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Build and test your design for Viva Connections

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After deciding which tasks, audiences, and resources to promote using Viva Connections in the planning phase, you're ready to move onto the building phase.

You know you're ready to move onto the building phase if you've met the following requirements and reviewed best practices:

Start by creating your Connections experience in the Viva Connections admin center with a standalone Connections, or use an existing intranet portal. Once your experience has been created, set-up, and enabled, have your site owners customize the Connections dashboard with tools and resources to help with their daily tasks. Use site traffic and analytics to understand how and when users engage with your site, then continue to build and refine your Connections experience.

Step 1: Create your Connections experience in the Connections admin center

Access the Viva Connections admin center from the Microsoft Admin Center to begin. Create an all-encompassing Connections experience for the entire organization, or for distinct audiences. You can choose to create a stand-alone Connections experience or use an existing intranet portal for your site.

Once you've created your experience:

  • Assign permissions
  • Decide which Microsoft 365 groups to associate with the new experience
  • Set the order of experiences (if more than one is created)
  • Enable the experience.

For more information, see setting up Connections in the Microsoft 365 admin center.

Step 2: Customize the Connections dashboard

The dashboard brings it all together; providing a personalized landing experience for users and is designed to be the central destination where everyone can discover your organization's resources and complete daily tasks. Users with site owner and site member permissions are able to customize the dashboard, apply audience targeting to role-specific cards, preview, and publish the dashboard.

Step 3: Ensure high-traffic content provides an ideal viewing experience

For a smooth launch, you want to make sure information can be easily accessed and that high-traffic sites and pages are high-performing.

  1. If your organization used an existing SharePoint home site to create the Connections experience, test the performance of the home site to ensure an optimal viewing experience (A site can always be added to a Connections experience later).

  2. Check the performance for any SharePoint sites that receive a high amount of traffic.

    For example, sites that relate to human resources, organizational news, and popular services like transportation or café menus.

  3. Share the SharePoint home site with the entire organization (if available) before launching. Make sure that the target audiences for the cards in the Connections dashboard are shared with the right audiences.

  4. Consider using the Portal launch scheduler to monitor performance for high-traffic sites that are being shared for the first time.

Step 4: Test and refine the Connections experience

Before sharing Connections with the rest of your organization, recruit a small group of users to test and refine popular workflows to ensure end-users have a great experience using Connections for the first time. Consider recruiting specific people from different audiences to complete popular tasks.

If your organization has a Viva suite or Viva Communications and Communities license, use analytics data for that Connections experience to review data on overall traffic, usage, and engagement. Make improvements until the experience is ideal for the rest of the organization.

Best practices for testing:

  • Test Connections through Microsoft Teams and the Viva Suite home site.
  • Test Connections through SharePoint if a home site was used to create the experience.
  • Depending what devices your organization prefers, test Connections on desktop, mobile, and tablet devices.
  • Make sure all links are active and there aren't any dead ends.
  • Pay attention to labels on dashboard cards and buttons – do they make sense to the rest of the organization?
  • Evaluate the quality and effectiveness of icons and images.
  • Check for performance issues like slow loading times or missing images.
  • Ask testers about the navigation experience.
  • Test with early adopters and champions and capture their feedback.

Next, launch Connections for your organization

After you have finished planning, building, and testing Connections, it's time to let the rest of the organization know that it's available for use. Learn more about how to launch Connections.