Viva Connections – A simple way to put your SharePoint Intranet inside Microsoft Teams

With Teams being such a fantastic collaboration tool with so many features, your users are probably working in it most of the time. But what then becomes of your beautiful intranet where news and announcements are posted, employee birthdays are shared and all your forms and policies can be accessed?

With users living in Teams, it’s difficult to get their attention on the intranet, as it requires them to navigate to another application.

But what if you could have the best of both worlds?

Your SharePoint Intranet inside Teams!

Viva Connections means that you can embed your Intranet into Teams, simply adding a link on the left hand side panel, making your intranet just a click away!  

So how do you do it?

Once you’ve created your Intranet, follow the steps below:

1. Firstly, configure a Home Site.
This means setting the site you want to use as your main landing site for your intranet.

You can do this in the SharePoint Admin Center by going to Settings à Home Site and pasting in the url of the site.

2. Configure your global navigation on the SharePoint App Bar. This makes it easier for your users to navigate the intranet inside teams.

From your homesite, click settings, then Global Navigation and configure your navigation.

3. Enable the Viva connections app in the Microsoft Teams admin center

a.       Navigate to Microsoft Teams Admin Center

b.       Go to “Manage Apps”

c.       Search for the Viva Connections app and click on “Customise”.

d. You can now rename it, add your own logo and change the website link to point to your Intranet site.

Make sure it is set to “Allowed” – Viva Connections is blocked by default

e. Now in your Set up policies in the Teams Admin Center, you can add the app to the Teams App Bar by default for your users.

4. If you have pre-pinned the app in for your users in the set up policies, it will also automatically appear for them in the Teams mobile app. You can customise how it looks in the mobile app by navigating to your home site, clicking settings and then clicking “Set up Viva Connections”.

This will give you the ability to add and organise content cards.