We are excited to announce updates and new features within the Viva Connections out of the box cards. These updates are around the News card, People card and the Events cards. News and people cards are already available for you to take advantage today and events card will be available within first quarter of 2024 (subject to change).
You can find more details on the configuration options and functionalities from following documentation - Create a Viva Connections dashboard and add cards.
News card
Add the News card to the Viva Connections Dashboard to promote news from a variety of sources that you wish to prominently display, including boosted news from SharePoint. If you choose any news posts that have been boosted, they will display in the News card for the duration of the boost period.
- Availability - Now
People card
The People Search card will automatically retrieve contact information from members of your organization using Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory). Users can access the People Search card to look up contact information and can jump into chat, email, or a call with the contact directly from the card view.
- Availability - Now
Events card
Surface any events from the organization on to the Viva Connections dashboard to spread awareness and increase the number of relevant audiences in the event.
- Availability - First quarter of 2024 (subject to change)
Ankur Madan and Vesa Juvonen are discussing and showcasing the new people search and news card features within the following video:
Frequently asked questions
Are you looking into supporting also other card sizes and presentation styles for the cards?
Yes. We are looking on supporting additional sizes for the cards and also additional rendering options. We will keep on evolving the different options for the Viva Connections dashboard based on the customer and partner feedback.
Are you looking into releasing additional set of out of the box cards?
Maybe. We are evaluating the customer and partner feedback continuously and make investments decisions based on that. There's currently no other public information available for these plans. Viva Connections is also a platform so if you'd like to include some other scenarios to your Viva Connections deployment, those can be implemented using SharePoint Framework or soon with the Bot Framework. There are thousands of partners who are building extensibility for Viva Connections and we recommend reaching to them based on your business requirements.
Does these features or Viva Connection require any additional licenses to be acquired?
Default features within the Viva Connections are free and part of the standard Microsoft 365 enterprise subscriptions, for example E3 and E5. There are however some specific features which might require additional licenses, depending on the exact use cases. Please see the Microsoft Viva plans and pricing for additional details. Notice that the licensing rules might be changed since this blog post has been released, so please refer the official documentation for the latest situation.
Can I acquire additional cards from the Microsoft store?
Yes. ISVs and partners are building thousands of different kinds of cards for Viva Connections. Some of the partners are also offering their solutions through the Microsoft store / AppSource. Currently the amount of offered cards in the store is quite limited, but partners do also have direct sales options with the customers.
Resources
- Viva Connections Overview
- Add cards to the dashboard
- Viva Connections cards in the Microsoft store / AppSource
- Build extensibility for Viva Connections
Thanks for reading. Please let us know any feedback or questions in the comments and we'll get back to you.