Microsoft Viva Goals and OKRs after retirement

Viva Goals was Microsoft's OKR product — the acquired Ally.io, rebranded and folded into the Viva suite in 2022 — and it was quietly the best-designed thing in Viva. It was also the first to go: Microsoft announced its retirement and switched it off at the end of 2025. Organisations that had built their quarterly goal-setting around it have spent the months since asking what replaces it. The short answer is nothing exactly, and the useful answer is that Microsoft 365 has enough pieces to run OKRs well if you're willing to assemble them. This guide covers what Goals did, what happened, and the realistic options.

What Viva Goals did

An OKR tool has a narrow job that's harder than it looks: a hierarchy of objectives (the qualitative ambition) and key results (the measurable outcome), owned by people and teams, cascading from the company level down, with check-ins that update progress and a set of dashboards that show alignment and momentum. Viva Goals did that cleanly, with integrations that pulled key-result data from Excel, Planner, Azure DevOps, Power BI, and a handful of third-party systems so a KR could update itself, and a Teams app so check-ins happened where people already were.

Its weakness was that it was a separate product with a separate licence (Viva Goals standalone, or the Viva Suite), which meant most organisations that "had" it had it for a leadership team and never rolled it wider.

What happened

Microsoft announced the retirement in 2024 with a run-off period; the service ended on 31 December 2025. Export was available through the product before shutdown — OKR hierarchies, check-in history, and dashboards as CSV and Excel — and the Viva Suite licence continued without Goals. If your organisation didn't export, the data is gone; there's no post-retirement retrieval path. If you did, it's a spreadsheet, and this guide is about where to put it.

The reasons weren't stated in detail, but the pattern is familiar from other Microsoft acquisitions: usage concentrated in a few large tenants, a product that didn't fit the Copilot-centred roadmap, and a suite being trimmed to the parts (Engage, Insights, Learning, Amplify, Connections) that had broader pull.

The options now

There's no first-party OKR product. There are four credible patterns.

1. Planner (premium) as the goal tracker

New Planner's premium tier — the former Project for the web — has a Goals feature that lets you define goals on a plan and link tasks to them, with progress rolling up. It's the closest structural match: objectives as goals, key results as tasks or sub-plans with completion percentages, owners, and due dates, all in Teams. What it lacks: a company-wide hierarchy across plans, check-in history as a first-class concept, and the alignment views that made Goals useful to leadership. Works well for a single team's quarterly OKRs; strains as an organisation-wide system.

2. Loop workspace with an OKR template

For organisations that valued Goals mostly for visibility, a Loop workspace — one page per team with an OKR table, components embedded in Teams channels, and a roll-up page for leadership — is fast to build, free within the licence, and genuinely collaborative. What it lacks: any calculation. Progress is typed in, not measured. Check-ins are a meeting habit, not a feature. Loop's retention and lifecycle are also still maturing, so treat the workspace as a working surface and keep the record somewhere durable.

3. A Dataverse or SharePoint list app

For organisations that want the hierarchy, the history, and the dashboards back, the honest route is to build it: a Dataverse (or SharePoint list) data model of objectives, key results, owners, and check-ins; a Power Apps front end embedded in Teams; Power Automate reminders for check-in cadence; and a Power BI alignment dashboard. It's a few weeks of a competent maker's time and it's the only option that reproduces what Goals did — including automated KR updates from other systems. It's also a thing you now own and maintain. Several partners sell this as a packaged solution; evaluate them before building.

4. A third-party OKR product

The market that Ally.io came from still exists. Products with Teams apps and Microsoft 365 sign-in are plentiful; the trade-off is another SaaS contract, another data-handling review, and another place for goals to live that isn't where work happens. For organisations where OKRs are genuinely central to how the company runs, this is often the right answer; for organisations where OKRs were an executive initiative that struggled for adoption, it usually isn't.

Choosing

Ask what Goals was actually doing for you. If it was a visibility tool for leadership, Loop or Planner is fine. If it was a management system with cascading targets and measured KRs, build on the Power Platform or buy a product. If it was an initiative that never really took hold, this is a chance to decide whether OKRs are how your organisation wants to run — a question the tool was always hiding.

Whatever you pick, migrate the exported history somewhere queryable (an Excel file in a governed library at minimum), because "what did we commit to in 2024" is a question that will come up, and it's the first thing a Copilot agent grounded on your goals data would want.

The Copilot angle

Microsoft's implied answer to "where do goals go now" is agents: a declarative agent grounded on a Planner plan, a Loop workspace, or a Dataverse table can answer "how are we tracking against Q3" without a dedicated product. It's a plausible future and a partial present — it works if the underlying data exists and is structured. It doesn't remove the need to decide where that data lives, which is the whole point of this guide.