Setting up Viva Connections for Microsoft Teams – Atlas by ClearPeople

What does setting this up do?
Pre-Requisites
Adding the Viva Connections app in the Teams Admin Centre
Customization of Viva Connections
Pin the ATLAS site for all Users by Default
Setting up Viva Connections for Mobile
Further Assistance
Glossary

What does setting this up do?

Simply, by following this guide it will allow your organisation to display their version of ATLAS from within Microsoft Teams for every user! An example of what this can look like is shown below, where "ClearPeople" is the ATLAS site.

Pre-Requisites

Below are the pre-requisites required to complete this guide. It is important to highlight that to complete these step-by-step instructions, you must have the permissions (or privileges) to the SharePoint and Microsoft Teams admin centre for your Organisation

Your Organisation must be on ATLAS
Your SharePoint site must have a "Home Site" set-up. Set-up SharePoint Home-Site Guide
Have 192x192 and 32x32 images to represent your Organisation. These will be used on the sidebar shown above and the application catalogue within Teams.

Adding the Viva Connections app in the Teams Admin Centre

Log in to the Microsoft Teams admin centre
Select Teams Apps and then Manage Apps
Search for “Viva Connections”, and select the Viva Connections app
Select Actions in the top-right area and then select Customize

Customization of Viva Connections

From the Customize panel, you can update the attributes of Viva Connections to create what will become your ATLAS "link" within Teams for your Organisation.

The information you will need to supply is explained below:

The Short name will be the display name of the Viva Connections app in your tenant
A Short description for the app (<80 char)
Website URL is the URL of your Home-Site
Privacy Policy and Terms can be left default to the Microsoft one, or you can specify your own Organisations if you wish
A Long description for the app (<4000 char)
The 192x192 & 32x32 images you have prepared to represent your Organisations ATLAS site

Hit "Apply" to save your changes.

Now, follow the steps below so the application will be available for users inside your organisation.

Return to the Teams admin centre and select Teams apps then Manage apps and search for the Viva Connections app using the name you selected as the Short name when you first customized the Viva Connections app.
Change the app from the default Blocked by Publisher state to the Allowed state

Pin the ATLAS site for all Users by Default

Finally, this section will make your application show by default for all users inside your organisation by pinning it on their Teams sidebar for easy accessibility.

Inside the Teams admin centre select Teams apps then Setup Policies
Select Global policy within the list
Under Pinned Apps, select Add App
Search for the short name you gave your application in the previous step and select Add
Now, under the Pinned Apps section select your Application and use the arrows to re-organise the order in which they appear on the Teams sidebar for all users

I recommend re-ordering your application to the top of the list for easy visibility among your organisation.

Setting up Viva Connections for Mobile

There is some configuration required to get the mobile experience of Viva Connections working as you would expect. Please refer to our Knowledge Article here to complete this.

Further Assistance

If you encounter any issues when using Viva Connections, it is advisable to raise a ticket directly with Microsoft. Viva Connections is a Microsoft product, meaning they are the only ones that can implement fixes and provide support for its functionality. We have a Knowledge Article here that details the best way to raise this.

Glossary

This KA was created using knowledge obtained from Microsoft's own articles on this process. Refer to their guide for further information:

Microsoft's Viva Connection Knowledge Article

Microsoft's Viva Connection Desktop Knowledge Article