The refreshed Viva Connections landing experience offers a more intuitive layout and introduces several requested new features including branding capabilities, sending announcements, and support for different card sizes. This experience will also bring the Feed back into the viewport on your Connections page and offers an improved layout to the landing page. A notable change that we will be discussing in this blog is the revamped Resources section that will appear in the refreshed Viva Connections experience.
Redesigned sections and icons in Viva Connections highlight content and links.
What’s changing with resources in Viva Connections?
We are introducing a new way to manage your organization’s links in the Viva Connections Desktop experience! Currently, the resources section is drawn from the global navigation functionality that can be found throughout the SharePoint ecosystem. With the updated resources experiences, we are pulling your links from a different data source, allowing for your links to better align with your brand via custom icons/images, as well as icons that can align with the branding/theming of your tenant.
Redesigned resources section in Viva Connections that highlights updated link-keeping for organizations.
How will this change impact my organization?
With the updated resources experience, this may require updates to any existing documentation that exists within your organization as it pertains to updating your resources section. Because the new resources experience will be pulling data from a different source, we will provide editors with the ability to create and curate a new list of resources that can be prepopulated into the resources experience prior to our General Availability date.
To do this, editors will need to follow these steps before our launch:
Here are the instructions to set up your resources before the release:
1. Access the provisioned SharePoint list link below with your home site URL: ({SiteUrl }/Lists/CompanyList006e2221e1df45c0875383a98de5ecf1/AllItems.aspx) before the November 2023 launch and add your company links to it.
2. In the list, there will be two required fields that you will need to fill out to add a link to your instance: Title and Link URL.
3. Review and add the links to the list to make it available in your Connections instance when we go live. Once the two fields are completed, a link will be stored in the list. The maximum number of links that can be stored is 48 links.
Here are the instructions to find the site URL needed for setting up Resources:
1. To find your site URL, go to the Microsoft Admin Center and on the menu pane, select Setup
2. Once selected, navigate to Featured Collections and select Microsoft Viva
3. From there, navigate and select Viva Connections
4. Under the Setup and Management tab, select Create and Manage Viva Connections Experiences
5. Select the tenant(s) that you want to edit and once selected, you’ll see a section that says URL (which will be the URL to your Connections instance).
Microsoft Admin Center for Viva Connections highlighting where admins can find site URL.
Will my global navigation disappear with this change?
The updated resources experience will replace the current global navigation in the resources section of the Viva Connections Desktop experience. Global navigation will still be accessible by clicking on the Connections icon in the Teams app bar. In addition, global navigation will continue to exist in other places as well in the SharePoint ecosystem, such as the SharePoint app bar and your SharePoint home site. This will allow you to access the apps and sites that you have previously pinned or frequently visited.
What happens if I don’t prepopulate existing links into the new resources experience?
If you do not prepopulate their existing links from global navigation into the new experience, the resources sections will appear in an empty state. However, editors will have the ability to add, remove, and reorganize links from the empty state experience once the new resources experience is available in the Viva Connections Desktop experience.
Will this change also take place on the mobile experience?
Temporarily, the desktop and mobile experiences for Viva Connections will be different, with desktop having the updated resources experience and mobile having the existing resources experience using global navigation. The new resources will be available for the mobile experience for Viva Connections sometime next year.
See more information on what’s new with Viva Connections, how to set up global navigation and set up Viva Connections in the admin center below:
What’s New in Microsoft Viva | October 2023 - Microsoft Community Hub)
Set up Viva Connections in the Microsoft 365 admin center | Microsoft Learn
Plan Viva Connections for your organization | Microsoft Learn