What Is Microsoft Viva

In this article, we discuss about Microsoft Viva and how to create a Viva Connection step by step. It will be a bit theoretical based on the understanding.....

What is Microsoft Viva?

Microsoft Viva is not a service, it’s an Employee Experience platform for integrating your works, knowledge, learning, and communications in one place intern empowers people and teams to be their best remotely.

It consists of 4 modules,

1. Viva Connections
   It helps users to search or discover required information or content and sites across the organization from the Teams App Bar.
    
2. Viva Insights
   Microsoft Viva Insights in Microsoft Teams shows personalized information based on the activity in M365.  It will tell you that how to manage your activity or work or prepare for upcoming meetings.
    
3. Viva Topics
   You can think of Microsoft Viva Topics as AI powered organizational Wikipedia. When you want to understand a term, Topic cards provides more information.
    
4. Viva Learning
   Microsoft Viva Learning provides numerous courses which will be relevant to your job title, skill set, and experience.

How to set up Viva Connection? 

Use PowerShell command to set up a site as HomeSite 

Prerequisite for running Powershell script command

Role: Admin, install  SharePoint Online Management Shell

Step 1

Connect to SharePoint as a global administrator or Sharepoint administrator in M365.

Connect-SPOService -Url https://YourTenantName-admin.sharepoint.com 

Step 2

On Success, Run the below command 

Set-SPOHomeSite –HomeSiteUrl <YourSiteUrl> 

This command sets a Sharepoint site as a Home Site which is a communication site. HomeSiteUrl --> SiteCollection Url

Cross verify whether the site is home site. To do that follow the below command.  

Get-SPOHomeSite

2.  Enable Global Navigation 

Navigate to your Home site. Home site Settings --> Global Navigations

Follow below steps to set up home site’s navigation for global navigations 

3. Create App package for Viva Connection using Powershell 

Click on the link to the PowerShell script address from Microsoft download center to create Viva Connection package for you. While script executes you will need to provide some value as follows:

• Home site URL - which will become default landing page for Viva 
• Name - Name of the Viva connection package  
• Short description and long descriptions - you can skip if you don’t want 
• Privacy policy - URL of the privacy policy page. In this article, I am running with default policy by pressing Enter. 
• Term of use - URL of term of use page.  In this article, I am running with default term of use by pressing Enter. 
• Company name - Enter your company name 
• Icons - Here to note important thing is icon for Desktop app Team size --> 192X192 and mono chrome icon for Teams App bar --> 32X32

Above steps generate Teams Desktop package in zip file format. You need to upload that in Teams admin center. 

This will create an App and on adding the app it will be available across the organization.

Now Microsoft Viva will be available with internal and external custom build solutions that comes with Viva and engage users to stay connected within the Viva.