Viva Connections, part of Microsoft Viva, is your gateway to a modern employee experience. The Viva connections app incorporates a customizable dashboard, the feed, and relevant resources all in one experience in the Microsoft Teams desktop and mobile app.

This Public preview release includes the ability to:

1. Set a SharePoint home site from the SharePoint admin center
2. Create, author, and manage a dashboard from the home site
3. Use Video news links to communicate announcements
4. Use the new Dashboard and Feed web parts on the home site
5. Brand the Viva Connections app for the desktop and mobile experiences for Android and iOS

Note: The preview is off by default and requires admin configuration to enable.

This message is associated with Microsoft 365 Roadmap ID: 86542

When this will happen

The Viva Connections Public preview release will begin rolling out starting September 9th and is expected to be completely rollout by September 20th.

Note: Many customers will notice that certain Viva Connections features will become available in SharePoint before the Viva connections app can be enabled in Teams. It’s recommended that you prepare for Viva Connections now but plan to enable the full experience in the Teams admin center after September 20th.

How this will affect your organization

The Viva connections app in Microsoft Teams will be blocked by default. A Teams admin can enable and customize the Viva Connections app in the Teams admin center once a home site in SharePoint has been designated and the dashboard has been published.

Set up home site from the SharePoint admin center

A home site can now be set from the SharePoint admin center instead of using PowerShell. From this home site, a dashboard can be created and configured for use in the Viva Connections app. Learn more about setting up a home site from SharePoint admin center.

Set up the Viva Connections dashboard for the first time

Once you’ve set your home site, you can create the Viva Connections dashboard from the home site’s settings panel. Then, create custom dashboard cards that are targeted to help employees find relevant resources and complete essential tasks.

Microsoft also recommends use of the Viva Connections Extensibility for building even more engaging custom experiences for your dashboard.

Use Video news links to communicate with your organization

Videos are an engaging way to reach users in your organization. Videos hosted on SharePoint sites can be published as Video news links from any SharePoint organizational news site. Video news links will appear in the Viva Connections Feed. Learn more about Video news links.

Use the new Dashboard and Feed web parts on the home site

Once you’ve set up the dashboard, you can use the Dashboard web part on the home site to surface Viva Connections content in SharePoint. Use the Feed web part on the home site to display a personalized list of conversations and news across the organization.

Customize Viva Connections branding for the desktop and mobile experience

In the Teams admin center, upload the logo or icon your organization would like to use for the Viva Connections experience. This logo or icon will appear in the Teams app bar for both desktop and mobile. Clicking on that logo will launch the Viva connections experience.

What you need to do to prepare

Viva Connections is an optional application that brings news, resources, and tasks into one place. Microsoft recommend that you plan to build and deploy your Viva Connections app as a part of your organization’s employee experience.

Review the Viva Connections overview where you will learn how to prepare your tenant and find step-by-step guidance on how to deploy Viva Connections for your organization.

Microsoft is currently rolling out SharePoint app bar and Global navigation to SharePoint online tenants. By default the home icon in app bar is linked to the SharePoint start page. To change this behavior, you need to enable the global navigation. Enabling and customizing global navigation in SharePoint requires a home site.

SharePoint online home site is also required to use Microsoft Viva connections in Microsoft Teams desktop client.

So, if you are planning to customize the global navigation or use Microsoft Viva connections in Microsoft Teams, first you have to set up a home site for your SharePoint online tenant. Home site is a SharePoint site that you create and set as the top landing page for all users in your intranet. You can set only one SharePoint site as a home site which must be a communication site.

Steps to set a site as your home site

1. Create a communication site to set it as the home site or use existing communication site.
2. Customize the communication site by adding navigation, header, footer, site logo, news, events and other web parts as per your requirements and brand.
3. Use PowerShell commands to set a communication site as the home site.

Use PowerShell to set a communication site as the home site

After you create and customize the communication site that you want to use as your home site, you need to run a PowerShell commands to set it as your home site. To run this commands, you must be a global admin or SharePoint admin in your Microsoft 365 tenant.

Using SharePoint Online PowerShell

1. Download the latest version of SharePoint Online Management Shell.

2. Connect to SharePoint admin site as a global admin or SharePoint admin using below command:

Connect-SPOService -Url https://<tenant>-admin.sharepoint.com

3. Run below command to set a communication site as the home site:

Set-SPOHomeSite -HomeSiteUrl https://<tenant>.sharepoint.com/sites/<communicationsite>

Using PnP PowerShell

You can use PnP PowerShell Set-PnPHomeSite command to set the home site for your SharePoint tenant.

Connect-PnPOnline -Url https://<tenant>-admin.sharepoint.com/ -Interactive
Set-PnPHomeSite -HomeSiteUrl "https://<tenant>.sharepoint.com/sites/<communicationsite>"

Using CLI for Microsoft 365

You can use CLI for Microsoft 365 spo homesite set command to set the specified communication site as the Home Site.

m365 login
m365 spo homesite set --siteUrl https://<tenant>.sharepoint.com/sites/<communicationsite>

Points to remember

• Only one communication site can be set as the home site.
• Search scope for the site will be changed to tenant-wide search.
• The site will be automatically set up as an organization news site.
• The first time you set up a home site, it might take up to several minutes for the changes to take effect.
• If you run the above command again to switch your home site to a different site, it might take up to 2 hours.
• Home site can be registered as a hub site, but it can’t be associated with a hub.

Unregister a home site from your tenant

If you have registered a site as a home site in your tenant previously and now you don’t want to have any home site in your tenant, you need to run the following PowerShell command with administrator privileges:

Remove-SPOHomeSite

This removes the current SharePoint Online Home Site setting. Note that you do not need to specify the URL of your home site.

Learn more

• Set up a SharePoint home site from the SharePoint admin center
• Set SharePoint site home page using PnP PowerShell and CLI for Microsoft 365
• Set SharePoint site home page using PnP PowerShell and CLI for Microsoft 365
• SharePoint Online: Empty Recycle Bin using PnP PowerShell
• Change SharePoint Online List URL using PnP PowerShell
• Update SharePoint Page Banner Image using PnP PowerShell
• Add/Update image columns in SharePoint/Microsoft Lists using PnP PowerShell
• SharePoint Online: Apply JSON View formatting using PnP PowerShell
• SharePoint Online: Apply JSON View formatting using CLI for Microsoft 365

Sign language interpreter video will be prioritized in Teams meetings, making them more visible and using higher quality video. PowerPoint Live in Teams will allow users to magnify slides in their personal experience of a meeting. Microsoft Viva admin becomes more organized but hasn’t yet got its own admin center. More on this week’s episode:

Sign Language View in Teams meetings - #260

This week on the 365 Message Center Show

In this week’s show:

— Changes to navigation in Outlook for Android — MC450188
 — Outlook for Windows: Cloud Signatures Coming Soon — MC450845
 — Sign Language View — MC450498
 — PowerPoint Live in Teams: Magnify Slide — MC452198
 — New Viva admin experience in M365 Admin Center — MC452213
 — Announcing the New Look of Office for the Web — MC452253
 — Stories available for public preview in Yammer and Microsoft Viva Engage beginning early November — MC452234
 — New home experience for Viva Connections desktop — MC447338

Join Daniel Glenn and Darrell as a Service Webster as they cover the latest messages in the Microsoft 365 Message Center.

Check out Daniel and Darrell’s own YouTube channels at:
Daniel — https://www.youtube.com/DanielGlenn
Darrell — https://www.youtube.com/modernworkmentor

Select a podcast app below to open our podcast on your favorite device!

Alternatively manually add our podcast via your favorite app:
https://www.messagecentershow.com/feed.xml

View ALL app options on our website: http://MessageCenter.show

See all the other 365 Message Center Show posts: #365MCS Recap Posts

Originally published at Daniel Glenn.

Sign Language View in Teams meetings was originally published in REgarding 365 on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Reminder: We have moved our YouTube channel! Our live streams have shifted to Youtube.com/365mcs
Visit the new channel, subscribe and turn on notifications to keep tuning into the show.

If your organization is using Viva Connections in Teams a new home experience will be arriving soon. The new landing page will show dashboard cards, news and communities feed, resources menu and frequent sites. If your org subscribes to other Viva apps, you can navigate to them from this new home experience. The question is, what happens to your existing home site? Find out on this episode.

New home experience for Viva Connections desktop - #259

This week on the 365 Message Center Show

In this week’s show:

It’s the week of Microsoft Ignite and we’re expecting plenty of announcements. Daniel and Darrell share their thoughts on this and more:

— Announcing de-duplication of contacts in Outlook Web — MC448368
 — New home experience for Viva Connections desktop — MC447338
 — New Teams Powered Encoder events — MC447685
 — Microsoft Teams zero-install link unfurling — MC447686
 — New praise compose experience in Teams and praise trends in Viva Insights — MC448356

Join Daniel Glenn and Darrell as a Service Webster as they cover the latest messages in the Microsoft 365 Message Center.

Check out Daniel and Darrell’s own YouTube channels at:
Daniel — https://www.youtube.com/DanielGlenn
Darrell — https://www.youtube.com/modernworkmentor

Select a podcast app below to open our podcast on your favorite device!

Alternatively manually add our podcast via your favorite app:
https://www.messagecentershow.com/feed.xml

View ALL app options on our website: http://MessageCenter.show

See all the other 365 Message Center Show posts: #365MCS Recap Posts

Originally published at Daniel Glenn.

New home experience for Viva Connections desktop was originally published in REgarding 365 on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Another day, another weird SharePoint problem. We’re working on a client Intranet, and just launched it yesterday. Everything works great and the client is happy. But, as is often the case, we needed to make a few tweaks to the Site Nav based on user feedback. (An Intranet is never done, folks.)

If you look at the screenshot of the site banner below, you can see the issue. There are extraneous icons on the far right, and the Edit link is missing for the Site Nav. That means we can’t make any changes to the Site Nav. There’s no settings page for it and there’s no workaround that I could find.

That is, until I posted the quandary to my MVP channels and Cathy Dew (@catpaint1) gave me an obscure fix. (I shouldn’t need to know exactly who on the Product Team to contact when something like this happens. It’s a bug and it should be fixed. I feel for all of you out there who must go into support ticket hell to resolve these things.)

If you ever get yourself into this state – and if you use Edge, you may well get here – this will fix things for you. (Another option is to switch to Chrome, but that feels wrong.)

This may happen to you if the following things are true:

• You use Edge as your browser
• You’ve enabled Viva Connections
• You’ve opened the Intranet in Microsoft Teams in the browser
• You’re in any SharePoint site and want to edit the Site Nav

The people who manage the Intranet are the most likely to do all of these things, and in the sequence that causes the problem.

The fix is simple if you’re used to the tooling but may not be familiar to you if you haven’t used the Developer Tools. Trust me, it’s not as bad as it looks. Here are the steps.

• Open the Developer tools in your browser by hitting the F12 key
• If you haven’t ever done this before, you’ll get this dialog:

• Click the Open DevTools button. If you’d like to avoid this dialog in the future, check the Remember my decision box first.
• The Developer Tools will open on the right side of the screen (by default – if you’ve used them before, they will be wherever you last docked them).
• Click the Console tab. If your screen isn’t very big, you may need to click on the >> to see the tab.

• At the bottom of the panel, you’ll have a command prompt. (You may well see a whole bunch of errors and other junk in that panel. To be honest, Microsoft does a horrible job cleaning up their debugging messages and spurious errors. But that’s a diatribe for another day.)
• Type localStorage.hostedApp and hit Enter. If you see the 'viva1p' value like I do below, that’s the culprit.

• Type localStorage.hostedApp = null and hit Enter. You’ll see the value is now null.

• Refresh the browser and all shall be good with the world – until the next time you open Microsoft Teams in the browser and navigate to the Intranet. (I’ve been sitting here toggling this back and forth to test it.)

What’s happening here is Microsoft Teams – the Viva Connections app in Teams, actually – is setting a value in the localStorage of your browser. That value for hostedApp tells SharePoint to render the page in a Teams-friendly way, with those extra icons on the right. When we go to the site in SharePoint instead, that value is still set, and the page renders with those icons. It also happens to break the Edit link for the Site Nav.

This fix ONLY sets the localStorage.hostedApp value in your browser to null. It doesn’t do anything dangerous or scary.

Note that this is a BUG. Microsoft knows about it, and one might hope they will fix it – soon. Until then, we have this fix.