New Intranet ? === Think Viva Connections...

I hear you ask - Why ?

Because it your same SharePoint online Modern Intranet just available to more staff; staff that does not go to the internet browser that often, staff that works in Teams most of their day. Which we would all agree is growing more now than ever before.

So how is it different from just adding a SharePoint page as a Teams tab ? It is, mildly but impactfully. Viva Connections app provides an additional left menu on top of the SharePoint page within the Teams that acts as global navigation, personalised news, and my sites. This is tightly integrated with Microsoft Graph. Microsoft Graph provides personalised services.

To achieve this left menu and your Viva Connections Intranet, you need to have something called a SharePoint Home site. The Home site is a Modern Communications template based SharePoint site collection that is set as a home site with PowerShell below.

Set-SPOHomeSite -HomeSiteUrl <url>        

Once you have the home site set up, there are a couple of additional settings that appear in the site setting for the newly set up home site. An important one is Global Navigation.

Global navigation is the navigation that is now shared amongst all sites in your SharePoint tenancy. This is your intranet that can be accessed from anywhere you are in your tenancy.

Once it is all set up, you will have 4 menus items in the app bar on the left that resides over all sites in the tenancy. Global navigation with custom icon and title, My Sites, My News and My Files.

At this stage these app bar menus are not extensible. But if, which I really hope, Microsoft enables for custom app bar menus, it has a potential to become new the app delivery platform for organisations on their modern workplace journey.

Once you package it all into a Teams Viva Connections you get a teams app as below.

As you would notice, all your app bar menus are embedded into one long list of items, except one - files. Files are available in a separate app called files. This app have been independently available for a while but it would be good if it can be integrated back into the intranet menu or at least be able to have custom menu or differentiation of the various information types.

For now, for here just this much. Hope to bring more on Viva Connections and other Viva products in the near future.

Namaste.