SharePoint app bar in Teams - Access your intranet directly from within Teams

Unless you have actively kept track of the Microsoft roadmap, it’s not been easy finding information relating to the SharePoint app bar in Teams. Perhaps this is because it has various names: SharePoint app bar, Home site app for Teams, Viva Connections – all pretty much the same thing!

The important thing for me is the now joined up user experience within M365 as far as the intranet is concerned. For Communications Managers, this is a great relief as users have migrated over to Teams for the day-to-day collaboration with team members, but perhaps have not been aware of company communications (news, events, updated policies etc.).

Microsoft Teams has seen a huge uptake since the pandemic and is proving to be the application of choice for project and operational teams. As a separate application within the Microsoft 365 suite of applications, there has been no direct link to an organisation’s intranet or indeed other operational sites that may not be M365 Group connected, and therefore do not have an associated Team/Group. With Viva Connections, the intranet can now be surfaced directly within Teams.

For Comms managers this is a game changer. Over the past few months, we have had various enquiries regarding the SharePoint intranet:

• Is our SharePoint intranet redundant, doesn’t Teams fulfil this role?
• How can users navigate to our intranet from Teams?
• Should our intranet effectively be a public Team?

There has been a lot of development within the Microsoft 365 environment over the past years, and at this moment in time it feels like a lot has now come together. We saw various pieces of the jigsaw being deployed, without perhaps the bigger picture in view.

As far as SharePoint and the impact on intranets is concerned, we saw:

• A new technical architecture - out with master pages, in with SPFx.
• New list and library experience.
• The advent of Office 365 Groups – a cross application membership service managed in AAD.
• SharePoint Communication sites and new Office 365 Group connected SharePoint Team sites.
• New web parts (functional widgets).
• SharePoint mobile application.
• Hub sites - delivering a new information architecture model plus branding and global navigation features.
• Home sites – another level of site, designed to be the root site of a Microsoft Office 365 tenancy.
• The name change from ‘Office 365’ to ‘Microsoft 365’!
• Microsoft Teams – an important aspect of how teams work together.
• The SharePoint app bar, delivering another layer of global navigation.
• And finally (for now) the SharePoint app bar deployed into Teams – giving the ability to access the intranet from within the Teams interface.

It’s been a journey, and Microsoft aren’t finished here, there is a lot of connecting technologies I haven’t even mentioned, Office Graph being one and the advances in artificial intelligence. 

To read more about Microsoft Viva and the wider implications and features, see this Microsoft article.

If you would like to know more, please don’t hesitate to get in contact.