How to Combine Your Intranet with Microsoft Teams

At the bottom of the pyramid, we see personal storage capabilities that are fulfilled with OneDrive and right at the top we have rarified, high-quality information that relevant to everyone that would live on the intranet or on a SharePoint Communication Site.

It is the middle of the pyramid which truly captures the intersection as that is where most of the collaboration work takes place. In smaller groups, it is MS Teams that assumes the role of the go-to collaboration platform, but at the peer-to-peer level, where groups become larger and the extent is not something that can be managed through MS Teams, then you would switch collaboration over to the intranet or a SharePoint Communication site.

SharePoint is Here to Stay

Among all this talk of combining your intranet with Microsoft Teams, it is important to clarify that SharePoint is not something that can be replaced, and it will continue to be a part of your collaboration ecosystem.

Organizations often misconstrue the usage of an intranet or the bringing in of Microsoft Viva as a replacement of SharePoint. This could not be further from reality, as SharePoint is the underlying structure layer in all of this.

To put it more simply, SharePoint is where all the information is stored and Microsoft Teams is the user interface to communicate and collaborate about that stored content/information.

The Myth of the Single Entry Point

Microsoft Teams is increasingly feeling like the hub of everything. The single point of entry for end users, but one should approach this with caution. This is because it is an overwhelming experience to treat it like a one-stop-shop for all business communication as not every employee or end user has the same starting point.

Ranging from always open tools that are job-specific, regular tools that are used for collaboration every now and then during the week, and the infrequent tools that are accessed once a month or even less, MS Teams is not exactly the hub of all these interactions.

Therefore, MS Teams may be a handy notification layer, but not every transaction is going to happen within Teams. In fact, we still need a ‘windowing’ environment so we can do a task in one pane, but keep going with conversations, meetings etc. in another. In that regard, an intranet may still be better in a browser for anything more than a quick check.

Viva Connections Teams App

This is currently the easiest way to surface your intranet into Microsoft Teams. The Viva Connections Teams App provides some noteworthy features that make the integrated experience even better:

• Navigation: The App Bar navigation offers consistent global navigation and is accessible when clicking the app in MS Teams. So, you can easily navigate around your intranet within MS Teams.
• Custom Branding: The App does not have to be called Viva Connections, you can brand this App with your own logo and name!
• Targeting: You can target this App to users so that it appears by default. You can automatically pin that app to everyone within your organization or you can be granular about it by pinning it for only certain members.
• Full Page View experience: News pages are viewed in a full-page experience, providing a more user-friendly interface to end users.

Among other pieces that make Viva Connections so useful are:

• New SharePoint Web Parts: These Web Parts are yet to come, but prove to be very promising for the platform. Among the most impactful are:
• The Company Feed: A new way to show aggregated info from SharePoint, Stream, and Yammer in one web part along with external content.

• Dashboard: The most exciting piece, providing easy-to-use interactive cards with the possibility of external integrations, the cards can be targeted based on geography or role of the engaging end user.

The Good and The Bad of Viva Connections

Viva makes your intranet available through Microsoft Teams, but at the same time if members of the organizations do not use MS Teams regularly, then it is only adding another layer in between them and the intranet. But MS Teams users can now search across SharePoint communication sites and hub sites and the Dashboard feature is sure to add a useful integration layer. The most remarkable bit is that it comes at no additional cost!

While Viva Connections will be an exciting addition, it is not certain how often users will engage with the App. Another aspect to be mindful of is that navigation is complicated and can get messy. Also, as part of the mobile experience users will be interacting with the dashboard and not the actual SharePoint Home site.

So before you surface your intranet through MS Viva Connections ensure you evaluate your present employee interactions and how they will be engaging with this new integration.

Here are other prospects that you are  able to take advantage of:

MS Teams Based Notification: Microsoft has opened up the Microsoft Teams Activity Feed, and now you can send notifications programmatically. You can enjoy the possibility of integrating notifications from multiple applications in a common digital workplace scenario giving users the power to control notifications settings.

Microsoft Teams Bots: Microsoft Teams can host Bots directly in the application to further establish it as the enterprise collaboration platform for the organization. Bots have a conversational interface which can provide a rich experience for various types of applications.