Posted on by Aaron Guilmette

Configuring Viva Connections in Teams – A Quickstart Guide

       
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For folks who want to get started on bringing your intranet into Teams, here’s a quick take on configuring Viva Connections, including screenshots, tips, and the ever popular “what happens to the end users” question answered.

Buckle up.

Introduction

Viva Connections, from our marketing material, is “a desktop and mobile experience that brings together relevant news, conversations, and resources in one place for your organization.” It’s a fancy way of bringing the SharePoint Modern site experience into Teams.

Requirements

In order to make it all the way through, we’ll need to have these things configured:

  • You need to have a SharePoint Home Site configured.
  • Said home site needs to be using the Communications Site template.
  • The home site also needs to be the root site.
  • You need to have a News Feed source.  By default, when you set your home site as a Communications site, the news feed is automagically configured to be SharePoint News.  You can also use Yammer as your news source.  Most of the customers I work with (in public sector) are in the GCC cloud, and since Yammer is outside the GCC boundary, they tend to not use it.  We’ll use the default SharePoint News Feed settings for this example.

If you haven’t done them or don’t know where to do them–that’s ok.  We’re going to take care of it all together.

Alrighty! Let’s get going!

Configuring the Prerequisites

First, we’re going to configure your new home site.  If you have a newer tenant (since we introduced the SharePoint Modern Experience), your default landing page will already be a Communications Site.  I

Existing Classic SharePoint root site

If you have a SharePoint Online tenant created before July 2017 (and you haven’t done anything to update it already), your SharePoint root site is a classic SharePoint site. You have two options for dealing with it:

In order to convert a classic site to a modern Communications site, follow these steps:

Ensure you have the latest SharePoint Online PowerShell module.  If you don’t have the SharePoint PowerShell module at all:

Install-Module Microsoft.Online.SharePoint.PowerShell

If you have an older version and want to update:

Update-Module Microsoft.Online.SharePoint.PowerShell

Run the following commands, replacing <tenant> with your SharePoint Online tenant name.

$AdminCenterURL="https://<tenant>-admin.SharePoint.com"
$SiteURL = "https://<tenant>.sharepoint.com/"
Connect-SPOService -Url $AdminCenterURL
Enable-SPOCommSite -SiteUrl $SiteURL

When prompted, select “Yes.”

With that out of the way, let’s begin.

Setting the home site and enabling global navigation

The home site feature is required for Viva Connections.

  1. Log into the SharePoint Admin Center (the easiest way is navigating to https://admin.microsoft.com, expanding Admin centers, and then selecting SharePoint).
  2. Locate the site that you want to use as your home site (it should be your root site, and must be a Communications site). In this case, I’m using the default site for my tenant, which meets all of the requirements.
  3. In the SharePoint admin center navigation bar, select Settings, and then click the Home site setting.
  4. Enter the URL of the site you’re going to configure as the home site.  The configuration panel will validate your site and should report This site can be used as your home site.
  5. Click Save.

Yay! You’ve now configured a home site.

Preparing the home site for Viva Connections

The navigation features are required for the Viva Connections deployment. It allows users to navigate the site menu using the VIva icon in the Teams UI. In order to make the site useful in Viva Connections and enable audience targeting, you’ll need to enable Global Navigation features. Let’s begin.

  1. As a SharePoint Admin, log into the root site that has been configured as the home site.
  2. Select the gear (Settings) icon, and then select Global navigation.
  3. Move the slider to On to enable global navigation features.  You can upload a picture and an updated name if desired, which will be displayed at the top of the new global navigation menu.
  4. Select a Navigation source.  You can select Home site navigation or Hub or global navigation.  You can switch back and forth, so your choice isn’t permanent.  The default is Hub or global navigation, which is what we’re going to choose for this example.  If you click the Edit global navigation link, you can see a preview of how it will look.  You’ll also notice that you see a toggle for audience targeting, which you can use to control who will see what links.  For this example, we’ll leave it disabled.  You can learn more about the specific features of each type of navigation in our documentation: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/viva/connections/sharepoint-app-bar.
  5. Click Save to save the configured site.

Woot! All done with the SharePoint side.  On to Teams!

Enabling Viva Connections in Microsoft Teams

The last process is going to involve unblocking the Viva Connections app in Teams and pinning it to the menu bar.

Enabling the Viva Connections app

By default, the Viva Connections app is blocked (since it requires prerequisite configuration).  In this set of steps, we’ll unblock it and make it available for people to add to Teams.

  1. As a Teams admin, navigate to the Microsoft Teams admin center (https://admin.teams.microsoft.com).
  2. Select Teams apps | Manage apps.
  3. In the search box, enter Viva Connections and then select it.
  4. Click Customize.
  5. Customize any details for the app, including links to your organization’s privacy policy, a description, how you want the app name to appear, and icon samples.  You’ll have to make some change, so if you want to just accept the defaults, click the description field, add a space at the end, and click Apply.
  6. Click Publish.
  7. Locate the app again, select it, and then click Allow to unblock the app.

At this point, the Viva Connections app is available for users to install themselves. However, you may wish to push it out and make it available to your users automatically. If so, keep reading.

Pinning Viva Connections to the Teams app bar

In this final set of steps, we’re going to install the app for everyone and pin it to the app bar.  We’re going to apply these settings to the Global policy; you can, of course, test it out by creating a new policy and scoping it to a smaller group of users to test first.

  1. From the Teams admin center, navigate to Teams apps | Setup policies.
  2. Click Global (Org-wide default).
  3. Under Installed apps, click Add apps.
  4. Search for Viva Connections and then click Add.
  5. Click Add.
  6. Scroll down to Pinned apps. Click Add apps and select Viva Connections from the list.
  7. Click Add.
  8. If desired, you can rearrange the apps as they’ll be displayed in the left rail. When finished, click Save.

After an hour or two, the Teams app bar should update. Users who are included in the policy (in this case, the Global policy) will have the Viva Connections app added.

Buuuuuut…..what happens when a user clicks on it?

End user experience

This part frequently gets left out–and generates a lot of questions from my customers.  Here’s what it looks like when a user launches Teams and then clicks on the Viva Connections app.

  1. User launches Teams.
  2. User clicks Viva Connections in the app bar and is presented with a series of screens, indicating that the intranet has now been made available in Teams.Screen 1
    Screen 2
    Screen 3
  3. After the user clicks Got it, they’ll be presented with the home site inside the Teams client.  This experience is the same for both the desktop and web clients.
  4. The second time the user clicks the Viva Connections link, they’ll see the Global navigation menu that was configured in the SharePoint site configuration.

That’s it! You’ve configured Viva Connections for Microsoft Teams!

Now,