Viva Connection integration with SharePoint enables a dynamic, engaging, and personalized employee experience for your organization. These innovations power the intelligent workplace, where teams can collaborate and streamline workflows, organizations can engage employees and communicate effectively, and individuals can be more creative and productive with experiences and insights powered by artificial intelligence (AI).
In this session we will dive into setting up Viva connections using SharePoint and integrating with Microsoft Teams.
We will explore how the Developers can extend Microsoft Viva Connections for building engaging experiences with the widely adopted SharePoint Framework (SPFx).
7. Microsoft Viva
Viva
Connections
The gateway to
your employee
experience
Viva
Insights
Balance
productivity and
wellbeing
Viva
Learning
Empower people
to gain targeted
skills
Viva Topics
Discover
knowledge and
expertise
8. Viva Connections mobile experience
The Viva Connections mobile app is
optimized to provide a fast, native, and
branded experience focused on
Dashboard, Feed, and Resources
It is a Teams application that is branded
with your company name and logo
The experience in the Viva Connections
mobile app is anchored around three
key concepts: the Dashboard, the Feed,
and Resources
Image reference: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
us/sharepoint/viva-connections-overview
9. Viva Connections desktop experience
Image reference: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
us/sharepoint/viva-connections
Key capabilities of the desktop experience for Viva Connections
Global navigation
and way finding
Navigate intranet
resources within
Teams
Search for intranet
content
Share intranet
content
Dashboard Feed
10. Viva Connections - Branding
Matching your company or
organizational brand is integral to
your employee’s connection with
your company's values and goals
The branding you apply in Teams to
the Viva Connections app – including
your logo and colors – is
automatically applied to the mobile
app
Image reference: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/customize-apps
14. Prepare intranet navigation design and content
Prepare your intranet by ensuring intranet content
and the flow of information is in order
A well-planned and well-executed intranet, hub, or
site are important elements in ensuring you get the
best from Viva Connections
Plan
Prepare
Prepare home site
and global
navigation design -
To ensure that your
navigational design
is a success, review
best practices on
how to design and
set up
your SharePoint
information
architecture
Modernize
Modernize sites and
pages - Only modern
SharePoint sites and
pages can be viewed
in Microsoft Teams,
otherwise they will
open in a separate
browser window
Consider
Consider whether
you will need a
multilingual
experience - You'll
need to start by
enabling your home
site with a default
language
15. Modern SharePoint Experience
The modern experience in Microsoft SharePoint is designed to be
compelling, flexible, and more performant.
The modern experience makes it easier for anyone to create beautiful,
dynamic sites and pages that are responsive.
17. Planning for Hub Sites
Image reference: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/planning-hub-sites
Hub sites complement the search experience
by helping you discover information in
context
• Benefits
• Pay and compensation
• Talent acquisition or recruiting
• Performance management
• Professional development or training
• Manager portal
As an example, HR often encompasses the
shown sub-functions:
19. Designating a home site in SharePoint
A home site is a SharePoint communication site that
acts as the front door to your organization’s intranet
and has special capabilities such as the ability to
prioritize news posted from the home site across the
rest of the intranet
When you deploy Viva Connections, your SharePoint
home site becomes the intranet-landing experience
inside of Microsoft Teams
Plan
1.If your organization does not already have a home site, plan a
home site.
1.Then, set the home site in the SharePoint admin center
1.Make sure you share the home site with everybody in your
organization
22. Enable SharePoint app bar and customize global navigation
The SharePoint app bar allows users to find important content and
resources, and dynamically displays personalized sites, news, and files
Viva Connections uses elements from the SharePoint app bar and global
navigation for the desktop and mobile experiences
SharePoint app bar elements will display in Microsoft Teams and includes
global navigation, followed sites, and recommended news
On mobile devices, Viva Connections uses global navigation for
the Resources tab
25. Create Dashboard, add cards
The Dashboard provides a
personalized landing experience
and is designed to be the
central destination where
everyone can discover your
organization's resources and
complete daily tasks
Apply audience targeting to
dashboard cards to give your
users an experience tailored to
their role and interests
Once you set up the Dashboard,
you will be able to use
the Dashboard web part on the
home site
26. Viva Connections Dashboard
The Viva Connections Dashboard enables you to create a
curated experience using Dashboard cards that give your
employee's access to their most critical content and tools
These cards are designed to enable quick task completion
either by interacting with a card directly or by opening a
quick view in the Dashboard
Image reference: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
us/sharepoint/viva-connections-overview
27. Anatomy of a dashboard
Image reference: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
us/sharepoint/viva-connections-overview
• A dashboard is made of medium-sized and large-
sized cards which users can interact with to get
information or complete a task.
• Users can select cards or click the buttons on
cards to do things like:
• Displaying a quick view with more
information or an input form
• Navigating to a SharePoint page
• Accessing a Teams app
• Accessing a site in the browser
28. Dashboard authoring
A Dashboard is authored in a SharePoint home site on a Dashboard page. A site editor can create the Dashboard, add cards
in the size and layout of choice, and target the cards to specific audiences
Image reference: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/viva-connections-overview
29. Dashboard cards
The Viva Connections Dashboard comes with an initial set of built-in cards, but is also designed to enable SaaS providers,
system integrators, and in-house development teams create their own cards to meet their business needs
Image reference: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/viva-connections-overview
32. Getting content ready for your Feed with
SharePoint news and Yammer
Image reference: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
us/sharepoint/guide-to-setting-up-viva-connections
1.In Yammer, target the conversations you want to
display in the Feed by using
Yammer’s Boost and Featured options on Yammer
community pages
1.Use News boost to elevate SharePoint
news and announcements into a priority
position in the Feed
1.Use Video news links in SharePoint to
create an engaging viewing experience in
the Feed
1.Use the Feed web part to display personalized
news and announcements to viewers on the
home site
34. Enable the Viva Connections app in the
Microsoft Teams admin center
1.Add the Viva
Connections app in
the Teams admin
center
1
1.Then customize app
settings like the app
name and logo and
decide user policies
2
1.Finally, make the
app available to end
users
3
36. Choose settings for your mobile Viva Connections app
The Viva Connections app creates a custom app in
Microsoft Teams that fits the needs of your organization
Your organization’s custom app will appear as a branded
company app in the Microsoft Teams app center
Once the app is added, your organization’s icon will appear
in the Teams app bar in the desktop and mobile Microsoft
Teams experience
Image reference: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/guide-to-setting-up-viva-connections
38. Let your users know how to access and use
Viva Connections
Help make end users aware of this new resource and provide guidance on
what icon in the Teams app bar is your organization's instance of Viva
Connections
Then, help end users understand how to use the desktop experience
Image reference: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/guide-to-setting-up-viva-connections
39. Build a rich experiences for
Viva Connections
with SharePoint Framework
44. References
• Microsoft Viva
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-viva
• Overview of Viva Connections
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/viva-connections-overview
• MS Learn: Extend Microsoft Viva Connections
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/paths/m365-extend-viva-connections/
• Configure Viva Connections for MS Teams Desktop
https://nanddeepnachanblogs.com/posts/2021-10-28-configure-viva-connections/
• Build Adaptive Card Extension with SPFx
https://nanddeepnachanblogs.com/posts/2021-09-21-build-ace-spfx/
The Viva Connections mobile app is optimized to provide a fast, native, and branded experience focused on Dashboard, Feed, and Resources. It is a Teams application that is branded with your company name and logo.
Dashboard, Feed, and Resources
The experience in the Viva Connections mobile app is anchored around three key concepts: the Dashboard, the Feed, and Resources.
Dashboard: The Dashboard is your employee’s digital toolset. It brings together the tools your employees need, enabling quick and easy access whether they are in the office or in the field. The Dashboard uses dynamic cards that employees can interact with to do things like complete simple tasks or review critical data. It’s authored in SharePoint and published to the Viva Connections Teams mobile app.
Cards in the Viva Connections Dashboard are based on adaptive cards and the SharePoint Framework (SPFx). They provide a low-code solution to bring your line-of-business apps into the Dashboard. In addition, in Viva Connections for Desktop, the experience uses SharePoint home sites, which can be extended using SPFx web parts and extensions.
Feed: The Viva Connections Feed delivers updates to the right people at the right time with powerful targeting and scheduling capabilities. It is tightly integrated with Yammer, SharePoint news, and Stream to display a personalized feed, based on post-level targeting of the groups that employees belong to. It supports both centralized corporate communication scenarios and democratized news scenarios. It is available in the Viva Connections Teams app on mobile, and will be available as a web part on desktop.
Resources: The Viva Connections Resources experience enables way finding across platforms. It uses navigation elements from the SharePoint app bar, which can be audience targeted.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/viva-connections-overview
The Viva Connections mobile app is optimized to provide a fast, native, and branded experience focused on Dashboard, Feed, and Resources. It is a Teams application that is branded with your company name and logo.
Dashboard, Feed, and Resources
The experience in the Viva Connections mobile app is anchored around three key concepts: the Dashboard, the Feed, and Resources.
Dashboard: The Dashboard is your employee’s digital toolset. It brings together the tools your employees need, enabling quick and easy access whether they are in the office or in the field. The Dashboard uses dynamic cards that employees can interact with to do things like complete simple tasks or review critical data. It’s authored in SharePoint and published to the Viva Connections Teams mobile app.
Cards in the Viva Connections Dashboard are based on adaptive cards and the SharePoint Framework (SPFx). They provide a low-code solution to bring your line-of-business apps into the Dashboard. In addition, in Viva Connections for Desktop, the experience uses SharePoint home sites, which can be extended using SPFx web parts and extensions.
Feed: The Viva Connections Feed delivers updates to the right people at the right time with powerful targeting and scheduling capabilities. It is tightly integrated with Yammer, SharePoint news, and Stream to display a personalized feed, based on post-level targeting of the groups that employees belong to. It supports both centralized corporate communication scenarios and democratized news scenarios. It is available in the Viva Connections Teams app on mobile, and will be available as a web part on desktop.
Resources: The Viva Connections Resources experience enables way finding across platforms. It uses navigation elements from the SharePoint app bar, which can be audience targeted.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/viva-connections-overview
Matching your company or organizational brand is integral to your employee’s connection with your company's values and goals. The branding you apply in Teams to the Viva Connections app – including your logo and colors – is automatically applied to the mobile app.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/viva-connections-overview
Prepare your intranet by ensuring intranet content and the flow of information is in order. A well-planned and well-executed intranet, hub, or site are important elements in ensuring you get the best from Viva Connections. When you set up Viva Connections, global navigation in the SharePoint app bar and navigation on the SharePoint home site will impact the overall Viva Connections experience.
While working to prepare your intranet, align with stakeholders to define top scenarios that can be supported through Viva Connections. Focus on tasks and scenarios that can be easily completed on a mobile device. Organize the Viva Connections dashboard around these key scenarios. After you launch your first iteration of Viva Connections, you can always add new scenarios and content as you gather insights from user feedback and usage analytics. Audit, modernize, and prioritize content related to your Viva Connection scenarios.
Get started
Prepare home site and global navigation design - To ensure that your navigational design is a success, review best practices on how to design and set up your SharePoint information architecture.
Modernize sites and pages - Only modern SharePoint sites and pages can be viewed in Microsoft Teams, otherwise they will open in a separate browser window. Learn more about how to modernize SharePoint sites and pages. If you are not using modern SharePoint yet, review the Guide to the modern experience in SharePoint.
Consider whether you will need a multilingual experience - You'll need to start by enabling your home site with a default language.
Permissions
SharePoint administrators (or higher) can create home sites and hub sites.
Site owners of the home site (or higher) can enable and customize global navigation.
Site owner and site member permissions are required to customize site-level navigation.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/guide-to-setting-up-viva-connections
A home site is a SharePoint communication site that acts as the front door to your organization’s intranet and has special capabilities such as the ability to prioritize news posted from the home site across the rest of the intranet. When you deploy Viva Connections, your SharePoint home site becomes the intranet-landing experience inside of Microsoft Teams. Consider using The Landing template in the SharePoint look book to get a head start.
Important
A SharePoint home site is required to set up Viva Connections.
Home sites are generally high-traffic sites that should be optimized for performance
Get started
If your organization does not already have a home site, learn more about how to plan a home site.
Then, set the home site in the SharePoint admin center.
Make sure you share the home site with everybody in your organization.
Permissions
SharePoint administrator (or higher) can create a home site.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/guide-to-setting-up-viva-connections
The Viva Connections Dashboard enables you to create a curated experience using Dashboard cards that give your employee's access to their most critical content and tools. These cards are designed to enable quick task completion either by interacting with a card directly or by opening a quick view in the Dashboard. Think of the Viva Connections Dashboard as a digital toolset for your employees. The Viva Connections Dashboard is available on mobile platforms (iOS, Android) in the Viva Connections Teams app, and on the desktop as a web part. This web part can be integrated into a SharePoint Home site, which then is exposed as part of the Viva Connections for Desktop experience in Teams.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/viva-connections-overview
A dashboard is made of medium-sized and large-sized cards which users can interact with to get information or complete a task.
Users can select cards or click the buttons on cards to do things like:
Displaying a quick view with more information or an input form
Navigating to a SharePoint page
Accessing a Teams app
Accessing a site in the browser
A card can also reflect dynamic content that refreshes based on a user action or other event. For example, users can see new tasks assigned to them when they open the dashboard. As the users mark the tasks as complete, the card updates to reflect their new number of tasks.
The dashboard experience has been designed to be consistent across mobile platform and desktop, but there are some differences:
Element Mobile Desktop
Dashboard Displays as the default tab in the Viva Connections app in Teams. Can be added to your home site as a web part.
Dashboard layout Fixed in portrait mode. Card sizes can be medium (which shows two
cards on one row) or large (which shows one card on a row). Can be portrait or landscape with varying numbers of cards on each row depending on whether the web part is used in a 1-, 2-, or 3-column page section layout.
Card UI Native HTML based
Card order Same as in Desktop Same as in Mobile
Card reflow Same as in Desktop Same as in Mobile
How many cards are shown All cards without audience targeting plus audience-targeted cards
where the viewer is part of the targeted audience. The number of cards to show can be specified in the Dashboard web part settings, but which cards are shown may vary depending on audience targeting.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/viva-connections-overview
A Dashboard is authored in a SharePoint home site on a Dashboard page. A site editor can create the Dashboard, add cards in the size and layout of choice, and target the cards to specific audiences.
The layout of the dashboard, including the size of the cards (which can be individually set as medium or large), is set up by the person who authors the dashboard. The cards in the dashboard reflow based on the screen real estate of the Dashboard. These cards may look different depending on whether the Dashboard is used on mobile or in the Dashboard web part on the home site.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/viva-connections-overview
The Viva Connections Dashboard comes with an initial set of built-in cards, but is also designed to enable SaaS providers, system integrators, and in-house development teams create their own cards to meet their business needs.
Cards in the Viva Connections Dashboard are based on adaptive cards and the SharePoint Framework (SPFx). They provide a low-code solution to bring your line-of-business apps into the Dashboard. In addition, in Viva Connections for Desktop, the experience leverages SharePoint home sites, which can already be extended using Web parts and SPFx.
The initial set of cards available are:
Card Name Description
SharePoint page Access a SharePoint modern page without leaving the Viva Connections app
Web link Access a site without leaving the Viva Connections app
Card designer Create your own cards and quick views using the adaptive cards framework
Teams app card Use to open a Teams personal app or bot specified by the dashboard author
Tasks Use to open the Teams Tasks app
Shifts Use to open the Shifts app in Teams (upon General Availability release)
These cards are available in the Dashboard toolbox when authoring a Dashboard, as shown in the following image:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/viva-connections-overview
In the Viva Connections app, users will see a Feed that is personalized with relevant content personalized to them. The Feed automatically balances fresh and engaging content with corporate communications to keep users engaged, while also ensuring that the users see the most important messages.
The Feed requires usage of modern SharePoint and either SharePoint news or a Yammer community. For the best and most engaging experience, use both. We recommend creating or using an existing organization news site so that users get the most important news.
If you are not already using SharePoint news or Yammer, learn how to use them by referring to the following articles:
SharePoint news:
Create an organizational news site
Use SharePoint news
Yammer
Welcome to new Yammer
Join and create Yammer community
Stream (built on SharePoint)
Video news links on organization news sites
Video in a SharePoint news post
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/guide-to-setting-up-viva-connections
After you have prepared your intranet for Viva Connections in SharePoint, you are ready to add the Viva Connections app in the Microsoft Teams Admin Center. Add the Viva Connections app, and then customize app settings to add your organization's logo, pre-install, and pre-pin the app for end users.
Get started
Add the Viva Connections app in the Teams admin center.
Then customize app settings like the app name and logo and decide user policies.
Finally, make the app available to end users.
Permissions
Teams administrator (or higher) permissions are required to add the Viva Connections app to the Teams Admin Center (TAC).
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/guide-to-setting-up-viva-connections
Note
A Dashboard is required to customize settings for the mobile app.
Mobile settings guidance
The Viva Connections app creates a custom app in Microsoft Teams that fits the needs of your organization. Your organization’s custom app will appear as a branded company app in the Microsoft Teams app center. Once the app is added, your organization’s icon will appear in the Teams app bar in the desktop and mobile Microsoft Teams experience. Users won’t see the app by default if you don’t pre-install and pre-pin.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/guide-to-setting-up-viva-connections
End user guidance
Help make end users aware of this new resource and provide guidance on what icon in the Teams app bar is your organization's instance of Viva Connections. Then, help end users understand how to use the desktop experience.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/guide-to-setting-up-viva-connections