Install Viva Connections today

[Michael Holste]

The next step in the journey towards greater employee experience is here. Earlier this month, we announced that Microsoft Viva Connections would soon be available for desktop and today, we’re excited to share that you can now download and install the Viva Connections desktop app in your organization.

Watch this video and follow the instructions below to get started with Viva Connections.

Step-by-step guide to setting up Viva Connections desktop

Complete the following steps to enable Viva Connections desktop using SharePoint PowerShell:

1. Set up a SharePoint home site: We highly recommend that you set up a SharePoint home site and use that site as the default landing experience for your users in Teams.
2. Enable global navigation and customize navigational links: Set up and customize global navigation in the SharePoint app bar. Learn about the different ways you can set up the home site navigation and global navigation to surface the right content at the right time.
3. Create a Viva Connections app package in PowerShell: The SharePoint admin needs to download and run the Viva Connections PowerShell script from the Microsoft download center to create the Viva Connections desktop package. Ensure that you are using the latest version of the SharePoint Management Shell tool before running the script.
4. Provide tenant and site information to create the package: For a detailed description of the information you’ll need to provide, reference this article. 
5. Upload the Viva Connections desktop package in the Teams Admin Center: Once you successfully provide the details, a Teams app manifest, which is a .zip file, will be created and saved on your device. The Teams administrator of your tenant will then need to upload this app manifest to Teams admin center > Manage apps.
6. Manage and pin the app by default for your users: Once the Viva Connections desktop package is successfully uploaded in the Teams admin center, it can be managed like any other app. You can configure user permissions to make this app available to the right set of user who will then be able to find this app in the Teams app catalog.

Find more detailed instructions on getting started with Viva Connections for admins and end users.

Continuing the journey

We are excited for you to begin working with the Teams desktop experience of Viva Connections and look forward to hearing your feedback.

The mobile experience for Viva Connections will be available in Teams in the summer of 2021. Learn more what the mobile experience for Viva Connections can do for your employees, leaders, and IT.

In conjunction with the release of the mobile experience, we will also release an update to the desktop experience that will focus on improvements for IT administrators and deployment enhancements. This summer update will combine both the mobile and desktop configuration and deployment into the Teams admin console.

In this summer update we will also release web parts for the “dashboard” and “feed” to align with the mobile experience. These new web parts will enable the dashboard experience, authored in SharePoint, to be constant across all end points.

As web parts they will be available to add to any of your sites and allow you to leverage multiple columns and other advanced layouts on the desktop.

Stay tuned!

-Mike Holste
Michael Holste is a senior product marketing manager for employee engagement at Microsoft 

[Lindsay Addie]

Looking forward to setting Viva connections up. Unfortunately I have two Microsoft 365 tenants and the global navigation functionality isn't enabled yet on both tenants that are both on the targeted release channel.

I need the global navigation stuff asap as it is a key part of the SharePoint dev I'm doing for the organization I'm contracted to.

[Abhimanyu Singh]

Our tenant is on targeted release (entire tenant), but the global navigation hasn't appeared yet! It's time already for the standard release. I wonder what use is the targeted release for?

[jasonkirk]

I have the same experience here. I have 3 environments in Targeted release, 1 dev and 2 prod, and none have the SharePoint app bar or global navigation. 

[AnnicaTunster]

We have the same problem on two tenants with targeted release and i opend a case and hope they will get back to me with an answer. I dont know if there might be some old settings that might conflict with it or something. To my knowledge the Sharepoint app bar should already released? I see it in my clients tenants.

[jasonkirk]

Glad to know it isnt just me. I have made sure to follow the instructions (Home site, Share to all etc). The only settting/customisation I have done which all tenants share is a customised theme installed via PowerShell, I can't image that being an issue though. It's a shame that it has appeared on your clients tenants before yours. I thought that the point of targeted release was that consultants can get to grips with a feature before it goes to GA. 

[EnricoBeyer]

It works fine.

I would like to have an official VIVA brand logo full-color 192x192 for the Viva connections app. Would be great.

[Asif Rehmani]

Good article @Michael Holste . Love the Viva Connections functionality within Teams.

I wrote an exhaustive article on all things Viva Connections to clarify the questions I was getting about it such as:

What is Connections? why should I care? do I still need SharePoint? do I really need a home site? why...? how do I get Connections? what are the gotchas? etc.

Hope it helps:

Show your SharePoint Intranet in Teams with Microsoft Viva Connections (visualsp.com)

[Michael Holste]

Hey Enrico, we don't have a single logo for the Microsoft Viva product family. Would you like the Viva Connections logo? 

[EnricoBeyer]

Hey Michael, yes this would be great.

[MPotvin]

Hey Michael, thanks for sharing this! Will be doing this shortly. Could you please tell me what are the language settings (which languages are available) in the Teams app? Looking to try this for a client which is mainly a french speaking company.

Thanks

[Diana Pallais]

Good stuff!

[Krzysztof_Majchrzycki]

Hi. Great news Michael, thanks for your post on Microsoft Viva Connections.
However, I have an unidentified problem. After building the application and uploading the zip package in the Manage Apps administration panel to my tenant, an undefined error pops up: "We can't upload the app. Please try again. If you continue to have problems, contact Microsoft customer support."
I've tried two separate tenants and it's always the same.
Have you also encountered such a problem? Do you have a solution for this?
Best, Krzysztof

[Valerie Fahel-Schaffer]

@Michael Holste, I also don't have the app bar yet.  Is it still being rolled out, because the documentation doesn't say anything about that.

[Matthew Carter]

Microsoft Teams Admin Center

Teams Apps

Manage Apps

Org-wide app settings

Custom apps - OFF

We have custom apps turned off.  

I am wondering if this is the ONLY way to get Viva Connections Desktop to show up in Microsoft Teams client?

Developers can build custom apps that can be used in your organization. If you turn this off, all of your users won't be able to use or upload custom apps.

As a Teams Admin, can I upload and approve this custom app from the PowerShell script to create the app?

# Viva Connections Desktop

This powershell script (`Viva-connections-desktop.ps1`) will allow SharePoint admins to create a personal app in Microsoft Teams that brings their modern SharePoint communication sites directly inside Teams.

[AnnicaTunster]

Im in contact with support and no i dont think it has to do with still rolling out. Last answer i got was:

Hello Annica,

I am writing regarding case 24975858. I would like to let you know that I have involved additional resources to help resolve the issue. I will get back to you as soon as I have updates or if additional information is needed.

Thank you!

So i think they got an issue. 

@Matthew Carter if you are teams admin you can go to teams admincenter and approve it i do belive. You do need to have the permissions to make a page homepage though if  you dont have it already.

[Jim Ehrenberg]

I'm having the same issue. I cannot upload zip file.

"We can't upload the app. Please try again. If you continue to have problems, contact Microsoft customer support."

All the other parts are checked and in place. Any ideas?

[Grassol]

I managed to follow all these steps and add the app successfully in the Team admin and pin for all sites etc no issue there but a bit disappointed  that the logo pic I added was not showing up as well as expected, I presume I can delete the app and redo the installation to fix the logo appearance? Also the app bar is not appearing yet in our tenant and only read last night somewhere (which article I now can't find again after around 4 plus hours of searching on Google) that the above steps should only have been done once the app bar makes it's appearance not before and that it won't work now after all that. Nowhere did I see this mentioned and even for some reason believed (wrongly I came to realise) that this process as described in this article would have the app bar appear. Only after reading comments I realise the app bar is deployed by default in its own time. There was so much hype around the script being available on 31-3 that I got right onto it. I also watched the Melissa Torres video tutorial and on there it appeared as if voila! your process was successful because there is the app bar making its appearance etc. Maybe I didn't pay enough attention, I will watch the video again to understand why I understood differently. In any case I presume also now that the app can simply be deleted and the process repeated once the app bar makes it's appearance? Which will also take care of the logo depiction issue.  

[EnricoBeyer]

@Grassol @You can change the logo in the App Studio App using the created Manifest. No need to make create the app from scratch again. 

[EnricoBeyer]

@Matthew Carter As long as Microsoft won‘t publish it as an Microsoft App, it is the only way. May you could change your settings? I think there is no reason to block the upload of custom apps globally. It’s enough to block it in the global app permission policy and setup a different policy to test Viva Connections. 

[Hilton Giesenow]

Got my first Connections app up and running in a test tenant, with Home Site and Global Nav configured and so far it's working great - only one issue: the search integration is not working (I don't get the 2nd search option in the Teams search bar). How can I go about troubleshooting this?

[Hilton Giesenow]

On a separate note, I can't update the app in the Teams Admin portal. I've increased the version number in the manifest, but it keeps telling me that the app already exists. This is probably not a Viva Connections issue per se, but...

[EnricoBeyer]

@Hilton Giesenow seems to have problems with uploading a new version. I had the same issue. So I deleted the installed app and uploaded the new version. 
Not heard about the integration of the second searchbar yet. I thought the updated search will come later this year?

[Hilton Giesenow]

I think I figured out the searchbar issue (can't update or reply to my existing post above) - I was side-loading the app using App Studio originally. If I install it globally using Teams Admin centre, then it works. Obviously some "special sauce" at play...

[Hilton Giesenow]

@EnricoBeyer I don't seem to have the ability to Delete an app...

[Hilton Giesenow]

@EnricoBeyer ah sorry, found it - had to click on the app to go to it's setting (silly for not noticing that before)

[SPvpApps]

Can Viva Connections be installed in GCC High Tenant?

[harshdamaniahd]

unfortunately guest users are also able to see this app in ios and android. when they click on it, it shows access denied.

[Giorgio-Rossetti]

Hello,

I faced two problems for the moment

1) Global navigation is not available in my SharePoint Home Site

2) After building the application and uploading the zip package in the Manage Apps administration panel to my tenant, an undefined error pops up: "We can't upload the app. Please try again. If you continue to have problems, contact Microsoft customer support."

some suggestions? I see a lot of guys here have same issues.

best regards

[m36five]

@Giorgio-Rossetti After I was unable to see Global Navigation as an option for the home site in my test tenant (Targeted release), I opened a support ticket. I was told that, because the roadmap listing for Microsoft Viva Connections Desktop is still status "In Development," I shouldn't expect this to work yet.

It's really frustrating that this blog post is entitled (bold added for emphasis), “Install Viva Connections today,” and the second sentence in the post ends with, “…you can now download and install the Viva Connections desktop app in your organization." It seems like an announcement like this should not be made, along with detailed instructions, unless it was at the very least available in Targeted release. Or at least it should not be called "Install Viva Connections today," and should include a disclaimer about the actual release schedule.

[Harsh Damania]

just confusing customers with these announcementa

[unnie ayilliath]

My fix for "We can't upload the app. Please try again. If you continue to have problems, contact Microsoft customer support". 

For ppl who have the issue while uploading the package to Admin center try below steps:

1. The Organisation name has a 32 character limit, but this is not enforced in the PowerShell script. So make sure, the Organisation name is max 32 chars. This was my issue. 

2. If number 1 was not the problem, then after generating the package and open the manifest file and open in VS code to see if there is any warning messages. Check against the schema for any other mistakes => 

https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/json-schemas/teams/v1.9/MicrosoftTeams.schema.json 

[Dragan_Panjkov]

@Lindsay Addie @Abhimanyu Singh @jasonkirk @AnnicaTunster I had the same issue with entire tenant on Targeted Release, but @Noorez Khamis advised me to enable Targeted Release to specific user (in my case global admin) and afterwards I was able to enable Global Navigation.

[AnnicaTunster]

@PDragan Thanks for the suggestion! I just tried it in one of our tenants. Do you know how long time it took before it worked? I still await answer from MS but they havent said a word since friday.

[Dragan_Panjkov]

@AnnicaTunster it should be reflected within an hour, that was my experience.

[m36five]

Thanks, @Dragan_Panjkov! I tried this and it worked for me as well, after waiting about an hour. I then switched it back to Targeted Release for the whole tenant. The option disappeared again, but I was able to deploy Viva Connections to Teams.

[Grassol]

@m36five wow! I tried it and so excited that it has actually worked and made an appearance! Why would the option disappear do you think? I will try deploy Viva Connections to Teams as well now, and set Global Navigation etc.

[Grassol]

Ok so the Global Navigation does not do anything? Even though I enabled it...maybe it is because of the development issue and it does not work yet?

[Grassol]

After a couple minutes it worked also! Wow, but then the Home site navigation did not disappear as I imagined it would but using the extended Header solved that issue with only the Hub navigation popping up. I had my extended header ready for this eventuality!

[NightmareRambo77]

I believe there is some character limits when you have your app manifest so if your trying to upload the app to teams and its failing its probably hitting a character limit. I could be wrong but i think the Company Name field can't be any longer than 32 characters or something, so try making that small or an abbreviation and see if it works then?

[Lindsay Addie]

Thanks a lot @Dragan_Panjkov 
I tried your workaround on two M365 tenants and it worked a treat both times.

[AnnicaTunster]

@Dragan_Panjkov It worked like a charm, thanks alot for the tip. Microsoft hasnt gotten back to us at all yet.

[Dragan_Panjkov]

@AnnicaTunster I am so sorry to hear that. If you submitted a support incident using Admin portal, I suggest that you follow-up on that e-mail thread.

[Joseph Cilia]

App deployed successfully. However there seems to be a problem with embedded Stream Video, which although initially seem to load successfully since video snip is shown, it asks for sign in as soon as you try to play, which then redirects to a page that never loads. 

[Abhimanyu Singh]

Thanks @Dragan_Panjkov for the suggestion.

I am however not inclined to change the TR to user from tenant. It is not documented anywhere and IMHO the TR should work the way it should. I was given to understand that the TR is still rolling out and hence some tenancies may not have the global nav appear as yet, Ref: https://twitter.com/tpmehta/status/1377667738114555904?s=20

I am starting to get a feeling that TR is not serving its purpose these days. I've noticed considerable delays lately in TR rollout and the reason we are on TR is to experience and try out features much before the SR so that we are ready when it hits the mainstream. But, that is not happening. I've seen many people posting videos and articles on the global nav and Viva connections in Teams since more than a month now! But, we are yet to see it. I don't understand the TR rollout mechanism! 

[Grassol]

I'm presuming if you received the TR app bar for specific user that deploying Viva Connections for Teams will not work yet only because its in TR for specific user only? Because I tried it and got this error:

Sorry, something went wrong

An unexpected error has occurred.

TECHNICAL DETAILS

GO BACK TO SITE

[Philip Worrell]

I spent a couple of hours on this setup. 

First app bar only shows in SharePoint if you are a selected targeted user. Not tenant ide targeted. 

If you switch between the two after the app ba appears, it disappears again. 

Downloading the app bar and installing it was simple enough, would have been nice to include a couple of default icons for testing purposes. 

Then just by chance I go into the Message center to find the app bar in SharePoint is being delayed from rollout. 

I pretty much say Microsoft have jumped the gun on this one. Getting people excited only to disappoint them again. As the product isn't ready yet. 

[Grassol]

I'm actually getting pretty used to using the app bar and using it all the time now, it's a pity the roll out has stalled as it has, I do think it adds a lot of value from a user experience.  

[ady7970]

Hi all,

Having an issue getting the App uploaded into the Teams Admin Centre.  I've tried on two different tenants and always receive the error "We can't upload the app. Please try again. If you continue to have problems, contact Microsoft customer support."  

I've already tried the suggestions, above, about character limits, have validated the JSON file and now am a bit stuck.

Grateful for any insights so that I can get this deployed and start learning.

Thanks!

[NightmareRambo77]

Hi Ady7970 , i too got super frustrated so i put the bare minimum in the powershell to get it to work, also make sure the urls are HTTPS as i think its required, i got feed up i literally called it Test for the name and description and company and it went through.

[ady7970]

@NightmareRambo77 thanks.  I actually tried the exact same thing and it still isn't working :(