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Viva Connections Blog
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Viva Connections Feed Web Part and Video News Link Retirement

Rob_Nunez's avatar
Rob_Nunez
Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
Aug 06, 2024

The Feed for Viva Connections webpart was a feature that brought personalized content into a user feed, in a single experience. This content included news published in SharePoint, posts in Viva Engage communities, and Stream videos in SharePoint. The Video News Link allowed for Stream videos to appear in the Viva Connections feed. This content was automatically populated in a user's feed based on the communities and sites they followed.

Our focus is to deliver the most efficient and enjoyable experience for our users, which means phasing out certain features is necessary to streamline and enhance the user experiences across our applications. In our efforts to elevate our platform-we will be retiring the Feed for Viva Connections web part and the Video News Link which we announced in our MC post on August 1st. 

 

Video news link

Starting September 1, 2024, the Feed for Viva Connections web part and the Video news link will no longer be available for SharePoint site editors to add to their sites. 

 

Furthermore, on November 5, 2024, existing instances of the Feed for Viva Connections web parts and Video News Link will no longer display content. 

 

To ensure a smooth transition, site editors and SharePoint admins should update the affected sites with the recommended alternative solutions. Additionally, please update any relevant documentation to reflect these changes.

 

Explore new alternatives
To continue surfacing feed content on SharePoint sites, the following web parts provide an alternative to the Feed for Viva Connections web part and the Video news link. We encourage you to explore our alternatives to keep employees engaged and informed: 

Resources 

We understand the importance of a smooth transition and are dedicated to providing support throughout this change. You can learn more and follow our guide for additional help. 

 

Updated Aug 06, 2024
Version 1.0
microsoft viva

1 Comment

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  • Alpha89's avatar
    Alpha89
    Copper Contributor
    Aug 15, 2024

    Thanks for the heads-up. This is sad news to read. The Viva Connections feed on SharePoint is very much appreciated by our Corporate Communications team and end users. It is also one of the few web parts which also shows likes and comment values under the messages.

     

    We also tried to mimic functionality with the Highlighted Content web part. But this is based on trending posts and pages for everyone and not unique to the users following sites and interactions from colleagues. Especially the fact that you could see: person X has commented on and Person Y has liked. We also liked the fact how Boosted News was represented in the Feed.

     

    What we are also sad about is the fact that you can’t filter the News web part once you choose: Recommended for the User. Somehow once you select Recommended for the user you get the same news items presented which are posted on the same page. Somehow the Viva Feed was much smarter in selecting what to show. We would like to filter out certain news sources to make sure the web part doesn’t show news which is already available on the same page in a different News Web Part.

     

    We hope more functionality will come to the News web part which fills the gaps that now are created by removing the Viva Feed for SharePoint. This message would be better to handle if every functionality was replaced 1:1 in a new solution.