Someone at your company went looking for Viva Connections in Microsoft Teams and couldn't find it. They called IT support. IT searched Google. Google returned documentation that was already outdated. And the confusion set in.
Nothing went wrong. Microsoft renamed the product, changed where it's administered, and updated the visual experience, all in less than six months. This article clears up the confusion once and for all.
The product that got a new ID card
In March 2026, Microsoft announced that Viva Connections would be renamed to "SharePoint app in Teams". No fanfare, no big communication campaign.
The logic behind the move is simple: Viva Connections always depended on a SharePoint Home Site to function. The intranet experience inside Teams was always, technically, a SharePoint view. Keeping a separate name created confusion about where content lived and who was responsible for it.
If your organization had already customized the app's name and icon, you saw no change at all. The new name only appears for those who were using the default "Viva Connections" name. In that case, Teams now displays "SharePoint".
The experience didn't change. The content didn't change. What changed was the sign on the door.
The control room that finally makes sense
For years, managing multiple Viva Connections experiences meant moving back and forth between the Microsoft 365 Admin Center and the SharePoint Admin Center, with settings scattered across both. In September 2026, that ended.
Microsoft consolidated the management of multiple Home Sites directly in the SharePoint Admin Center. Creating or removing sites, configuring audience targeting, and setting the priority order of Home Sites, everything now happens in one place. The old entry points in the M365 Admin Center automatically redirect to the new experience.
As part of this migration, legacy Viva Connections instances were upgraded to full Home Sites. The model simplified: a SharePoint Home Site is the primary object, and the Teams-facing configuration flows from it.
For administrators managing multi-divisional or multi-regional intranets, this change meaningfully reduces operational overhead.
More columns, more sources, less scrolling
Alongside the administrative consolidation, Home Experience 3.0 reached General Availability. The most visible update is the dashboard card grid, now configurable at three column widths: 2, 3, or 4.
Cards also gained a compact variant, which increases information density without requiring employees to scroll through the page. And the news feed can now aggregate content from multiple SharePoint Hub Sites in a single view, something teams with multiple business units had been requesting for some time.
All configuration happens in the administration panel, with no need to edit SharePoint pages.
| What changed | Where to configure |
|---|---|
| Configurable grid (2, 3, or 4 columns) | Viva Connections admin panel |
| Compact cards | Viva Connections admin panel |
| Multi-source feed (multiple hub sites) | Viva Connections admin panel |
| Multiple Home Sites management | SharePoint Admin Center |
For developers who built Adaptive Card Extensions: Home Experience 3.0 is fully backward compatible. Existing ACEs render without modification in the compact variant. Microsoft recommends adding the supportsCompact property to your manifest to signal intentional compact support and enable additional layout optimizations.
Who needs to act and who can close their laptop
For most organizations, the practical answer is: almost nothing. Content stays where it was, permissions haven't changed, and employees keep accessing the intranet through the same icon in Teams.
What changes in practice:
Administrators: the next time you need to adjust the order of Home Sites or create a new experience for a division, go directly to the SharePoint Admin Center.
Content editors and internal communications teams: nothing changes in the page and news publishing workflow.
SPFx developers: review your ACE manifests and consider adding supportsCompact. It's not mandatory, but it's recommended so your cards take full advantage of the new layout.
The takeaway
Microsoft is, piece by piece, simplifying the corporate intranet stack. SharePoint was always the engine. Viva Connections was always the storefront. Now they share the same family name.
For the employee who accesses the intranet every day, the change is invisible. For the team maintaining it, the administrative consolidation is a real win.
If the rebrand confusion is still alive in your organization, this article has everything you need to explain it to your manager in five minutes.
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Sources
- What's New in Copilot in SharePoint: September 2026 — Microsoft Community Hub
- Microsoft 365 September 2026: Every Update That Matters This Month — Akshara Technologies
- Home site updates - SharePoint in Microsoft 365 — Microsoft Learn
- Viva Connections multi-home site management moving to SharePoint admin center — M365 Admin