Introducing new Viva Connections integrations, AI and breadcrumbs
It’s our first new release of 2024 and boy, is it a good one, loaded with new features and enhancements to existing features.
We’ve got lots of ACEs up our sleeves. That is, Adaptive Card Extensions (aka. cards) to give you tonnes more flexibility and control over your Viva Connections Dashboard content.
We’ve also infused some AI into our People Search, for a super-charged search experience, and made our global navigation easier to use with breadcrumb functionality.
Plus, we’ve made intranet governance a whole lot less time-consuming by introducing bulk updating of metadata and descriptions.
Read on for the details…
Release highlights
Viva Connections Dashboard Cards
With more and more of our clients using Viva Connections as a key component of their employee comms, we wanted to empower intranet owners by opening up the capabilities of the Viva Connections Dashboard. We’ve done this by introducing eight new cards.
Curated Pages
Our Curated Pages card allows you to manually choose a selection of content pages or news posts to display to employees; for example, a collection of “how-to” guides about an IT topic.
Events
As the name suggests, you can share information about upcoming events with our Event card, but the really neat thing is, employees can click for more information in the pop-out and add the event to their calendars directly from the Viva Connections Dashboard.
What’s New
Inform staff about new or modified items with the What’s New card. Intranet owners can choose which item type to display and which to set as a default. Items supported include alerts, documents, events, news and pages.
Documents
Aligning with the Document Cards web part, this card displays documents based on search. So, for example, the intranet owner can set up a query to show all policy documents on the intranet.
The end user can click the next and previous buttons to see all the documents.
Curated Documents
From the end user’s perspective, this card works in the same way as the Document card but the Curated Documents card allows the intranet owner to curate which documents are displayed; for example, policy documents.
Viva Engage Conversations
Intranet owners can drive collaboration and usage of Viva Engage with the Viva Engage Conversations card.
The card displays a feed of conversations from Viva Engage in Viva Connections based on settings including author, topic or recent conversations.
Viva Engage Communities
Similar to the Viva Engage Conversations card, the Viva Engage Communities card is great for increasing engagement and building community.
Intranet owners can choose which communities to highlight on the dashboard and once clicked on, the pop-out will display the name, icon and description of the community, as well as the first line of the last three posts.
Videos
Context switching is so tiresome, which is where our new Video card comes in handy. The Video card allows users to view videos directly from Viva Connections. Intranet owners can display multiple videos for employees to choose from.
AI-driven people search
Now you can use AI to super-charge your people search with this new feature as part of our FreshMind AI-infused intranet and available directly from the People Search web part.
So, if you’ve ever wanted to find someone in your organisation, with a specific skill or responsibility, but you don’t know which department or job title to search for, our AI-driven chatbot can help you identify them.
But it doesn’t end there. Once you’ve found the person you’re looking for, it can help kick off a conversation, or schedule a meeting.
It’s like having your own personal assistant.
Global navigation – Option to display breadcrumbs
A popular request from clients and a great addition to improve accessibility, we’ve introduced the option to display breadcrumbs on your intranet to make navigation quicker and easier.
Intranet owners can switch breadcrumbs on and choose which background and text colour to use.
Content management – Bulk update of metadata and description
No one wants untagged content on their intranet but having to go to each document or page and update the metadata is time consuming and annoying.
That’s why we’ve released this new Bulk Update feature, available directly from the Content report web part, that allows intranet owners to use filters to select a subset of items (pages and documents) to update. They can then choose which property they want to update and the value they want to add.
A preview option is also available so items can be reviewed and updated individually.
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