in the upper right corner of the Viva Amplify dashboard. Once activated, posts within a campaign must be reviewed and approved by the designated approvers before they can be published.

You can also designate multiple approvers, all of whom need a Viva Amplify license. You can define whether approval from all approvers or just one is required. That offers flexibility, but also brings challenges, especially when managing complex approval hierarchies.

Benefits for companies

This feature brings clear added value for companies that want consistent, high-quality internal communication. By making reviews mandatory, the risk of unreviewed or incomplete information reaching the public is minimised. Especially where compliance and corporate governance matter, it provides an additional control mechanism.

The approval process is also ideal for organizations that want the four-eyes principle in their communication strategy: every piece of content is checked by a second, independent instance for errors or ambiguities before it goes live.

Challenges and room for improvement

Despite the positive impact, a few challenges remain:

• Individual assignment of approvers per post: currently an approver has to be selected for each post individually. In large campaigns with many posts, that quickly becomes an administrative burden. An automatic assignment based on roles or responsibilities would help.
• Self-approval is possible: the campaign creator can designate themselves as the approver. That undermines independent review and should be addressed through stricter role separation.
• Urgency marking: an approval request can be marked as “important” when speed matters, but there is no automatic escalation if an approver does not respond in time. An escalation level or automatic reminder would be desirable.

Technical implementation

The feature builds on the existing user and role concepts in Microsoft 365, extended by specific approval mechanisms in Viva Amplify. Essentially it is the “Approval” function in Power Automate that we meet in various places across Microsoft 365. In the Viva Amplify campaign settings, administrators specify which users may act as approvers.

Although the approval workflow in Microsoft Teams may give the impression that approvers do not need an extra Viva Amplify license, that is not correct. Because the approver is organizationally responsible for reviewing the content and deciding whether it should be published, that review requires a license in the Microsoft Viva area.

Conclusion

Mandatory content review in Viva Amplify is an important step towards better communication processes. It enables clear quality control and helps avoid errors before publication. There is still room for improvement, particularly in managing approvers and the possibility of self-approval. Companies that want to use the feature should be aware that it is still maturing — but overall it is a valuable addition with real potential to improve internal communication.