Viva Connections’ dashboard is a fresh, new take on an intranet dashboard. Available both on SharePoint and Microsoft Teams, in a recent overhaul the dashboard has become even more central on the Viva homepage.
This area is therefore coming into the focus of many admins and comms teams who discover that you can not just make your own Cards, you can also get Cards that let you connect to other work tools. This promises to improve the usability of your new intranet homepage, so in this post we’ll look at the 6 best apps for Viva Connections for improving your digital employee experience.
Tribute
Tribute is a new type of mentorship program that aims at helping employees find mentors within the organization. Having great mentors is associated with lower employee attrition which can save an organization tens of thousands in replacing talented people. The Tribute platform itself starts at $25k a year (or about $8.33 a month per employee) and it includes access to the Viva Connections app which is a thoughtful addition for organizations that have nurturing internal talents at heart.
Moveworks
Moveworks is a chatbot platform that’s specially trained to help with typical workplace headaches such as unlocking accounts, booking PTO, locating policies, finding a conference room, etc. The Viva Connections app is a great addition to any intranet as it lets you instantly launch into a relevant chat conversation from your dashboard, so users can get something done in a way that feels natural and doesn’t distract them anymore than necessary. Although there is no pricing available for the platform, you can request a demo from the website at https://www.moveworks.com/request-demo .
App Connections
This app makes lists out of data from your other applications that can be outside to SharePoint, e.g. ServiceNow, Hubspot, Workday, Confluence, etc. Simply pick one of the built-in connectors and the Card will automatically appear on your dashboard. This flexible app lets you combine all those disparate data sources into Viva that you otherwise have to hunt for across multiple browser tabs. You can customize how the Card looks to suit your needs. App Connections is free to start and a paid monthly plan with higher limits begins at just at $4 per user.
ListBurst Charts and Dashboards BI
Being a very nifty way to turn SharePoint lists into various charts, this SharePoint web part has also come out as a Viva dashboard extension. Being very reasonably priced, this product even comes with an instant free trial which means you can try it out risk free. This is a perfect add-on for teams that already use a lot of SharePoint lists and want to visualize this data in new ways, particularly on Viva Connections it should help managers monitor things more easily.
Alerts by WM Reply
Notification bars are a popular way to alert an entire team to timely events that they need to be aware of, for example a server outage or disruption at the workplace. Alerts by WM Reply is the first such notification service available on Viva’s dashboard. Since the dashboard is central to Viva (see above), it makes it a no-brainer to install this extension to deliver alerts instantly to your team. Being very reasonably priced at £3,000 one-off (about $3,600), it even comes with an instant free trial.
Qualtrics Feedback
Collecting user feedback is crucial to ensuring a smooth experience for your employees. This feedback Card for Viva Connections can survey user’s opinions and helps to maintain a good service quality for your digital employee experience. The Card requires to have a Qualtrics Employee Experience License, for which pricing isn’t public.
Where do you get Viva Connections dashboard apps?
Admins will already know that Microsoft made the decision to make that dashboard out of Adaptive Cards, and not the familiar web parts. Except for a few exceptions, this also means that your SharePoint add-ins will not be available in Viva Connections and you will need new ones. Just like web parts, apps for Viva Connections are still shipped through Microsoft App Source. However, the public version at https://appsource.microsoft.com/ doesn’t have yet have it’s own section specific to Viva Connections. The internal-to-SharePoint store meanwhile does.
To get to it you need to open your Admin center (https://admin.microsoft.com/) and then click on Show all → SharePoint → More features → Apps [Open] → SharePoint Store.
Once you’re there, click on Viva Connections Dashboard card. This will then show you a grid of all Viva Connections compatible apps. The little icons denote if an app is available as web part and a Viva Connections card, or just as a card alone. In the below list we’ve given you direct links that work with https://appsource.microsoft.com/ .
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There you are. My take on the best Viva Connections apps that are currently available on Microsoft’s App Source store. Are you improving your employee experience with one of these? Or is there one you would recommend to other companies? Let me know in the comments below.
