Sergio Ortega Martin
Microsoft 365 & SharePoint Solutions Architect at NTT DATA
What is Microsoft VIVA Connections?
Microsoft VIVA Connections is a new set of components built on top of Microsoft 365 and modern experience designed to keep everyone in a company engaged and informed.
VIVA Connections can be accessed either through a customizable app in Microsoft Teams or through a web browser, allowing every employee to discover relevant news, conversations, and the tools they need.
VIVA Connections connects people and content in Office 365, pushing specific information regarding the current user and displaying popular resources by combining the power of your SharePoint intranet, Microsoft Teams and other Microsoft 365 apps like Yammer and Stream. It offers added functionalities through three primary components – the Dashboard, the Feed, and the Resources.
Dashboard
The Dashboard is the core component of VIVA Connections. It offers a panel to bring together the contents and resources your employees need, enabling a quick and easy access to other Office 365 or 3rd Party platforms.
The Dashboard uses dynamic cards that employees can interact with, in order to complete simple tasks or review critical data. We can gather, on one single panel, tasks from planner, videos from stream, or task approvals specifically addressed to the current user.
The VIVA Connections Dashboard is available on mobile platforms (iOS, Android) in the VIVA Connections Teams app, and on the desktop as a web part. This web part can be integrated into a SharePoint Home site, which then is exposed as part of the VIVA Connections for Desktop experience in Teams.
The VIVA Connections dashboard provides a cards catalog that can be extended with cards coming from other VIVA Modules, 3rd party systems as Syntphony Employee Intranet, as well as from custom development cards.
Currently, only one feed can be used, in the homepage, per organization, but Microsoft is working to extend the feed to many pages across our organization.
Feed
In the feed component, users will see a personalized feed with relevant information from across their organization in Office 365. The feed automatically promotes content to keep users interested.
Individual messages can be promoted to raise greater awareness among users by using SharePoint’s News boost and Yammer’s “Featured” options. The Feed requires usage of modern SharePoint or Yammer communities, but the best experience is delivered when both are used together.
Resources
Resources are the navigational links that are set up and customized in the SharePoint app bar from the home site. These resources will get displayed on both the desktop and mobile instances of VIVA Connections.
In the mobile app, users can view resources by selecting the “Resources” tab. This type of functioning provides users with a familiar navigation structure and allows them to open sites, pages, news, and more—right from their mobile devices.
Other VIVA Modules in the family
In addition of VIVA Connections, some other VIVA modules are being released:
– VIVA Insights: Tool that helps people and businesses providing data insights and recommendations to improve productivity and wellbeing. The tool is focused on the wellbeing and productivity of the employees, by analyzing their working behaviors. With VIVA Insights, a user can discover new findings that build on the capabilities of Personal Analytics, Manager insights and Leader Analytics.
– VIVA Learning: Learning hub that collects learning resources from a variety of different sources including LinkedIn Learning, Microsoft Learn, and popular third-party providers such as Skillsoft and Coursera. 3rd party LMS can be added by developing connectors using the new API offered by Microsoft.
– VIVA Topics: Knowledge platform that analyzes information in Office 365 and, based on AI, creates information pages that connect people with knowledge, serving as a tool to manage information and expertise across the company.
– VIVA Engage: Enterprise social network where users can form connections through open sharing and discussions with co-workers, building and joining communities, sharing unique stories and interests. With VIVA Engage now Yammer is fully embedded in Microsoft Teams, enabling users a quick access from the Teams appbar.
– VIVA Goals: Platform that allows for the definition of individual, department, and organizational goals, also tracking progress through Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) while aligning goals with strategic priorities.
– VIVA Sales: Tool to better manage the whole sales process by gathering information coming from Office 365, Microsoft Teams and any CRM Tool. It saves the user time, effort, and energy, empowering your sales team to focus their efforts on truly impactful work.
– VIVA Pulse (available in 2023): Module that focuses on the check-in with your employees to better understand their feedback (their feelings, performance and opinions). Anonymous features protect users’ privacy and encourage truthful and honest opinions, giving managers authentic insights into the sentiments of their team. With accurate data-driven insights, VIVA Pulse empowers leaders to make impactful changes to improve the workplace.
– VIVA Amplify: Integration focused on the improvement of the overall employee experience helping your team expand its voice across channels. This module acts as a central hub for communication while assisting users in creating and maintaining meaningful connections across the organization.
Most of these modules (i.e VIVA Connections) are already available and included in Microsoft 365 and ready to be used by any organization with no extra cost. Some of them (VIVA Topics) require an extra license in order to be used, and others (VIVA learning / VIVA insights) offer some free capabilities that can be extended with licensed modules.
VIVA Connections and Syntphony Employee Intranet. Better together!
Syntphony Employee Intranet is a product built on top of Microsoft 365 that offers a full Digital Workplace Solution by using best Microsoft patterns and practices.
It offers a fully customizable content distribution system that enables corporation to effectively manage communications and contents while enhancing platform governance.
Since it’s based on a modern Experience, Syntphony Employee Intranet is fully aligned with all the Microsoft 365 applications and features, including Microsoft Teams and the new VIVA platform. With the aim to offer the best experience to our Microsoft 365 / Syntphony Employee Intranet customers we have integrated VIVA Connections as part of the base product.
The VIVA Connections dashboard is fully embedded in the last version of Syntphony Employee Intranet, acting as a window to the more relevant contents available in Syntphony Employee Intranet / Office 365 for the current user.
We can now offer some Syntphony Employee Intranet components, such as the activity feed, the user favorites or the most used applications as cards in the VIVA Connections catalog, allowing digital workplace administrators to mix notifications coming either from Syntphony Employee Intranet, Office 365 or other VIVA Modules.
By combining VIVA Connections dashboards with the Syntphony Employee Intranet contents governance, the information will be more dynamic and properly addressed to the right user, avoiding the feeling of getting useless information.
Additionally, VIVA Connections is already included in Microsoft 365, so we can get profit from all its features with no extra cost for the organization.
