Episode Details

If you've ever rolled out a new SharePoint dashboard, only to watch your users ignore it completely, you’re not alone. What if you could make Microsoft Viva Connections the homepage they’ll actually use — and customize every tile, data feed, and workflow step by step?Let’s break down how to extend Viva Connections with SPFx web parts and adaptive card extensions, and what it really takes to get end-user adoption.Why Most Viva Connections Dashboards Fall FlatIf you’ve ever sunk hours into building a SharePoint homepage, only to watch your users ignore it and go straight back to Outlook or Teams, you’ll know exactly how underwhelming dashboard adoption can be. It’s a pattern a lot of us recognize: leadership gets excited, IT gets asked for a modern, all-in-one place—and then nobody uses it. Here’s the odd part: the technology works, the dashboard loads, the tabs point to the right places, but you log in after week one and usage has already flatlined. It stings a bit when you realize your “central hub” is just collecting digital dust, right next to that abandoned OneNote section from two years ago.The theory behind Viva Connections is promising: one dashboard that connects your team to announcements, resources, personalized links—right inside Teams. The reality, though, is a little different. Even after a textbook rollout, the adoption numbers usually fizzle after the initial push. There’s often a mismatch between what IT thinks employees need—like a clean announcements feed or a link to HR policies—and what staff actually use day-to-day. For many, Teams already feels like the only doorway they need, with files, chat, and a calendar a click away. And if users have built their own shortcuts in Outlook or saved links to OneDrive, why go hunting through a dashboard that feels generic and disconnected from their real work?Disconnected systems are one of the biggest culprits here. Every organization has pockets of data: maybe purchase orders live in SAP, tickets in Jira or ServiceNow, and files scattered across Teams, SharePoint, and personal drives. The out-of-the-box Viva Connections dashboard often stops at surfacing a few SharePoint pages, a news web part, and some static links. It can feel like a half-hearted attempt to glue things together that—if you’re honest—weren’t designed to work smoothly with each other in the first place. Generic layouts don’t help, either. Those default square tiles give you a polished start, but if they all link out to things your users either never visit or already have a faster way to access, engagement drops fast. It’s like adding a fancy new button to the coffee machine that nobody asked for.And then there’s personalization—or the lack of it. Imagine logging in to a dashboard and seeing the same weather widget whether you’re working in finance, HR, or IT support. If solutions aren’t tailored, they become invisible. After a while, employees scroll past the dashboard because they already know there’s nothing new or—more importantly—useful for them as individuals. One regional sales team I worked with went live with a Viva dashboard featuring links, company news, and an embedded Yammer conversation. Within a month, traffic dropped to almost zero. In their post-mortem, they found the links were all reused from a previous SharePoint site, the news was months old, and the Yammer thread hadn’t been updated since launch. Worse, nobody had set up audience targeting, so sales folks in Europe saw the same content as the back-office staff in Asia. That one-size-fits-no-one approach made the dashboard feel irrelevant from the start.Research backs this up: according to several digital workplace studies, the top reasons employees avoid new platforms aren’t visual design or a lack of training—it’s because the content isn’t personally meaningful and the apps they actually need are missing. IT’s focus tends to be on rolling out features, ticking compliance boxes, and keeping the navigation organized. But users—espec