Viva Intranet – the components of a modern intranet

Microsoft’s Viva employee experience platform offers new, modular services related to internal communications, on-the-job learning, well-being at work, and sharing and finding information. One of the modules, Viva Connections, is designed specifically for making better use of the services provided through the intranet.

A Viva-era intranet is built on the modern platforms of SharePoint, Yammer, and Teams, and it provides targeted and user-specific content in the context of work, through Teams and mobile channels. In this post, we will take a look at what Viva Connections is concretely made of, and what is the easiest way to make an existing intranet Viva-compatible.

What is Viva Connections?

Let’s start with what Viva Connections is not. It is not a standalone content platform or an entirely new way to build an intranet. The modern M365 intranet is still constructed using SharePoint’s content management capabilities, by designing and implementing structures and functionalities for publishing rich content.

Viva Connections offers new ways to:

widen the audience of intranet content (via Teams and mobile channels)
improve the targeting and relevance of intranet content.

The aim is to offer each user easy access to intranet content that is most relevant to them. Viva Connections offers access to the intranet through Teams and the Teams mobile app, helps keep up-to-speed with the new smart feed, and enables the implementation of a user-specific electronic desktop without heavy code.

Viva Connections is commissioned by activating it on the SharePoint home page (typically the intranet landing page). With activation, two new and modern web parts are added to SharePoint: the Feed and the Dashboard. After activation, the Viva Connections app can be installed in Teams, giving access to the intranet directly from the web and desktop versions of Teams, as well as the mobile app.

The Feed

The Feed is a topical news feed, where each user sees news, videos, discussions, and other content relevant to them. The Feed can be added to any modern web page. In the Viva Connections mobile app in Teams, it is displayed in a separate tab. While the Feed cannot be configured as such, there are many ways to affect its content.

The Feed content consists of:

news pages of modern SharePoint communications sites
conversations and announcements in Yammer communities that the user is following or that concern the entire organization
video news links, i.e. Stream videos published separately as news, saved in SharePoint and shared with the entire organization.

In the future, other content sources will also be added to the Feed. Not all content is equal in the Feed – both users and content creators can influence the content shown. A user can “subscribe” to content by following pages and communities, as well as by indicating that they wish to see more or less of similar content in the future (in the mobile feed). Content creators, in turn, can promote their content by publishing a piece of news through an organisation news site, specifying a target audience, and boosting the news.

The Feed is not fully chronological. It has three different content sections, and the order of the contents in these is affected by the promotion activities for the content (boosting, featuring), the creator of the content (content created by people working closely with a user, such as one’s supervisor, is prioritized), and the content source site. The Feed is customized smartly with the purpose of offering an appropriate mix of content that the user wishes to see and content that they ought to see.

The Dashboard

The Dashboard is a special SharePoint page and a web part displaying content. It can be used to provide each user group easy access to key links, functionalities, and information. The Dashboard consists of cards that resemble web parts. It can be displayed on the intranet landing page or another selected location. Like the Feed, it has its own tab in the Teams mobile app.

There are different Dashboard cards available, and more cards can be created easily. There is only one Dashboard, but it can be customized according to the needs of different user groups by assigning each card a target user group. It is also possible to create different language versions of the Dashboard, just like other SharePoint pages.

Viva Connections in Teams

The Viva Connections app makes intranet sites easy to browse through the Teams app menu. Navigating the site, browsing content, interacting (such as commenting), and basic editing are all possible within Teams. New content cannot yet be created in Teams, however.

In addition to the browsable intranet site, the Teams app features the SharePoint app menu, i.e. global navigation, and the most important sites and featured news for each user.

Viva Connections can be used through the Teams mobile app – the installation of a separate app is not required. Unlike the web and desktop versions of Teams, the mobile app does not display the intranet site as such. The mobile view includes three content tabs:

Dashboard
Feed
Resources, i.e. global navigation that provides access to the intranet home page, among other destinations.

Vivafication – the easiest way to make an existing intranet Viva-compatible

How do you implement Viva Connections, then? Consultants’ favorite phrase “It depends!” applies here: the workload connected to commissioning Viva Connections varies from a couple of hours to ten days or more, depending on the starting point and objectives.

The first prerequisite is that the intranet is built in a modern SharePoint environment. Viva Connections does not work on traditional sites or in the server version of SharePoint. While not all content needs to be modern, your home site and key news sources, at the very least, need to be modernized before implementing Viva Connections.

If the intranet is modern to start with and its structures are suitable, the steps required depend on the desired improvements. If the aim is simply to improve access to the existing intranet through Teams and mobile applications, all that is needed are app activation and Teams installation. Keep in mind, however, that the Dashboard and Feed will be visible to mobile users even if they are not added to the intranet home page.

If the objective is to achieve more relevant and topical communications through an intranet that is already modern and functions well as it is, technical activation alone is not enough. You should design and (if necessary) adapt the information architecture, i.e. the site structure, as well as the prioritization methods and target audiences to ensure that they support following and targeting. In order to offer high-quality content in the feed consistently, it is also important to create internal publication guidelines and to ensure that content creators follow these guidelines.

When communication on topical matters through the intranet works as it should, it is possible to start using the Dashboard, i.e. the electronic desktop. It’s easy to get started creating cards, but you can also reach for the sky – various integrations and functional mini-apps are now more achievable than ever. When designing the dashboard, the first step is to determine the most important actions for each target audience. It is possible to proceed little by little, one audience at a time.

Implementation

Once the goals and schedule have been confirmed, it is finally time to start thinking about the implementation of Viva Connections. If the intranet is modern as it is and its structure is suitable, a large part of the preparatory work can be done in the background and the actual implementation does not require much time.

Typical preparatory steps before implementing Viva Connections include the following:

setting the intranet home page as your organization home site
setting intranet hub navigation as global navigation
defining and creating the target audiences to be used for content targeting
configuring the key news sites (with the Organization news site setting)
creating internal guidelines for news publication (location, boosting, audiences) and providing training for content creators
activating the Dashboard and creating cards – at least adding the key links for mobile use
importing relevant videos from the legacy Stream service into SharePoint
updating publication guidelines, as well as instructions concerning any Yammer community memberships.

When the preliminary work has been done with care, the actual implementation requires little effort. The actual tasks to be completed are the following:

adding the Feed web part onto the intranet landing page (to replace other news feeds or to be featured alongside them)
adding the Dashboard web part to the landing page
configuring the Teams app and pinning it to the application bar
informing users.

Viva Connections is the only entirely free Viva service, meaning it is included in the existing licenses. Since the implementation of the Connections Teams app alone supports and enhances internal communications and helps to create a sense of community, this shouldn’t be something that requires lengthy deliberation. Microsoft offers high-quality documentation on the implementation of Viva Connections.

This blog post has also been published on Sulava website https://sulava.com/en/modern-work/viva-intranet-the-components-of-a-modern-intranet/.

Intranet Information Architecture – Part 2 – Purpose and scope of the intranet

This is the second post in my blog post series explaining how to plan and implement an effective intranet information architecture. In the first part we got the ball rolling with the basics, and now it’s time to start defining the purpose and scope of the intranet.

In the upcoming parts of this blog post series we will then dive deeper in all areas of the planning process:

Understanding the basics – what is information architecture
Defining purpose, roles and contents of the intranet (THIS POST)
Planning the physical infrastructure (hubs and sites)
Organizing contents in topic sites, navigation and metadata
Creating awesome and accessible pieces of information using content pages
Improving discoverability with landing pages and additional paths
Ways to take care of content findability
Implementing processes to keep the content up-to-date

Part 2 – Purpose and scope of the intranet

It might sound trivial – of course we know what an intranet is. It’s a place where we bury all the information and materials related to our business and support functions. Usually there’s also some kind of a news feed and lunch menu available.

However, from the information architecture point of view, we have two extremely important questions to answer:

Who are the users and what are their use cases – why on Earth do they visit the intranet? What are they looking for?
What are the contents of the intranet – how does the intranet differ from a business unit public team? Or Yammer news feed? And what about file shares?

When we are able to present answers to those questions with clearness and clarity, we have actually defined the purpose, role and scope of our intranet – and after that it’s suddenly much easier to plan the information architecture so that intranet stuff is easy to find and stays up-to-date.

It starts with the Playbook

I have to admit – personally, I don’t fancy the word playbook. We’re all adults here and should know how to play this game already. But it’s the word Microsoft uses and I don’t have anything better to offer so let’s be happy and stick with it.

Usually, playbooks are used to support the move from a traditional way of working (file shares & email) to modern, cloud-based applications, and more communicative and open working culture. In a nutshell, playbook is a presentation which describes:

roles of communication and collaboration tools in our organization
ways of working together using those tools

If you find yourself thinking “well, I didn’t need any playbook to understand how to work”, you’re most likely right. The need for a playbook is quite a new phenomenon. Previously we only had two tools with very clear roles: email (to communicate) and file shares (to collaborate). And even with the rise of SharePoint portals and workspaces there was still just one simple place where to work together.

But in a modern, Microsoft 365 -powered workplace there are plenty of different apps with quite similar possible use cases. You can store and share your files using OneDrive, Teams or SharePoint. You can post announcements as SharePoint news, Yammer group conversations, Teams channel announcements or private chats – and yes, you can still use email. And if we don’t agree when to use what as an organization, it will be a mess.

Some concrete examples of playbook contents:

Pic 1: Explaining the move from old communication and collaboration tools to the new ones

Pic 2: Explaining the basic roles and use cases of the new tools

Pic 3: Explaining ways of working: content creation process on Teams, publishing & outer loop discussions on SharePoint and Yammer

Well, okay – we could have a dedicated blog post series for the playbook, but let’s get back to the topic! So why do we need the playbook to plan Intranet information architecture? The answer lies in defining the scope of the intranet. With the help of playbook we can pick any single piece of information and answer the question: Should this reside on the Intranet?

Yes, we do want to be a little bit exclusive. There are some qualifications for the intranet content. In my opinion, contents of the intranet should be:

Published – we don’t want to have any drafts or unfinished or not-yet-approved content on the intranet
Non-negotiable – there’s definitely time and place for the discussion about the content, but it should happen either before publishing (when working together) or after publishing in enterprise social network platform (like Yammer), and not directly as a part of intranet content
Valid and up-to-date – it’s okay to have an archive but it should be clearly separated from the operative content in active use

In a nutshell, playbook is a presentation of the design of your digital workplace. Intranet is one element (service, platform) of that workplace, and it should have a very clear specific role and scope. But what about users and their needs?

User scenarios – what are you doing here?

Every intranet is – of course – unique. But after 12 years of planning and implementing them I dare to say this: they do have a lot in common, too. The two most important, core use cases for every intranet I’ve seen are these:

I want to find the information I need (in order to thrive at my job)
I want to be aware of what’s happening (in order to feel connected)

So it’s pretty safe to assume that these two should be kept on top of mind during the planning process. But in order to dig deeper in and find out how your intranet should serve the organization, it’s important to identify business-specific scenarios.

A scenario or high level use case is a written description of how the intranet is used and what business challenge it will solve. Simple way to document scenarios is to write sentences with these four elements:

As someone in [team, unit, role]…
I want to [do something]…
Using [tools]..
In order to [goal / success measure]

For example: As a Contoso employee, I want to glance through the global news feed every morning while commuting using SharePoint mobile app in order to keep on track of the important updates and announcements.

Microsoft provides a lots of SharePoint-specific material with very similar scenario model and even ready-to-use workshop materials – you can find them here: https://resources.techcommunity.microsoft.com/resources/SharePoint-adoption/#scenarios (Envision Workshop Concept).

Wrap up!

So, in the pursuit of proper intranet information architecture we ended up (re)designing the whole digital workplace – and that’s not a bad thing to do! At the moment way too many organizations live in a communication & collaboration chaos.

Ideally, the process for defining the scope, role and purpose of the Intranet goes like this:

Identifying digital workplace scenarios
Planning digital workplace tools and ways of working to support the scenarios
Explaining and visualizing them with the Playbook
Recognizing intranet-specific scenarios, tools and ways of working –> purpose, role and scope of the intranet

With this information it’s easy to continue to the next step in the intranet information architecture planning process: planning the physical infrastructure (hubs and sites). See you next time!

Psst, if you’re willing to achieve more in the modern workplace with Microsoft 365, let’s meet in Las Vegas @ SharePoint Conference!
Use discount code JOKISALO and save $50: https://sharepointna.com/#!/register?utm_term=JOKISALO

Intranet Information Architecture – Part 1 – What is it?

This is the first post in my blog post series explaining how to plan and implement an effective intranet information architecture. In this first part we will start with the basics – what is information architecture, what does it mean in the context of intranets, what skills are needed in order to plan and implement it, and what are the main areas involved and steps to be taken in the planning process.

In the next parts of this blog post series we will dive deeper in these main areas of the planning process:

Understanding the basics – what is information architecture (THIS POST)
Defining purpose, roles and contents of the intranet
Planning the physical infrastructure (hubs and sites)
Organizing contents in topic sites, navigation and metadata
Creating awesome and accessible pieces of information using content pages
Improving discoverability with landing pages and additional paths
Ways to take care of content findability
Implementing processes to keep the content up-to-date

Phew, there’s lot on our plate! But let’s start with the basics 🙂

Part 1 – What does it mean?

Building your own modern intranet site has never been this easy – in the simplest case you can just visit lookbook.microsoft.com, pick your favorite template and copy it to your tenant.

Despite the fact that there’s no more need to plan and implement your own technical solution or platform for your intranet from the scratch, there’s still one critical aspect which can’t be copy-pasted or implemented as is. In order to build a great intranet, you really need to plan and implement a proper intranet information architecture which is unique to your organization.

What are we talking about?

So what actually is information architecture? Wikipedia describes it pretty well:

Information architecture (IA) is the structural design of shared information environments; the art and science of organizing and labelling — , intranets, — to support usability and findability; and an emerging community of practice focused on bringing principles of design, architecture and information science to the digital landscape.

In a nutshell IA means taking care of these two things:
1) Organizing content
2) Usability and findability of the content

Organizing content means that we recognize the different contexts of the content, group items together based on that context (with structure or labels) and usually also apply some hierarchy to it. A traditional library is a typical example of this – books are divided into different categories (sci-fi, cooking etc) and arranged by the author. However, it used to be difficult to find the book you’re looking for and you needed to walk back and forth between the shelves in order to figure out the navigation logic.

The second part – usability and findability – is necessary in order to make the organized content easy to use and discover. Google search engine is a good example of this – it’s extremely easy to use and you do find stuff, but the results are not organized and you need to rely on your own media reading skills to figure out if the contents are valid or trustful or in the context of your search.

How does it apply to intranets?

When we talk about intranets – and specifically modern SharePoint intranets – organizing content means that we create a physical structure (sites and libraries and folders) and necessary labels (metadata) for the content, and present it to the user with pre-planned logic (navigation). We also plan our page templates with layouts and elements (web parts) to organize the contents of the single piece of information. Pretty simple!

When it comes to usability, things tend to have more layers and variations based on your needs and resources. Even though we don’t have many out-of-the-box options to modify the user interface, we can still take care of usability by making sure that the intranet is easy, efficient and satisfying to use. Some tips below.

Easy to use
- offer training, tips, how-to-guidance for the most important use cases
- create color themes with sufficient contrast ratios and page layouts with clear visual sections
- implement landing pages which will guide the user to the content and provide context
- make sure that every page has contact information available
Efficient to use
- support mobile use
- implement multi-channel publishing – push intranet contents to other apps or let your users access content from where they work (eg. a tab on Teams channel)
- limit the amount of content visible with audience targeting
- use elements offering personalized content based on Microsoft Graph data, eg. suggested news
- make sure your internet bandwidth is reasonable
Satisfying to use
- make it beautiful! Use pictures!
- create interesting, well written content which is up to date

And what about findability? That’s a very important part, because the most common complaint about the intranet is that “You can’t find stuff”. There are actually two closely connected topics to consider here:

Findability, which means the ability to FIND the content you’re actively looking for, either using search or navigation
Discoverability, which in addition to findability means the ability to NOTICE, EXPLORE, WALK INTO the content (especially changes, new and updated content) even if you were not actively looking for it.

We’ll have a dedicated blog post for both of these later on in this series.

What do you need to know?

So, it seems that planning and implementing information architecture does require something else than just creating top level sites for your intranet contents. It’s easy to ruin the user experience of your technically advanced intranet with the lack of information architecture.

However, it’s not rocket science. There are three main skills involved:

Users and their needs. Remember – intranet is always a service platform, internal support function which main role is to offer the employees the information they need in order to excel in their job. So the first thing you need to know is who is going to use the intranet and why.
Contents. It’s essential to be familiar with the content in order to organize it. In a tiny organization there might be someone who knows everything about everything, but in normal case we work in two different levels – there’s group of people who know a little bit of everything (planning the overall intranet structure and main areas) and other groups of people who know everything about their specific subject (content experts or owners planning the contents and navigation of their own site)
Technology. There are a bunch of technical limitations and best practices affecting how the information architecture can and should be implemented. For example, by default in modern SharePoint people can only follow sites, not categories or metadata. This means that if you want to allow the users to follow certain type of news, you shouldn’t put all your news articles in one centralized news site but instead make them decentralized in the related topic sites.

How does the planning process look like?

I’m happy and honored to have been able to participate in planning and implementing more than 70 intranets during my career. Despite the fact that these projects vary in size, resources, technology and complexity, there’s always a certain “base model” of planning process I tend to follow.

In the beginning (black row) we define the users and their needs, the roles of the intranet, and connections to other information work apps and services. We also figure out what are the contents of the intranet in high level and who are the people taking responsibility of each of the main content areas.

In the second phase (blue row) the main physical structures are planned. Contents are divided to sites, and based on the amount of content and complexity of the intranet, hubs and main level (hub) navigations are planned by the intranet core project group.

Then it’s time to dive deeper in the content (green row) with the content owners and start planning the contents and local navigation of each topic site. Local navigation is usually organized by topics or themes, but during that work it’s also useful to figure out what other labels we should apply to content. These labels (=metadata) are later on used to create additional paths and improve findability and discoverability.

When we do know the contents it’s time to plan how to present the information for the user. In this phase (red row) we decide what kind of elements there are in each page and in what kind of layout supports the content the best. This is also the right time to talk about terminology and style of the written language and other contents of the intranet.

So we started from the high level general view of the intranet contents and in each of the first four rows we stepped into more detailed level. In the last phase (yellow row) it’s time to take a step back and return the focus to the higher level. Now that we know what’s happening inside the intranet it’s time to plan the landing pages (intranet front page, section or topic site landing pages) and additional paths to content. In the last step we also define the ways and processes to keep the contents up-to-date.

That’s it! Hope you enjoyed the ride and got an idea of the meaning and importance of a proper information architecture. I will be presenting a session of this topic in SharePoint & Microsoft 365 Conference next May in Las Vegas – hope to see you there! If you register by this link https://sharepointna.com/#!/register?utm_term=JOKISALO or just use my family name JOKISALO as a discount code, you’ll save $50 😊

Three tips for Modern SharePoint

Modern SharePoint is beautiful, mobile-friendly and fun to use. Moreover, it’s an increasingly effective platform to tell your story, digitalize business processes and help employees to share and find information.

Modern Communication and Team sites have been around for years already, but just like the whole Microsoft 365 stack, they are constantly evolving. If your daily tasks (or hobbies!) do not include checking out the roadmap, admin message center and all the blogs around there, it’s very likely that you are not aware of all the fancy new things available. (… and don’t worry, that still happens when keeping track of new things IS your job :D)

In this post I’ll cover three very different features which may be useful to know about whether you are planning to introduce Modern Sites to your organization or to finetune already existing solutions.

Newsletter or news digest is an out-of-the-box way to manually send teasers of selected news articles via email. It’s especially useful in these two cases:

1) If your organization has previously relied heavily on mass email communication (proactive), and you’re trying to move to the Intranet News world (reactive), it might be wise to also provide the information in familiar email form during the onboarding or adoption phase, by sending the summary news digest for example once a week.

2) Because you can easily select the news articles included and the receivers of the newsletter, news digest is also an effective way to provide extra targeted information for special groups. For example, you can send a newsletter to team leaders once a month reminding them of the most important HR news.

How to send a newsletter? It’s easy! Just locate the News web part configured to show the articles you want to include in your news digest. Then click Show all to get to the news archive, and there you’ll find Email a news digest -button. Detailed guidance can be found here: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/create-and-send-a-news-digest-42efc3c6-605f-4a9a-85d5-1f9ff46019bf

Look book – copy the examples in your tenant!

Look book is a website by Microsoft with almost 20 examples of modern SharePoint sites. The purpose of the site is to help you discover what kind of experiences can be built with Modern SharePoint and also get an idea of how these sites usually look and feel.

Look book does not only show nice pictures of sites but it also provides a list of features and elements (web parts) used in each examples – with links to actual guidance on how to use and configure the web parts.

Although Microsoft already published the first version of the SharePoint look book during the Ignite conference in 2018, they only recently gave it a new and straightforward URL address (https://lookbook.microsoft.com/) and the fabulous option to provision the examples in your own tenant with one click! So nowadays, when you find a great example to use as a starting point for your own site, you don’t need to build your site from scratch manually.

Custom List Formatting

SharePoint lists and libraries are flexible and efficient means to store, analyze and report your files and data. However, modern SharePoint lists used to be a little bit limited when it comes to changing the way the data is displayed.

With the new column and view formatting capabilities, you can customize the look and feel of your list – and you can also add actions to streamline user interaction with the data! Typical use cases for list formatting:

use conditional formatting to highlight the most important data or visualize changes
highlight every other row or add icons or other visual elements to make your data easier to read or understand
add an action (for example link to start workflow) to allow smooth interaction with the data
have the branding, look and feel as you wish – which is important for example when you show the list in your Intranet page

How to get started? Option to format the list view or column is available out-of-the-box in list user experience, but I’d recommend starting with official documentation: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/dev/declarative-customization/column-formatting. There are lots of examples and ideas available in GitHub, and when you find something useful, you can just copy it for yourself and start tweaking.

PS Here you can find my presentation slides about Custom Formatting: https://sulava-my.sharepoint.com/:b:/p/katja_jokisalo/EQPPdJqkYhRPhlx6RmYCsjwBKC2LoYmAtOuwB0Mj-BKt9Q?e=enjPeF

Wanna hear more? Join me in the SharePoint Conference this May!

The SharePoint Conference is the world’s biggest and most comprehensive event empowering you to achieve more in the modern workplace with Microsoft 365. It’s happening in May 19-21 in Las Vegas. I’m proud to be part of the team presenting there!

This conference offers more than 200 sessions, panels and workshops to cover all the new stuff, as well as deep dives into existing technologies and practical how-to guidance to help you plan and implement them. This year there will also be specific sessions for people who are new to Office 365 or modern workplace concept.

And of course, it’s much more than SharePoint nowadays: we’ll be talking about Teams, OneDrive, Yammer, Stream, Power Platform and more. Don’t miss your chance to join – register now! If you register by this link https://sharepointna.com/#!/register?utm_term=JOKISALO or just use my family name JOKISALO as a discount code, you’ll save $50 😘 See you there!