Viva Connections: Microsoft Viva Use Cases Partners Should Be Thinking About (Part 1)
Its a new year, Viva la Vida! This phrase has three meanings, its a song by Coldplay, a phrase in Spanish that means “Live Life”, and its my favorite Microsoft Product that I will discuss in this article. Microsoft Viva is currently composed of 4 modules, Viva Connections, Viva Learning, Viva Topics and Viva Insights. I’m not going to spend much time discussing what Viva is, there’s a lot of good content on that. What I’m going to focus on are use cases that our Partners should think about when working with their customers. To create use-cases we must think in terms of scenarios. Take a look at the graphic below. We have to ask these questions in order to generate use-cases.
Let’s begin with Viva Connections. When I think of Viva Connections I think of Intranets and SharePoint. I also think of getting connected with subject matter experts in my organization, accessing my intranet on my mobile device via Microsoft Teams and ACE cards! (More on ACE cards in a moment)
Here are some ideas for use cases our Partners can help their customers with:
Information Architecture
SharePoint Modernization
ACE cards
Viva Connections Desktop
Information Architecture
This part of the process is a big one that your customers will definitely need help and guidance with. Before you even think about technically modernizing your sites, a well thought out Information Architecture should be established so that the intranet will be intuitive, high-performant and valuable. Happy users are happy customers, and happy customers are more likely to adopt Viva Connections.
Let’s begin with Global Navigation. A simple, yet inclusive global navigation structure will be key to getting your customers where they want to go, quickly. Do not overload the global navigation with every link under the sun, hence the recommendation to think about this top level navigation carefully. Overloading the menu with too many elements can lead to performance problems. I’ve always been a fan of Amazon.com global navigation. They sell tons of products, yet they’ve managed to organize navigation to them in a very organized, straightforward manner. They also realize Search is a great tool, no need to provide a link to every single product, when you can just search for what you’re looking for. Most users these days are quite savvy with search.
Forget about subsites, we are now living in the age of flat structures. Via the use of Hub sites, you can make groupings based on sites that have similar topics and content. No need to create nested sites that are difficult to maintain. Remember, less is more.
Some thought should be given to local site navigation, especially for sites that serve as Hub sites, or as I like to think of them, “gateways to related content”. For example, if I am on the Finance site, I expect to have links to Expense Reports, Tax reports, Financial tools to download and other finance related content.
At this time, metadata, along with compliance and retention policies should also be decided upon. Metadata helps your customers have a better search experience. Retention policies, such as how many years content should be retained before it is archived or deleted, should be mapped out now so that when Viva Connections is enabled, there are no worries as to sensitive content being accidentally exposed. Compliance policies should also be in place so that customers don’t violate any compliance laws by accidentally uploading something they shouldn’t.
Personalization can also be helpful if addressed now. Audiences, can be leveraged to target specific content to users and groups of users based on their profiles.
SharePoint Modernization
This infographic does a great job of explaining how to setup Viva Connections. Each one of these items can serve as a use-case to help your customers setup and begin using Viva. The first two boxes compose the SharePoint modernization pieces of the puzzle. Classic SharePoint sites will not give your customers the full fidelity experience they expect when viewing the sites in Microsoft Teams. When clicking on a Classic SharePoint site in Microsoft Teams, new browser windows will spawn, creating a confusing experience. The technical aspect of modernizing sites and pages may involve migrating content from an on-premises SharePoint environment to SharePoint online and/or may also involve transforming SharePoint online classic pages to modern pages. From experience, this may require retrofitting of the pages due to the absence of a 1:1 conversion of classic sites to modern site.
ACE Cards
ACE stands for Adaptive Card Extension. These cards are powered by the SPFx framework. The first time I saw an ACE card, I experienced a wave of nostalgia because they reminded me of the first time I saw SharePoint webparts back in the day. I remember thinking webparts were little “windows of logic“ that could perform transactions independently of the parent web page. ACE cards are similar because they can be used to surface information and interact with users within the Viva Connections dashboard and mobile experience. These cards generate their UI via JSON due to the fact that they use our Adaptive Card Framework which means that a creator of these cards can focus on the business logic instead of the look and feel. Hey Partners!! You can come in and create ACE cards for your customers needs! For example, maybe they need a card on their Viva Connections dashboard so users can view their expense reports. Or maybe the dashboard needs a form for employees to self-attest for COVID exposure. Why not build a library of ACE cards and sell them to your customers? Lots of possibilities here.
Viva Connections desktop
Think of the Viva Connections desktop experience as the face of a customer’s intranet. A lot of work for Partners to help here as well in the realm of helping customers figure out which resources to highlight. A finely tuned and well thought out search experience is another customer need. The icing on the cake is, all of this work will be viewable in Microsoft Teams via the Viva Connections app in full fidelity. That means when customers are navigating and clicking within the experience they will remain within Microsoft Teams without being sent to additional browser windows. Helping your customers identify critical applications they need and exposing them, via ACE cards, on the desktop experience will go a long way to making their workdays a lot more productive by finding information they need quickly.
Customers must also think about personalization. Managers are going to want a different experience vs. CRM leads vs. IT Pro workers. Partners can help with this as well. What about LOB systems and exposing these snippets of data via ACE cards on the desktop experience?!
Let’s help them get there.
I hope this article sparked some ideas ideas on how to help your customers get up and running with Viva Connections. I’ve listed some additional resource but feel free to drop me a line to discuss this subject some more!
Additional Resources