With so many organizations moving to the cloud during the pandemic, there’s been an even greater shift to technology to enable work. To enable remote work, organizations rely on many applications to perform unique tasks. While these applications can be great for completing a specific task, having many applications creates issues including:

• Finding content spread throughout so many different applications

• Knowing which storage location or application is correct for your content

• Switching between apps consistently is a drain on productivity

Microsoft understands that products need to work together, integrate, and increase productivity rather than cause more confusion for employees.

"77% of organizations say that Microsoft Teams usage had 'increased' or 'increased significantly' as a result of COVID"

— According to a recent AIIM report (Mastering your Microsoft 365 and SharePoint Investment)

This makes Teams the perfect place to use as the hub for all work. Teams not only lets users work with other Microsoft 365 products within the application but with external applications and content as well.

With Teams, organizations can enable work to be completed by employees without them ever opening an application outside of Teams. In this first part of my series on Enabling Work from Microsoft Teams I'll detail the Viva Connections App (formerly the Home site app) that allows users to interact seamlessly with your SharePoint hosted Employee Portal or Intranet without having to launch a web browser window.

The Viva Connections app

Most of us have a few programs we open when we start our day and probably keep open all day long. Those might be Microsoft Teams and your web browser for instance. Your IT department has probably set the browser start page for all employees to your Employee Portal so you can get the latest company news and information when you open your browser. While this is great, it's just another application to open to get the information we need throughout the day.

Enter the Viva Connections app. An app that can be deployed to Teams and allows employees to access the Employee Portal or Intranet without leaving Teams. Catching up on organizational news, finding upcoming training events, templates or forms, or other content can now be done easily through one application. There is no need to open your browser and navigate through SharePoint, it can all be seen in Teams by simply click the app in the left side menu bar of Teams.

With SharePoint's new Global Navigation, a unique navigation element can be created and accessed by clicking a second time on the Viva Connections app. Not only do we have our Employee Portal navigation, but we can extend that navigation to Team Sites or other important Hub sites within our overall SharePoint architecture. This second click menu doesn't only incorporate the Global Navigation, but it also surfaces "My News" and "My Sites" - bringing in content from the SharePoint start page and the Microsoft Graph.

What's the big deal?

Switching between applications is not only a drain on productivity, but can be frustrating to employees.

According to a Forrester study:

Using the efficiencies delivered with Microsoft Teams platform allows employees to save, on average, 15 to 25 minutes per day. 

If you look at this as an entire organization over a year, this is enormous time and productivity savings.

With Viva Connections, even though we are utilizing SharePoint to create and host our Employee Portal, as far as our users are concerned, it's all Teams. This causes less confusion on where to go and how to get content. It also allows interaction with the employee portal while still being able to share links and chat with colleagues without switching between Teams and a browser or other applications. This is just one piece in the overall picture of enabling work to be done in Teams.

While the IT team may know that users are interacting with multiple applications with Teams being just a front end, the users themselves often won't know and will feel like they are just interacting with Teams. Just like they probably don't know that Teams is using SharePoint, OneDrive and Exchange Online for the back-end storage of files and chat histories, users likely think that everything is done in Teams itself. You can find more information on this and how to recover Teams content in my previous blog post.

Creating and Adding the App

Review the quick setup guide to plan your Viva Connections experience. Once it’s setup you can display a tab to the employee portal in Teams like this:

Summary

Adding the Viva Connections app to Teams and pinning it for users is an easy and great first step IT or your M365 team can take to start enabling work out of Teams. This can help users find information faster and easier without being confused about where to go or where to save their content. Incorporating apps is often a fast and easy way to bring content from other applications into Microsoft Teams, allowing quick and easy access for employees. This helps build efficiency into work and saves time for your employees.