Connections

Featured Karl Kocar

Viva Connections: Switching the Home experience

This is a brief overview of the options for the Home page experience for Viva Connections. It shows how to switch between the SharePoint Home Site and the new Home page, which has a similar “look and feel” to that of the Microsoft Teams mobile client’s Connections App.

This now provides different deployment options for customers who can’t or don’t want to surface the SharePoint Home site as their Viva Connections landing page. This new experience can be used standalone, or as you’ll see in the video, still linked to a SharePoint Home site. Or you can still surface the SharePoint Home page as the landing page.

At the time of creation the new Viva Home page was in targeted release, with GA planned for CY23.

Note: Editing the banner wasn’t available in my demo tenant when I created the video. According to the documentation it should be available so expect to see this feature at GA or before.

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Video Featured Karl Kocar

Viva Connections for Microsoft Teams Desktop

Viva Connections provides a company branded home page experience that can be surfaced directly within Microsoft Teams as a personal App. Some of the aims of Viva Connections are to keep an organisation connected, provide an easy way to allow people to contribute and allow the company to come together. In its current iteration Viva Connections is available for Microsoft Teams Desktops, although the mobile experience has been announced and should be available in the near future.

If you review the Viva Connections Resource Centre you can get a glimpse of the mobile version of Connections as well as the custom dashboard experience that’s planned.

I created the following 4 minute video to demonstrate the “nuts and bolts” of Viva Connection as it exists today (May 2021). I’ll reference this blog as a starting point in future posts as Connections evolves.

Note: You can learn more about Viva Connections from the Microsoft Documentation.