Viva Connections is the gateway to the employee experience and is designed to be a one-stop-shop for all things connected to your company. The Viva Connections mobile app on Teams enables employees access to tools and resources that help in their day-to-day activities, allowing them to be more productive and connected anytime, anywhere.
Today we are announcing a set of new features aimed to provide end-users seamless access to their enterprise intranet resources and that will allow admins to customize the app to reflect their brand better.
Quick home site access and improved site navigation
An organization’s SharePoint home site and connected intranet can be a rich source of information for an employee. Many organizations rely on their intranet to run critical workflows and need to ensure their employees can access it as needed.
To make it easier for an employee to get into their intranet home site, we’re adding a home site access button above the Dashboard on Viva Connections mobile. With the recent “Multiple Viva Connections experiences” update, this button ensure that your employees always land at the right home site for them. Note that home sites are not a requirement for Viva Connections but can be used to extend and connect the organization’s intranet.
The home site access button will pick up the icon from your intranet’s home site will work out of the box without any admin intervention. Learn more about how Connections and home sites work together.
Intranet resources from SharePoint global navigation are now integrated with the mobile and tablet experience. Now, you can access popular sites by selecting the menu in the top-left. This easy-to-use hamburger menu appears on all SharePoint sites and showcases the site navigation menu and a hub navigation menu (if a site is part of a hub ).
Hero image on mobile
The updated mobile design also brings branding improvements. The hero image(also known as banner image) in your new desktop Viva Connections experience will be coming to mobile and tablet as well by early October. The Hero image is available on mobile irrespective of your default desktop experience.
A standard greeting is also added over the background image in Viva Connections which updates with different times of the day.
Save for later (SFL)
The new mobile experience on the right brings saved content directly into view.
The home for saved links is moving from the app title bar into the Feed tab for better alignment and access. Previously, users found it challenging to locate their saved elements from within the feed. This update makes it easy to toggle between the fresh feed and your saved items. This feature update will be available in the September.
We hope you enjoy these new features, and we look forward to hearing your feedback. Learn more about how to plan, build, and launch multiple Viva Connections experiences for your organization, please visit our documentation page. Learn more about Microsoft Viva and other Viva apps and services.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. How do I know setup my home site? How can I change it?
Microsoft provides a detailed documentation on how you can Plan, Build, Launch and Manage your home site and intranet experience. Please refer to this link to get started on or to manage your home site Plan, build, and launch a home site for your organization | Microsoft Learn
2. How can I change the icon of the home site access button?
Admins can modify the site logo easily from their settings panel. Refer to this article to Change a site's title, description, logo, and site information settings - Microsoft Support.
We support a range of square to rectangle (horizontal) logos. To ensure that your icon renders properly, please pick one that fits into the size range of 64 x 64px to 192 x 64px (width x height) and avoid icons that go over these dimensions.
3. How can I update the Banner Image?
See this article for information on how to Customize and edit the Viva Connections home experience | Microsoft Learn
4. What if I don’t upload a Hero image?
The Viva Connections app comes with a default Hero image (a gradient of Viva Connections theme colours ). If a hero image is not uploaded, the below default image will be shown to all users.
5. What happens to my pre-saved feed items with the change in Save For Later location?
All your previously saved items can now be found under the saved pill in the Feed tab and will not be impacted by this change.