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Viva Connections Blog
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Introducing enterprise news reader in Viva connections

DC_Padur's avatar
DC_Padur
Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
Feb 25, 2025

We are excited to launch a new Enterprise News reader experience in Viva Connections. This feature will replace the Feed in Viva Connections across desktop, mobile, and web platforms. This new experience will present SharePoint news from the organizational sites, boosted news, user’s followed sites, frequent sites, and people they work with in an immersive reader experience.

Viva Connections serves as the gateway to your employee experience through a branded company app - surfacing apps, tools, resources, and news to keep everyone connected from wherever they are. 

 

News reader also includes a Copilot powered news summary, available on desktop only in this initial release. Copilot will provide an AI generated summary of top news items in a user’s feed to provide a quick overview of all the latest information.

 

The news reader features a fresh new grid UX for recommended News with intuitive card design and layout. The news item cards have easy access to Like and Save for later gestures. It also has intuitive visual cues to indicate a News link post type and the original link source domain.

 

 

Saved items are available for viewing from the specific “Saved for later” tab.

 

 

When user is accessing the news items, they are loaded within the Viva Connections app itself in an immersive reader experience with quick access to sharing gestures and ability to open the same news item in a browser.

 

 

The features and capabilities mentioned in this blog post are demonstrated in the following video with Divyachapan (DC) Padur (Microsoft) and Vesa Juvonen (Microsoft).

Frequently asked questions

When will this happen?

The feature has started rolling out to Targeted Release customers and will continue to roll out to all customers through the end of April 2025.

This message is associated with Microsoft Roadmap ID 472018.

What News items are shown to a user?

This is a system driven news feed with SharePoint news posts from the user’s followed sites, frequent sites, trending sites, home site, organization news sites and news posts published by people they work with.

Does admin have any control over the news items shown here?

News posts published on the home site, organizational news sites, boosted news will all be prioritized and will show at the top of the feed experience.

Does this feed support audience targeting?

Yes, News posts are filtered appropriately based on the user’s audience memberships. Additionally, if multilingual news posts are available, the news item for the user’s preferred language is shown.

Will the Copilot summary work for any language?

The Copilot summary experience will respect the end user’s language and works for all languages called out in following article: Supported languages for Microsoft Copilot.  

How can Engage content be shown in Viva Connections now?

We are soon rolling out a new Engage card that could be configured and used in the Viva Connections dashboard. Specific posts can be pinned in the Spotlight control. Viva Engage storylines are now natively available in Teams app (see more from What’s new in Viva Engage – Ignite Edition).

 

Thanks for reading. Let us know any feedback or questions in the comments.

Updated Feb 25, 2025
Version 3.0
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  • AmitDhania's avatar
    AmitDhania
    Copper Contributor
    Apr 09, 2025

    With regards to this recent change, the 'Feed' tab has now been replaced in our tenant with the 'News' tab and we appreciate the change. However, the out-of-the-box card in the Connections Spotlight section still reads as "Discover more news in your feed". This is confusing for end users as they expect to find something called 'Feed' when using Viva Connections. The language needs to appropriately align with the recent change. As a Site owner/editor, I appreciate that we 'hide' this card if we pinned 11 items, or selected news from this site or selected sites. However, till the time we're ready to do that, we'd like this change to be considered. Also, Microsoft doco says "If no items are available to display, this section collapses." 'Viva Connections feed' heading (Overview: Viva Connections | Microsoft Learn). Can you elaborate what this means and how can it be controlled?

  • paxvas's avatar
    paxvas
    Copper Contributor
    Apr 09, 2025

    DC_Padur@ Functionality seems to be more consistent, nevertheless I have configuration Problem.

    We have Connections activated because of SharePoint Homesite & Global Navigation in SPAppbar, default Experience SharePoint Home (not Connections). No Viva Connections Dashboard is configured, therefore also the Connections Shortcut is not shown in SPAppbar, what is good as we do not use VC. 

    Now we saw that when I post a News in SharePoint there is an Teams Activity Notification created, which is great to see that there is a new news. BUT there is this link "View More News" which leads me to Viva Connections where I also can access the EMPTY default, ugly Dashboard. I would expect, when NO Dashboard configured and Default Experience SharePoint Home, that this link should lead to the configured home site, as the users do not really use Viva Connections. When I limit the App in Teams, I loose the notification in Teams, what would be a great benefit.

    Any thoughts what could be the solution to not use Viva Interfaces but use the notifications in Teams? It is to early stage in my current project to introduce Connections, when the client still not understood the whole SharePoint concept.

     

     

  • JoTeirney1's avatar
    JoTeirney1
    Copper Contributor
    Mar 25, 2025

    I'm keen to understand the rationale of removing Viva Engage posts from the newsfeed. VE is a primary communication channel for many with some orgs having much more engagement with 'news' there than within sharepoint - so I feel this is a weakening of the newsfeed offering.  Is there any plans to improve the UI of the news feed so that the author can be hidden? Also, an enhancement we've asked about previously is the ability to restrict the boost feature to a limited audience. We have many news creators, however want to restrict boosting to a central team - is this planned or available?

  • EjnerJensen's avatar
    EjnerJensen
    Copper Contributor
    Mar 03, 2025

    Much better than before :-)
    I have testet in my own tenant - and here are a few considerations/observations:

    • I don't know if I like, that you can comment from the feed-overview, without having read the news article...
    • It is a bit confusing, that the M365-star(favorite) is a synonym for the SharePoint-bookmark(save for later)
    • Favorite-markings in "My activity" in the "Feed" does not show all news articles marked as favorites/Saved-for-later.
    • DC_Padur's avatar
      DC_Padur
      Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
      Apr 07, 2025

      EjnerJensen : Thank you for the feedback. 

      1. Commenting directly from the cards is not possible today. You have to read ( load )the news item, scroll to the bottom and comment there.
      2. We are thinking about how to resolve the "start" and "Save for later"
      3. The My Activity is part of the old FEED experience which has been replaced with this new News reader.