Extending Microsoft Viva Connections with Custom Dashboards

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—especially in hybrid workplaces—just want a fast way to get to their stuff, no matter where it actually lives in the stack. It’s easy to forget we’re not just pushing information out; we’re competing with established habits and shortcuts built up over years.So, how do you fix it? The trick isn’t swapping out tiles or adding a chatbot. The real solution is to treat Viva Connections like a system, not just another SharePoint landing page. Every layer—navigation, permissions, data sources, interactivity—needs to play a role and connect back to actual business workflows. When those pieces start to work in sync, usage doesn’t just go up, people start expecting more out of the dashboard—they ask for new integrations, surface missing data, and push for more automation.That’s when things get interesting. But before you can customize, you need a dashboard that fits your actual environment—without breaking everything else you rely on day to day. So where do you even start when building a foundation that doesn’t collapse under its own weight?Building the Foundation: Setting Up a Dashboard that Fits Your EcosystemEver tried flipping on a fancy new Teams app—only to kick off a SharePoint permission nightmare, or watch a different app break in the background? Rolling out Viva Connections isn’t much different. It’s never just a click-and-go. If you try to layer a dashboard on top of messy, overlapping M365 workflows, you’re almost guaranteed headaches—and worse, user complaints. Let’s be honest: most of us don’t get to start with a blank slate. Instead, your organization’s M365 setup is already packed with legacy site collections, random permission groups, and maybe a few half-baked intranet projects “pending migration” for the last six months.Plugging Viva Connections into that reality can feel less like opening a new app, and more like coming home to fix a leaky pipe—while the rest of the family is in the kitchen making breakfast. You can’t just bulldoze whatever’s already there. Even something as basic as enabling the dashboard can ripple out: restructure your SharePoint navigation and suddenly links break for one team; add a custom web part and the load time for mobile users starts creeping up; adjust audience targeting, and you accidentally hide HR forms from the Finance group for a week. These are the things nobody puts in the demo videos, but they’re the reason half of these projects never get past the “pilot” stage.Think of it like kitchen renovation while the house is still full. The dashboard is your new countertop—shiny and promising but only useful if the sink, cabinets, and oven still line up and work when you’re done. You can’t move the fridge to another room just because the tile looks nicer; everything still needs to fit around the way people actually cook. The same goes for setting up Viva Connections. If you drop the dashboard in without thinking through what else is in the “digital kitchen,” you’re just shifting messes around instead of solving them.A team I worked with in healthcare tried going live with Viva Connections out of the box—same navigation for everyone, basic permissions copied over from SharePoint, and no real mapping to what staff did day-to-day. Adoption just crawled. Then, instead of guessing what users might want, they asked each department manager to choose the four business apps or resources their teams actually used. Suddenly, the Finance team saw links to expense claims, the nursing staff had shift schedules on their front page, and IT support could surface their ticket status directly on the dashboard. Usage didn’t just rise—it kept climbing six months later. The key? The dashboard wasn’t a fixed poster; it was a window into actual business processes. The layout changed as the needs changed. People noticed because those tiles finally gave them a shortcut to something they’d otherwise have to dig around for—no more ten-click journeys just to file paperwork.But to get there, you really have to nail the basics. Start by sorting out your site structure. If News lives in ten different sites or you’ve got duplicate pages everywhere, users will end up with broken links or mismatched branding. Audience targeting isn’t just a “nice to have”—it means you can surface a dashboard experience tailored even across roles or geographies, instead of forcing everyone to scroll through irrelevant content. Permissions? Get those wrong, and you’ll either lock out the very people you’re trying to help, or worse, open the door to sensitive data without meaning to. Don’t leave governance to the last minute—it’s cheaper to get policies right now than to rebuild things at scale after six months of confused access requests.And don’t forget the one sticking point that trips up even the savviest admins: everything you build for desktop needs just as much attention on mobile. The Viva Connections app inside Teams isn’t just a shrunken version of your SharePoint dashboard. Visual layouts, navigation, and even security behave differently when users flip from laptop to phone. A tile that fits neatly on the web can overflow or break on mobile, and things like adaptive cards or custom web parts might perform flawlessly in a browser but sluggishly—or not at all—on an iPhone. Testing both sides is slow but saves support tickets later.When you get that foundation right, something shifts. Instead of complaints about needless dashboards, you start to hear requests for more integrations or questions about advanced functionality. Users notice when things actually work. A dashboard that’s woven into the flow of work becomes more than a digital roadmap—it’s the launchpad for custom features and real productivity gains, without tearing up your existing systems in the process.So, with the build-out solid and the ecosystem mapped, you’re ready to try something with more horsepower than just link tiles. Custom web parts and new data-driven components open the next chapter. Let’s see how deep you can go when you un

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If this clashes with how you’ve seen it play out, I’m always curious. I use LinkedIn for the back-and-forth.