How to Integrate Your SharePoint Intranet with Microsoft Teams

Teams gives employees a place to communicate and collaborate. A SharePoint intranet creates a central destination for company news, resources, documents, policies, and organizational knowledge. By bringing your SharePoint intranet into Microsoft Teams, employees can access important company information from an application they already use throughout the workday.

Microsoft now supports this experience through the SharePoint app in Teams, formerly known as Viva Connections. The app brings SharePoint capabilities into Microsoft Teams and is built on SharePoint home site technology.

Here's how the pieces fit together and what organizations should consider when integrating an intranet with Microsoft Teams.

If you've researched how to integrate a SharePoint intranet with Microsoft Teams before, you've probably encountered Microsoft Viva Connections.

Microsoft has since renamed Viva Connections to the SharePoint app in Teams. The underlying experience is powered by SharePoint home site technology. Existing Viva Connections configurations and deployments continue to work, including customized names and logos.

This is more than a terminology change for organizations reviewing older integration instructions.

Microsoft has also simplified how administrators establish home sites and configure the SharePoint app for Teams. SharePoint administrators can create or designate home sites through the SharePoint admin center, while configuration of the Teams experience is available through home site settings.

That means older tutorials involving Viva Connections, PowerShell scripts, and custom app deployment may no longer reflect the current setup experience.

Your SharePoint home site provides the foundation for the intranet experience in Teams.

Microsoft defines a home site as a SharePoint communication site that provides a customized landing experience reflecting an organization's brand, voice, and priorities. It also serves as a gateway to other portals across the organization's intranet.

Organizations can use an existing communication site or establish a new site as their home site.

Before configuring Teams, make sure the home site actually works as the organizational front door you want employees to use.

Microsoft now provides configuration options directly through SharePoint home site settings.

Home site owners can access the configuration experience through:

Settings → Manage home site → SharePoint app for Teams

From there, owners can control aspects of the mobile and desktop experience, including which tabs appear on mobile and whether the desktop experience opens with the home site as its landing page. [learn.microsoft.com]

This replaces some of the more complicated setup guidance associated with older Viva Connections implementations.

Getting the technology connected is only part of a successful Teams intranet integration.

Employees also need a logical path to information.

Think about the resources people repeatedly look for:

• Company news
• Policies and procedures
• HR information
• Department resources
• Frequently used applications
• Employee directories
• Documents and knowledge
• Forms and requests

The objective should be to reduce the effort required to move from "I need something" to "I found it."

Microsoft specifically recommends planning for adoption, success metrics, and ongoing maintenance when implementing the SharePoint app in Teams.

That matters because putting an intranet inside Teams won't fix unclear navigation, outdated information, weak governance, or poor content ownership.

Your Teams integration should be treated as part of the overall intranet experience, not as a separate project

One of the easiest ways to create confusion is to duplicate everything.

Employees should understand where authoritative information lives.

Teams is well suited to active collaboration and conversations. Your intranet can provide the organized, governed destination for information that needs to be easily found across the company.

Instead of copying the same content into several places, provide employees with convenient ways to reach the authoritative source. 

Don't integrate Teams and your intranet simply because the technology allows it.

Consider how employees actually work.

Someone who spends most of the day in Teams may want immediate access to company resources without opening another application. Another employee may prefer starting from the full intranet in a browser.

A useful intranet supports both experiences.

Easier access to content doesn't automatically make the content easier to manage.

Define who owns important intranet areas, how content should be organized, who can publish information, and how outdated information will be reviewed.

A cleaner SharePoint environment creates a stronger foundation for the experiences employees access through Teams.

For organizations already invested in Microsoft 365, the opportunity isn't to introduce another disconnected platform. It's to make the Microsoft environment employees already have easier to navigate, search, and use.

hubley is built natively on SharePoint and Microsoft 365, extending the Microsoft environment with additional intranet, communication, search, and employee experience capabilities.

That includes direct connections between the intranet and Teams. For example, Teams Feed can surface Microsoft Teams conversations directly within hubley pages, helping keep conversations connected to the content employees are viewing. Our team's collaboration tools, including SearchHub, Spaces, FormsHub, PolicyHub, OnboardingHub, and People Finder, are integrated into the broader Microsoft 365 experience.

Because hubley works on the Microsoft 365 foundation, organizations can build the employee experience around the Microsoft tools already used across the business rather than creating another destination employees have to learn.