As organizations seek to simplify, and improve, the employee experience in a do more with less reality providing an intuitive, unified experience becomes paramount. Providing a number of disjointed employee experiences across various pillars like Learning, Organizational Health/Sentiment Analysis, Communications/Employee Engagement, doesn’t improve the overall employee experience but rather adds to additional employee dissatisfaction. Thankfully, the Microsoft Viva suite and Viva Connections Home is here to help.
Microsoft Viva suite provides the most comprehensive set of employee experiences all from a single point within the single pane of glass to get work done, Microsoft Teams. The best of breed modules covering Employee Connections, Insight, Purpose, and Growth, come to life for employees within the Viva Connections Home. Whether mobile or desktop, Viva Connections Home provides tailored experiences to specific employee groups, roles, or geos with targeted news, conversations, applications, and content powered by AI and Microsoft Graph.
In this MidDay Café Viva edition podcast, we take a look at Microsoft Viva Connections Home, what’s locked, what’s customizable, and how it can benefit your organization. Finally, we also look at some tips/tricks in use of the Dashboard to deliver immediate impact.
After watching the podcast be sure to check out the resources below to get started.
* Oh, and as a bonus underneath my signature I have included a Generative AI writeup on Microsoft Viva Connections Home as well. To see how you can leverage Generative AI as well check out my recent post "Use Bing Generative AI inline in Microsoft Edge Browser Today!"
Resources:
- Overview: Viva Connections | Microsoft Learn
- Guide to setting up Viva Connections | Microsoft Learn
- Add the Viva Connections app in the Teams admin center | Microsoft Learn
- Viva Connections analytics | Microsoft Learn
- Add, edit, and remove cards from the Viva Connections dashboard | Microsoft Learn
- Use the Web link card to integrate content into Viva Connections | Microsoft Learn
- Create a Viva Connections dashboard in more than one language | Microsoft Learn
- Embed Video news links in the Viva Connections Feed | Microsoft Learn
- Frequently asked questions about the Feed for Viva Connections | Microsoft Learn
- Comprehensive Viva Connections PDF Download
- Employee Experience and Engagement | Microsoft Viva
- Microsoft Viva help & learning
- Microsoft Viva Documentation Center
Keep up to date with MidDay Café - Viva:
- The MidDay Café – Viva Blog Board
- Subscribe to the MidDay Café YouTube Playlist
- Audio Podcast Subscriptions
Thanks for visiting – Michael Gannotti LinkedIn | Twitter
Question I posed to Bing Generative AI in Microsoft Edge: # What are use cases for Microsoft Viva Connections Home and how can it be customized?
Below is the writeup provided by Bing Generative AI in Microsoft Edge.
"Microsoft Viva Connections Home is a new feature of Microsoft Viva Connections, which is a customizable app in Microsoft Teams that gives different audiences in your organization a personalized destination to discover other Viva apps your organization is licensed for, relevant news, conversations, and the tools they need to succeed.
Viva Connections Home is designed to help your employees start their day with all the relevant information they care about, as well as access to other Viva apps in one click. It also allows you to highlight your own brand with Viva Connections and create a sense of community and belonging among your workforce.
Some of the use cases for Viva Connections Home are:
- **Employee communication**: You can use Viva Connections Home to share important announcements, updates, events, and stories from across your organization. You can also enable employees to join conversations and provide feedback through Yammer communities embedded in Viva Connections Home.
- **Employee engagement**: You can use Viva Connections Home to showcase your organizational culture, values, and initiatives. You can also celebrate employee achievements, recognize diversity and inclusion efforts, and promote wellness and wellbeing programs through Viva Connections Home.
- **Employee productivity**: You can use Viva Connections Home to provide easy access to frequently used tools and resources such as SharePoint sites, Power Apps, Power Automate flows, Microsoft Lists, etc. You can also integrate other Viva apps such as Insights, Learning, and Topics into Viva Connections Home to help employees manage their time, learn new skills, and discover relevant knowledge.
Viva Connections Home is highly customizable and flexible to meet your specific needs and preferences. Some of the ways you can customize it are:
- **Choose a home site**: Viva Connections Home requires a SharePoint home site which is a communication site that has special capabilities. A home site is the front door to your organization’s intranet and a gateway to other popular portals that are relevant to the entire organization. You can choose an existing communication site or create a new one as your home site .
- **Configure web parts**: Web parts are reusable components that you can add to pages on your home site. They allow you to display dynamic content such as news articles, videos, images, documents etc. You can configure web parts according to your layout design preferences (such as horizontal or vertical), audience targeting settings (such as showing different content for different groups), filtering options (such as showing only recent or trending items), etc.
- **Customize branding**: Branding refers to the visual elements that represent your organization's identity such as logo image color theme font style etc. You can customize branding for both desktop experience (which shows up in Teams) mobile experience (which shows up in SharePoint app) of Viva Connections Home by using SharePoint theming capabilities.
To learn more about how to plan build launch customize Microsoft Viva Connections Home please visit https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/viva/connections "
Microsoft
