What’s new in Viva Connections – Ignite Edition
Viva Connections serves as the gateway to your employee experience through a branded company app -- surfacing apps, tools, resources and news to keep everyone connected from wherever they are. We are committed to building a single, unified experience and reducing friction across products and services. With that in mind, here are some of the latest enhancements to these features announced at Ignite: New ways to customize the employee app Organizations all around the world use Connections as their employee app, customizing it to fit the needs of their employees, adding in their own branding and 3 rd party business tools, and delivering it across a variety of formats and devices. Now, it can go even further. Spotlight capabilities Earlier this year we announced the hero ‘spotlight’ area at the top of the canvas, together with advanced branding and theming capabilities. As the next step, we’re adding new capabilities to help highlight and emphasize content in the spotlight: Pin content – pin specific content to increase its visibility. This includes content from any URL and SharePoint News items. Admins can also reorder pinned content. Further customize spotlight content with images and title text. Spotlight content from multiple SharePoint sites as sources Branding across all experiences Company branding is a critical part of company culture. To help your brand shine, we’ve extended branding and theming capabilities throughout Connections experiences to include desktop, mobile, tablet, and of course, your home site in web. Unique experiences in the Teams app bar Viva Connections now supports up to 50 unique “instances” in a tenant, allowing you to have differently branded versions for various groups of employees. Until recently, however, you could only have one app icon for Connections in Teams. We’ve now released the ability for you to have multiple app customizations for the Connections app in Teams – so for every “instance” of Connections, you can have a distinct app name and icon appear in the Teams App Bar. Custom Fonts Adding custom fonts has been a long-standing request from customers, and we are thrilled to deliver this feature. New enterprise news reader The Viva Connections feed experience is being replaced with an immersive SharePoint news experience. This transformation allows for a best-in-class enterprise news reader, providing a uniform and customizable experience across desktop and mobile with features like notifications, and enhanced user engagement. This updated News experience will also leverage Copilot to help you summarize top news and stay connected to what’s happening across your organization. The Enterprise News reader, along with Copilot capabilities, will be rolling out in early 2025. What’s new with Adaptive cards We’re continuing to build new ways for employees to access and take action on the information they need. Adaptive Card Extensions in Copilot Experiences When a card is relevant for a specific topic, Microsoft 365 Copilot will understand that a Connections card can address the request, and the card will surface within M365 Copilot chat. This is an exciting step forward for interactive content within Copilot, and will be in public preview this January. Quick links card This card shows a set of curated links created for quick access and wayfinding of important items. Stream Playlist card The Stream playlist card allows you to quickly view recently updated videos from the Stream app that can be accessed directly from your dashboard. Files Card Connected to your OneDrive, this card shows recent, shared and favorite files – keeping the most important files to you only a click or tap away. Power Apps Card This card allows you to surface content or directly interact with a Power App enabling quick access to the Power Apps you need. Deeper integrations with Viva Engage We are continuing to invest in deeper integration with Viva Engage starting with the Viva Engage Feed card for the dashboard – this new card will surface personalized recent and relevant community discussions directly on the card. From the card, you can quickly catch up on the latest posts, react, take actions, or navigate to the community itself for deeper engagement. And to better stay connected to company news, Engage announcements will soon show up in the announcements banner at the top of Connections. Additionally, we will include Engage campaigns and event within the Spotlight carousel. There are plenty more additions on the horizon as we continue efforts to build a unified, flexible employee app that serves the needs of information workers and deskless employees working on the frontline. For a detailed look at everything on our roadmap, check out our Viva Communications & Communities on-demand session. Thanks for reading! Thanks for reading!
