Bot Powered Viva Connections extensibility supported for Teams Solutions

Vesa Juvonen

March 28th, 20240 3

We are excited to announce improved support in Microsoft Teams solutions for the Bot Powered Viva Connections extensibility which initially was released in early 2024. Bot Framework powered Adaptive Card Extensions (ACEs) will become automatically available in the Viva Connections as cards for adding to the dashboard. There is no explicit install required of the Teams application containing the Bot Powered ACEs.

Starting with the Microsoft Teams manifest version 1.17, you can define the required card configuration in the solution manifest, which will then result the extension to get deployed. 1.17 is currently in dev preview status (when this blog post released) and is expected to get released during April 2024. When 1.17 is officially released, it will be also supported for the Microsoft Teams solutions in the store, enabling marketplace solutions to take advantage of bot powered Viva Connections extensibility.

See the following documentation for more details around publishing Bot Powered Adaptive Card Extensions to marketplace.

Publishing Bot Powered Adaptive Card Extensions to the market place

Here’s the key changes in the Teams manifest related on the Viva Connections dashboard support – notice the new dashboardCards element.

What’s Bot Powered Viva Connections extensibility 🤖

Bot Powered Adaptive Card Extensions (ACEs) for Microsoft Viva Connections can be used to build custom experiences for the Microsoft Viva Connections Dashboard using the Bot development model. Bot Powered ACEs are an addition to the already existing Viva Connections extensibility model, which is based on SharePoint Framework (SPFx) components.

Objective of the Bot Powered ACEs is to enable existing Microsoft Teams developers, with existing bot implementations, extend their bot implementations to be available in the Viva Connections. Bot Powered ACEs are packaged using the Microsoft Teams solution model, enabling the same bot to be used in both Microsoft Teams and in Microsoft Viva Connections.

What is Microsoft Viva Connections?

Microsoft Viva Connections is a branded app experience in Microsoft Teams that provides a gateway to employee experiences. It allows you to curate the content and tools you want to deliver to your workers, such as data, tasks, news, communications, people, and resources. You can extend Microsoft Viva Connections using either widely adopted SharePoint Framework or with bot framework. Viva Connection is part of the Microsoft Viva suite which is the employee experiences platform at Microsoft 365.

Additional resources and support 🤝

See following references on more details and guidance on Viva Connections extensibility and on building Bot powered Viva Connections extensibility.

If you are looking to build experiences for Microsoft 365, we strongly recommend joining our community calls and other Microsoft 365 & Power Platform Community activities covering Microsoft Graph, Microsoft Teams, Power Platform, Microsoft Viva, OneDrive, SharePoint and more… More details here https://aka.ms/community/home 🚀

And, follow us on Twitter or in LinkedIn to stay up to date on Microsoft 365 Platform announcements.

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