Key Features of Microsoft Viva Connections

Key Features of Microsoft Viva Connections

Make your Microsoft Teams a one stop shop for all business needs including employee engagement with Microsoft Viva Connections.

Microsoft Viva offers a suite of powerful tools designed to enhance employee engagement. In this blog we are going to dive into the key features of Microsoft Viva Connections.

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SharePoint vs Viva Connections

I just wanted to start off by telling you though that Viva Connections is based on SharePoint. Although it has its own unique interface that you can access through Microsoft Teams, a browser, mobile apps, it is based on SharePoint.

So, if you’ve already used to using some of the components of SharePoint, like news and events and some of these other kind of features, you’re going to find it very easy to pick up Viva Connections.

In fact, viva connections has a SharePoint site which is associated to it and you can actually manage The dashboard elements of viva connections and see the analytical sides of viva connections directly from the SharePoint site.

Microsoft Viva Connections Newsfeed

So let’s talk about the first feature of Viva Connections, which is the News component.

Now this is the most visible, obvious feature of Viva Connections, because it’s pushed right to the top of the user interface.

The News bar across the top is essentially pulling from the News site that we’ve got selected. In the background, as I say, it’s based on SharePoint. So it’s nice and simple to create news articles inside of SharePoint, which will then automatically pull through Viva connections.

Now users can choose to cycle through and kind of see different news articles. By clicking on a particular article, it will then launch the full article to display the SharePoint page that was originally creating it.

Viva Connections Resources

The next thing to talk about is resources. Essentially resources is a dedicated area for quick links inside of viva connections.

Now, I know we’ve seen that we’ve got a couple of different types of link cards we can already add to viva connections, but there’s also a dedicated area that you could add in small links which are essentially like useful links.

Sometimes referred to as quick links, which really call it out and make it much easier for people to see dedicated links.

As Viva Connections is connected to our SharePoint Online intranet, we can automatically pull through the navigation bar links from the intranet into Microsoft Viva Connections resources bar.

I can import and i’ll automatically pull through each of these quick links. We can then edit them individually if we wanted to to change the icons so we can choose a totally different icons.

So we’ve also got our resources area as I say, it’s a nice way of calling out the individual links on the page so they stand out slightly separate maybe from some of these other kind of busier areas in the dashboard.

Other Viva Suite Products

And then finally inside of viva connections There’s a error at the bottom which is going to promote the use of more viva products So viva as I say is a suite of products.

It’s not just one product. So viva connections doesn’t just kind of exist on its own. There’s so many other viva products including viva insights, viva engage and essentially once you start using these viva products, they all start to integrate a little bit and will start promoting the use of other products with inside of the viva suite. So if I scroll down further you can see there’s explore more Viva apps.

We’ve got Viva in general, engage, insights, learning, as well as the pulse options as well.

So this is a fantastic way of kind of promoting more of the kind of apps of Microsoft Viva and getting adoption of all the Viva suite applications, increasing whilst people are using Viva connections.

Microsoft Viva Connections – Our Expert Says

SharePoint has long been known as the collaboration tool within Microsoft 365, but stand back as Microsoft Viva Connections kicks it up a notch!

I love Viva Connections as it truly simplifies the key elements of a SharePoint intranet for users to access quickly.

The key elements of intranet design include sharing news and announcements, events and quick links. Viva Connections has accomplished this with a really simple and sleek interface that anyone could use.

From my own experience I have seen that once it has been properly deployed it is simple for end users to continue to configure themselves when they need to change something.

Reach out to us today to discuss how we can help you adopt Viva Connections.

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