Microsoft is redefining employee engagement in 2025 with major updates to Viva Connections — and we got a live walkthrough at the Microsoft 365 Community Conference!
In this video, I’m joined by Divyachapan (DC) Padur, Principal Product Manager at Microsoft, to explore:
☑️ Copilot-powered news summaries and audio recaps
☑️ Custom dashboards built on SharePoint
☑️ Personalization, audience targeting, and governance options
☑️ How to get started — and what’s coming next
Whether you’re managing your organization’s intranet or supporting internal communications, Viva Connections is now smarter, more flexible, and ready for the Copilot era.
Video Summary
- Viva Connections brings your intranet into Microsoft Teams, making it easier for employees to engage with content where they already work, whether at a desk or on the go.
- The dashboard is the star of the show, offering zero-code, low-code, and pro-code options to deliver personalized, actionable content through sleek, mobile-friendly cards.
- AI-powered news summaries and audio briefings (via Copilot) help users quickly catch up on important updates, whether they prefer to read or listen. Audio features are coming soon!
- Governance and personalization go hand in hand—IT can control what users can customize, while still allowing tailored experiences through audience targeting and user-added cards.
- Most features are available now or rolling out by summer, so there’s no reason to wait. Start building your Viva Connections experience today—your users will thank you!
For more information, read the transcript blog below, or watch the video above!
Transcript
Welcome, everyone! I’m so excited to be here today at the Microsoft 365 Conference in Las Vegas with DC Padur, Principal Product Manager at Microsoft. We’re going to talk about all things Viva Connections and the new announcements that just dropped. Viva Connections has seen so much innovation in the last year. I know you’ve been working on this for a long time, and it feels like it’s coming together. We want to do a quick video, short and sweet, to show all the amazing things that are either just shipped or about to ship. Let’s dive right in.
Absolutely. Thank you, Vlad. Thank you for having me here. It’s a pleasure. We’re at the Microsoft 365 Conference here in Vegas, and it’s a great chance to connect with customers and partners, and I’m really excited to show you some of the new stuff in Viva Connections. Let’s dive in. The first thing I want to show you is this. This is our new dashboard experience. It’s fully available in Teams—desktop and mobile—and browser. This is what we call a micro-experiential dashboard. Each of these cards is a little bit of an experience. They’re modular. You can move them around, configure them, and deliver an employee experience directly to your workforce. One awesome thing is that this is a zero-code experience. So, if you are not a developer, if you’re just getting started, if you are the intranet manager or the corporate communicator, and you want to build a compelling experience for your users, you can do that directly from the dashboard editor experience. Let me show you what I mean.
I’m going to click on the dashboard, and now we are in the dashboard editor experience. It is as simple as going and saying, “Add a card.” What you’re seeing here is a catalog of available cards that are ready to go. You click, you configure, and you are done. Our goal is to reduce the time to value. So that’s our zero-code experience. Now, if you’re a little more advanced—let’s say you want to bring in some JSON—you’re a SharePoint developer, you’ve played around with some of our ACEs (Adaptive Card Extensions), you want to build something—there’s a low-code experience too.
Absolutely. And this is the part where, if you are a little bit technical or you have somebody a little bit technical in your team, you can just buy them a coffee or a beer. Just a coffee or a beer, and you can make some cool cards. So let me show you how we do that. We’re going to go back and hit “Add a Card.” This time, we’re going to go to the “Card Designer.” The Card Designer is something that allows you to build your card. The great part here is we’re using the Adaptive Card templating language. So this is already known. You can go to the Adaptive Card Designer, get a sample JSON, copy it in here, and that is your card. That’s all you need to do.
So this one is built to go and call a SharePoint list, get the system status for a bunch of internal systems, and show that in a dashboard experience. I love it. And you know what’s cool? The intranet manager or the corporate communicator or whoever manages the list doesn’t even need to touch this again. They go to SharePoint, edit that list, and automatically, this will show the new value. You just have to change the SharePoint list, and it will update automatically. And your user doesn’t have to go anywhere else. They open their Teams, they open their dashboard, and boom—the latest status is available right there.
And then let’s go a step further. Now, imagine you are a field worker or somebody who’s in a frontline role, and you want to have a card that connects to the Microsoft Graph and pulls out a calendar. That’s also doable. This is a calendar card. It’s calling the Microsoft Graph, getting the user’s next meeting, and showing that. So that’s awesome. If I’m a field worker or if I’m someone who travels a lot, or if I work in a factory and I want to check when my next training is, that’s super useful.
Exactly. It’s all about that real-time dynamic experience, pulling the right data for the right person. And Graph unlocks so many possibilities—calendar, mail, tasks, planner, SharePoint, you name it. All of that can be powered with just a few lines of JSON.
So that’s the personalized card experience with just a few clicks. And I agree—there is some level of JSON understanding that needs to happen, but the more power you need, the more knowledge you need. I love that there’s that balance of no-code, low-code, and now I’m going to talk about pro-code.
The pro-code experience is this: either you are a developer, or you hire a developer (you’ve got to pay them more than a beer), and the idea is now you have the flexibility where you can go talk to your custom HR solution, line of business, ADP, whoever it is—your system of record, whoever is tracking all of this information. You can take your user’s identity, make sure they get the information according to them, and then present that information—the user-personalized information. So this pay slip card is not just a link to your pay system. It is calling the system on behalf of the user, fetching that nugget of information, and presenting it into this cohesive, sleek dashboard experience. That’s, again, the value proposition, and it’s amazing.
And that opens the door to, like you said, go to other systems and do whatever logic you want. And I like that you can still configure it here. So you create your customization options, and the developer—you tell them what you want to do, what options, what configurations. And after it’s deployed, the maker can still control it.
Absolutely. And our partners, our developers—we have access, so you can see this. There are suggested cards. These are all cards available through our store, through the SharePoint App Store. You have ACE cards that can be community-developed. People develop these cards, and they deploy them. You can bring them into your ecosystem, make sure you test that it works right, and then put it into your environment to call your service provider on your behalf of and then bring the data back.
That is amazing. So that is the power of what we want to do in here. And yeah, so the low-code experience of cards that are available out of the box—sorry, zero-code, low-code, use the Card Designer, create your JSON, call any of the API endpoints to have a nice card experience—or the pro-code. All of these things come together cohesively. Again, they don’t look different. Everything is subject to the same design language, which makes the user experience that much more enhanced. So at the end of the day, we’re talking about an employee engagement experience. It doesn’t help if everything behaves differently, and I’m like, “Wait a second, what?” That cohesion is very important.
This is amazing. Thank you. I’m mind-blown about all the cool stuff you’ve been doing.
Thank you.
Wow. I’ve got one more thing to show.
There’s more?
There’s more. There’s always more. Actually, I have two things to do. Let me quickly breeze through those two things. One more thing—like Steve Jobs, yes. So, the resources—the permanent links—I want to talk about. Again, Viva Connections can help you get started from zero, or it can help you leverage what you’ve already invested in. And that’s what this is about. And what I want to talk about is: when you have resources, you can import them from the home site that you have and say, “Hey, you know what? My home site is the fully set-up navigation of my intranet.”
Going back to the metaphor of restaurants, your menu could be an entire book, like 50 different items. But then what shows up on your DoorDash menu is the most favorites or the most requested, or the ones that are good for delivery. Exactly. So applying the same metaphor, think about: in this context of being in an employee-centric app experience, which of these resources from your home site should be part of the resources? You just click and import them into your resources. We don’t want you to do double work. We’re trying to reduce that.
But if you’re getting started with an intranet from the ground up—you have nothing in SharePoint yet, you’re starting fresh—Viva Connections gets you going fast. The time to value is much faster in this Viva Connections experience.
Amazing. And last thing I want to show is the news. As I said, this is still system-driven, but there is a way for the maker to influence what goes in here. And the idea here is this concept called Boost. It’s been in the SharePoint news ecosystem, but once you boost a news item using this button and then decide, “I’m going to prioritize this as the top boosted item/news in my organization,” you hit Save. And this is the way you get to influence the system-driven news for a given end user.
So it’s still AI-based, it’s still dynamic—but I’m still telling—well, AI-based maybe is a big word—but you’re still telling the system like, “Hey, you know what? Be dynamic, but this is still more important.”
Exactly. Exactly that. So again, that item got pinned to the top. The idea here is we don’t want—like, we want people to have a team news experience. You want to know what’s happening around me, as much as the top-down information. Finding the right balance—we’re providing you the ability where you get to influence this.
Amazing. I love it. And the Boost also had a time limit.
Exactly. So I don’t have to go unboost it after. I can decide until when it’s important and then let the system clear it out, flush it out.
Exactly. Absolutely.
This is amazing. There’s so much stuff there, and I think almost—well, a lot of everything you showed will be here by the summer.
Well, I know some of it you said might be a challenge, and the audio stuff might be a bit of a challenge to get it by the summer. But almost everything else is here by the summer, or here already.
Already, yes. For those of you watching: start building this. Start building this today. Your users will love you for it.
Absolutely. Any final advice before we close this out?
That is it, right? Yeah. Viva Connections is about helping you keep your intranet fresh. It’s a new way of thinking about how to keep the intranet fresh. It’s not just about adding the content and updating the image. You could still do that—we should still do that. Go back to the hotel versus app metaphor. How do you bring more people into this new world where everybody’s mobile, hybrid, mobile-ready, always on the go, geographically distributed? Getting everybody on the same page, helping them up-level—Viva Connections is your companion app that’s going to get you there.
That is amazing. DC, thank you so much for your time. This has been amazing. “Amazing” is not a good enough word. Thank you. This has been amazing. And for everybody watching—if you want to connect with DC, follow the latest news directly—all the links will be in the description below. And of course, if you want to keep seeing awesome videos like this one, make sure you subscribe to the channel.
Thank you, everyone, for watching. And of course, one final thing: if you want to have the chance to sit near amazing product managers like this one, make sure you join us at the next Microsoft 365 Conference in 2026. Over 200 of your colleagues were here, if I remember correctly. And the opportunity to engage directly with amazing people like DC here. So make sure to attend next year.
Thank you so much, everyone.
Thank you. Thank you for having me, Vlad. Glad to be part of your audience.
