Viva Connections is a branded app experience in Microsoft Teams that is designed to meet users where they are – from in the office to in the field, and on desktop or on mobile devices. Viva Connections provides a gateway to employee experiences, with the ability for you to curate the content and tools that your organization needs to get work done. Learn more about Viva Connections.
Your organization’s custom Viva Connections app will appear as a branded company app in the Microsoft Teams app center. Once the app is enabled, your organization’s icon will appear in the Teams app bar in Microsoft Teams.
The Viva Connections experience is designed to engage and connect your organization and is anchored around three key concepts: the dashboard, the feed, and resources.
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Dashboard – Brings together the tools your employees need in one place, providing quick and easy access whether they are in the office or in the field.
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Feed - Aggregates conversations from Viva Engage, SharePoint news, and Stream based on the sites and communities the user follows.
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Resources - For customers with a home site, this displays your intranet’s global navigation from the SharePoint app bar to enable consistent wayfinding for your employees across platforms. Customers without home sites can customize the links in the Navigation column.
Notes:
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Member level permissions (or higher) to the experience are required to choose settings.
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A dashboard is required to use Viva Connections in the Teams mobile app.
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A SharePoint home site is optional.
Before getting started
Step 1 - Optionally, designate a SharePoint home site
Using a home site is optional and may be ideal for organizations who want to extend the employee experience. Learn more about how home sites and Viva Connections work together.
Learn more about how to designate a communication site as a home site in the SharePoint admin center. Confirm your organization has a home site and has enabled global navigation before customizing Viva Connections app settings for end-users in Microsoft Teams.
Step 2 - Set up global navigation in the SharePoint app bar
Customers with home sites also need to enable and customize SharePoint global navigation. One key element to taking advantage of the full Viva Connections value is to ensure you have already set up global navigation in the SharePoint app bar. Intranet links and resources that appear in global navigation will be inherited in the Navigation section of the desktop experience and in the Resources tab of the Viva Connections mobile experience.
Note: You must be a site owner (or higher) of the home site to edit global navigation.
Step 3 - Set up a dashboard
The dashboard is the landing experience for the Viva Connections mobile app in Teams. The Viva Connections dashboard provides fast and easy access to information and job-related tasks. Content on the dashboard can be targeted to users in specific roles, markets, and job functions.
Choose settings for the app
Determine if your organization's instance of Viva Connections will be automatically pre-pinned or pre-installed in the Teams app.
Notes:
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Member level (or higher) permissions to the dashboard site are required to choose app settings.
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It's optional, but highly recommended, that you pre-install and pre-pin your organization's version of Viva Connections for end users.
If you have pre-pinned the app for your users with Teams app setup policies
If the app is already pre-pinned for users, the app will automatically appear in the user's Microsoft Teams app bar on iOS and Android. Learn more about managing setup policies in Microsoft Teams.
If you have not pre-pinned the app for your users with Teams app setup policies
If you have not pre-pinned the app via policy, then users will first need to search for and install Viva Connections from the Teams desktop application.
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Launch the Store app from the Teams app bar, and search for the app in your store. Search for the re-branded app name that was determined by the Teams admin when setting up the Viva Connections app in the Teams admin center.
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Once the app is found users can install it and optionally pin it on their app bar (if you have permitted the pinning of apps by users in your tenant.)
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Once installed from Teams desktop, the app will be available for the user from Teams mobile app. If it does not appear in the first four apps in the tray, it can be found by tapping the ( … ) ellipses. The app can also be reordered to appear in the first 5 default apps in Teams by selecting Reorder.
