Introducing enterprise news reader in Viva connections

We are excited to launch a new Enterprise News reader experience in Viva Connections. This feature will replace the Feed in Viva Connections across desktop, mobile, and web platforms. This new experience will present SharePoint news from the organizational sites, boosted news, user’s followed sites, frequent sites, and people they work with in an immersive reader experience.

Viva Connections serves as the gateway to your employee experience through a branded company app - surfacing apps, tools, resources, and news to keep everyone connected from wherever they are. 

News reader also includes a Copilot powered news summary, available on desktop only in this initial release. Copilot will provide an AI generated summary of top news items in a user’s feed to provide a quick overview of all the latest information.

The news reader features a fresh new grid UX for recommended News with intuitive card design and layout. The news item cards have easy access to Like and Save for later gestures. It also has intuitive visual cues to indicate a News link post type and the original link source domain.

Saved items are available for viewing from the specific “Saved for later” tab.

When user is accessing the news items, they are loaded within the Viva Connections app itself in an immersive reader experience with quick access to sharing gestures and ability to open the same news item in a browser.

The features and capabilities mentioned in this blog post are demonstrated in the following video with Divyachapan (DC) Padur (Microsoft) and Vesa Juvonen (Microsoft).

Frequently asked questions

When will this happen?

The feature has started rolling out to Targeted Release customers and will continue to roll out to all customers through the end of April 2025.

This message is associated with Microsoft Roadmap ID 472018.

What News items are shown to a user?

This is a system driven news feed with SharePoint news posts from the user’s followed sites, frequent sites, trending sites, home site, organization news sites and news posts published by people they work with.

Does admin have any control over the news items shown here?

News posts published on the home site, organizational news sites, boosted news will all be prioritized and will show at the top of the feed experience.

Does this feed support audience targeting?

Yes, News posts are filtered appropriately based on the user’s audience memberships. Additionally, if multilingual news posts are available, the news item for the user’s preferred language is shown.

Will the Copilot summary work for any language?

The Copilot summary experience will respect the end user’s language and works for all languages called out in following article: Supported languages for Microsoft Copilot.  

How can Engage content be shown in Viva Connections now?

We are soon rolling out a new Engage card that could be configured and used in the Viva Connections dashboard. Specific posts can be pinned in the Spotlight control. Viva Engage storylines are now natively available in Teams app (see more from What’s new in Viva Engage – Ignite Edition).

Thanks for reading. Let us know any feedback or questions in the comments.