MicrosoftThanks 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.
