{"id":11429,"date":"2023-06-16T09:32:07","date_gmt":"2023-06-16T16:32:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/?p=11429"},"modified":"2025-09-16T15:13:23","modified_gmt":"2025-09-16T22:13:23","slug":"deploying-microsoft-viva-connections-internally-at-microsoft","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/deploying-microsoft-viva-connections-internally-at-microsoft\/","title":{"rendered":"Deploying Microsoft Viva Connections internally at Microsoft"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"MicrosoftWhether it\u2019s from the office or at home, we must be prepared to meet our employees where they are. At Microsoft, this involves using Microsoft Viva Connections to bring our employees together and to encourage them to engage with each other in the flow of work.<\/p>\n

Microsoft Viva Connections is our gateway to our employee experience. It\u2019s a hub from which our employees can move through the many different parts of their work experience throughout their day. It\u2019s their single place to connect with news, conversations, and resources from across the organization, personalized for each employee through AI and organizational information.<\/p>\n

With Microsoft Viva Connections, our employees have an entry point into the entire Microsoft Viva experience and a genuine feel for what\u2019s happening in our organization, at every level that applies to them.<\/p>\n

\u2014Rich Kaplan, general manager for Microsoft Viva, Microsoft Human Resources<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

A unified experience is at the core of Microsoft Viva Connections. We use it to consolidate resource access across a huge array of company resources and touchpoints, including SharePoint Online, Microsoft Teams, the Microsoft Graph, and other Microsoft 365 apps like Microsoft Viva Engage and Microsoft Stream.<\/p>\n

We want it to be the first place our employees go to get informed about the company and their work at Microsoft.<\/p>\n

\u201cMicrosoft Viva provides an experience for our employees that goes where they go; it\u2019s like their mobile office\u2014everything is right there in Viva, whether they\u2019re learning at work, communicating with others or getting insights about how their team is doing,\u201d says Rich Kaplan, general manager for Microsoft Viva in Microsoft Human Resources. \u201cWith Microsoft Viva Connections, our employees have an entry point into the entire Microsoft Viva experience and a genuine feel for what\u2019s happening in our organization at every level that applies to them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kaplan highlights the way Microsoft Viva Connections has ingrained itself into the everyday employee experience at Microsoft.<\/p>\n

\u201cViva Connections puts the employee at the center and provides the information and tools that are most important to them. It has access to building location information, and I can see which food trucks are nearby for lunch,\u201d Kaplan says. \u201cI can start a maintenance request for something like the air conditioning not working correctly. I can contact TechLink to troubleshoot a technical issue I\u2019m having. It\u2019s all right there, accessible from the Viva Connections Dashboard.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"A
Microsoft Viva Connections provides each employee with a personalized page where they are empowered to take actions that are most relevant to them. This is a sample of what a Viva Connections page looks like for an employee here at Microsoft.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The Microsoft Viva Connections dashboard is the primary portal into what\u2019s happening in an employee\u2019s day and in the organization. It provides a centralized location to find and act on company tasks and specific action items for their job. The dashboard uses dynamic cards that employees can interact with to do things like complete simple tasks or review critical data. It\u2019s authored in SharePoint and published to the Viva Connections app within the Teams mobile experience or to the employee\u2019s desktop.<\/p>\n

The feed aggregates news and conversations into a single place where they can stay on top of everything they need to know. It delivers updates with powerful targeting and scheduling capabilities. The feed enables you to efficiently reuse and aggregate existing news items and posts from SharePoint, Microsoft Viva Engage, and Microsoft Stream resources.<\/p>\n

The resources page consolidates resources for users across the digital workplace, including resources on other platforms and sites using a familiar SharePoint-like navigation.<\/p>\n

Building on our history of employee focus<\/h2>\n

Microsoft is the first and best customer of its own products. We are \u201cCustomer Zero.\u201d<\/a> As a large enterprise customer and employer, many of the issues Microsoft faces when deploying its own products are not unique. They are shared by other large multinational enterprises, and even by small and midsize customers.<\/p>\n

As the company’s IT organization, Microsoft Digital has been deeply invested in the employee experience for years. Our involvement in Microsoft Viva Connections began several years ago when we developed MyHub, an internal app for Microsoft employees that enables them to connect to the Microsoft culture and mission.<\/p>\n

We wanted to empower employees to simplify their life, to have this personalized, connected, and intuitive experience where they could access all those previously fragmented experiences with things like taking time off, viewing pay information, tracking expenses, or understanding what was happening in the company.<\/p>\n

\u2014Kirkland Barrett, principal group product manager, Unified Employee Experience<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Kirkland Barrett is the principal group product manager for Unified Employee Experience in MDEE. His team was responsible for the creation and deployment of MyHub to Microsoft employees more than four years ago. A team was created with members who tackled the project from their various perspectives\u2014program management, engineering, design, and research.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen we began, our leadership was championing this employee-focused approach to how we do things as an organization,\u201d Barrett says. \u201cSo we set out to deeply understand and invest in improving the employee experience.\u201d<\/p>\n

The vision for MyHub was bringing everything that our employees want and need to do.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe wanted to empower employees to simplify their life, to have this personalized, connected, and intuitive experience where they could access all those previously fragmented experiences with things like taking time off, viewing pay information, tracking expenses, or understanding what was happening in the company,\u201d Barrett says.<\/p>\n

\"Portrait
Rich Kaplan (left) and Kirkland Barrett are on the team that helped deploy Microsoft Viva Connections internally at Microsoft. Kaplan is general manager for Microsoft Viva in Microsoft Human Resources and Barrett is principal group product manager for Unified Employee Experience in Microsoft Digital.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

There were many different apps and touchpoints for those experiences before MyHub. Barrett\u2019s team wanted to put them in a single, employee-focused app. They put employees at the center. A big part of that was reevaluating the many design teams, delivery channels, and interaction methods that were used to create interaction with Microsoft employees.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe had a fragmented and disconnected set of tools and interfaces before MyHub,\u201d Barrett says. \u201cThe experience was inconsistent for our employees, and it was often hard to find the tools in the first place.\u201d<\/p>\n

Out of this vision for a connected and unified employee experience came MyHub, a mobile app that Microsoft employees adopted rapidly and used extensively across the organization. As MyHub grew and matured and added functionality, momentum for the app grew, and it became a mainstay for Microsoft employees to interact with each other and the organization in dozens of ways.<\/p>\n

Microsoft Viva Connections has become the next evolution of MyHub, but extended for the rest of the world. As Customer Zero for Viva Connections, we have a unique opportunity to not only inform product development but to contribute to the evolution of one of our key projects, MyHub, as it transforms to fulfill the needs of Microsoft\u2019s external customers. It\u2019s a perfect example of how our own internal challenges and innovative responses are directly relevant to our customers and lead to Microsoft creating better products.<\/p>\n

The co-development process between the Microsoft Viva Connections product team and our MyHub engineers in Microsoft Digital is one of the most integrated and cooperative examples of Customer Zero engineering at Microsoft. MyHub was designed and built for Microsoft, so many of the features and capabilities were created specifically for the Microsoft context.<\/p>\n

How we do business, what\u2019s important to our organization, how we treat our employees\u2013\u2013all of these went into the design and development of MyHub, which meant that we could precisely focus on feature design and providing a unified experience at Microsoft. Microsoft Human Resources (HR) was a big partner in helping us understand the employee experience and what we wanted to accomplish holistically.<\/p>\n

While these factors helped us design a product unique to Microsoft, it also helped our engineering and HR teams understand what made Microsoft unique. When the Microsoft Viva Connections team began development, using MyHub as a starting point, we had a clear idea of which parts of the MyHub experience would work well for the general public and which parts didn\u2019t need to make the jump from MyHub into Viva Connections.<\/p>\n

Microsoft Digital, the MyHub team, and Microsoft HR have provided feedback and assistance based on the four years of experience working in the employee experience space. Our collaborative effort with the Microsoft Viva Connections design team helped us adopt design features like notifications, naming, organization, taxonomy, and adoption.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve also contributed to many improvements and new features in Viva Connections, including:<\/p>\n