Building University Staff Intranets on SharePoint Online & Viva Connections

Why Universities Are a Distinct Intranet Challenge

Universities are unlike most enterprise organisations. They serve multiple parallel communities — academic staff, professional services, postdoctoral researchers, senior leadership, and often part-time and visiting staff — each with radically different daily tasks, different relationships with IT, and different tolerance for complexity. A portal designed for a dean of faculty will overwhelm a laboratory administrator; one built for a finance team will baffle a lecturer who only needs to submit timesheets and access the library catalogue.

Add to this a typically fragmented legacy landscape — a mix of on-premises SharePoint, Blackboard or Moodle for learning management, custom HR systems, and a cobbled collection of departmental microsites — and the challenge becomes clear: a modern university intranet must simultaneously unify and personalise. It has to feel like one coherent platform while surfacing radically different content and tools to each user group, all while integrating with a wider ecosystem than most corporate tenants ever face.

This guide walks through how we approach building university staff intranets on SharePoint Online and Viva Connections — from architecture decisions through to specific SPFx patterns and governance models — drawing on the Inside Ashcombe project we delivered for a 1,959-staff institution.

Information Architecture: Hub Sites Over Mega-Menus

The temptation in higher education is to build a mega-site with a single deep navigation structure — an approach that reliably produces a navigation tree no one can remember and an intranet no one uses. The SharePoint Hub Site model is a better fit for universities because it mirrors how universities actually organise themselves: a central institution with relatively autonomous faculties and professional services divisions.

Recommended Hub Architecture

Hub site association gives you cross-site search (all content in hub-associated sites surfaces in a single search scope), consistent navigation via hub navigation inheritance, and the ability to use the Hub News web part to aggregate news from all associated sites into the home experience. Faculty sites can opt into the hub navigation or override it for their own audience — giving central comms control without removing faculty autonomy.

Role-Based Navigation with Azure AD Group Targeting

The most impactful feature in a university intranet is role-based navigation — presenting a personalised set of shortcuts, quick links, and content sections based on who the user is. On SharePoint and Viva Connections, this is implemented through a combination of Azure AD group membership and the Audience Targeting feature built into SharePoint web parts.

Configuring Audience Targeting

Audience targeting must be enabled at the library level before it can be used at the web part level. For Quick Links and News web parts, enable it in the web part properties panel under "Audience targeting." Each Quick Link item or News page can then be tagged with one or more Azure AD security groups. Users who are not members of any tagged group will not see that item — SharePoint handles the filtering on the client side using the user's group claims.

# Connect to the university home site
Connect-PnPOnline -Url "https://university.sharepoint.com/sites/home" -Interactive

# Enable audience targeting on the Site Pages library
Set-PnPList -Identity "Site Pages" -EnableAudienceTargeting $true

# Enable on a custom Quick Links library
Set-PnPList -Identity "UniversityShortcuts" -EnableAudienceTargeting $true

For the Viva Connections home experience, audience targeting works at the dashboard card level — each ACE card in the Viva Connections dashboard can be assigned target audiences via the card configuration panel. A card visible only to managers, for example, can be targeted to an Azure AD security group called "UNI-Staff-Managers" without any custom code.

Recommended Group Naming Convention

Establish a consistent naming convention for audience targeting groups before you start configuring. Groups proliferate quickly in a university context. A recommended pattern is SP-[SCOPE]-[AUDIENCE]-[PURPOSE] — for example:

• SP-INTRANET-ACADEMIC-STAFF — all academic (lecturing) staff
• SP-INTRANET-PROSERVICES-STAFF — all professional services staff
• SP-INTRANET-MANAGERS — all line managers (for manager-specific shortcuts)
• SP-INTRANET-FACULTY-SCIENCE — Science & Engineering faculty members
• SP-INTRANET-FACULTY-MEDICINE — Medicine & Health faculty members
• SP-INTRANET-NEWCOMERS — dynamic group: staff who joined within the last 90 days

Using a dynamic Azure AD group for newcomers (based on the employeeHireDate attribute) means the onboarding experience section on the home page automatically appears and disappears without any manual curation — an excellent set-and-forget governance pattern for universities where staff turnover is continuous.

Custom ACE Widgets for University-Specific Data

Out-of-the-box Viva Connections cards cover common tasks well — task counts, approvals, news, links. But universities typically need widgets that surface institution-specific data: upcoming timetable events from the room booking system, research grant deadlines from the finance system, ethics committee submission windows, or the semester academic calendar. These require custom Adaptive Card Extensions (ACEs) built with SPFx.

The Card View / Quick View Pattern

ACEs use a two-view pattern that maps naturally to a university use case. The Card View is the compact tile on the Viva Connections dashboard — it shows a summary (e.g., "2 ethics submissions due this month"). When the user clicks, the Quick View renders a larger panel with the full detail — the submission list, dates, and a link to the submission form.

import {
  BaseAdaptiveCardExtension,
  RenderType
} from '@microsoft/sp-adaptive-card-extension-base';

export interface IDeadlineState {
  upcomingDeadlines: { title: string; dueDate: string; category: string }[];
  isLoading: boolean;
}

export class UniversityDeadlineACE
  extends BaseAdaptiveCardExtension<{}, IDeadlineState> {

  public onInit(): Promise<void> {
    this.state = { upcomingDeadlines: [], isLoading: true };
    this.fetchDeadlines();
    return Promise.resolve();
  }

  private async fetchDeadlines(): Promise<void> {
    // Call Graph or a SharePoint list storing university deadlines
    const response = await this.context.httpClient.get(
      `https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/sites/{id}/lists/{id}/items?$filter=fields/DueDate ge '${new Date().toISOString()}'&$orderby=fields/DueDate asc&$top=5`,
      /* HttpClient.configurations.v1 */ 1
    );
    const data = await response.json();
    this.setState({ upcomingDeadlines: data.value, isLoading: false });
  }
}

For universities, the key Graph queries to master are: reading from SharePoint Lists (academic calendar, room bookings, committee schedules), reading People API profiles (to show each staff member's faculty affiliation and room number), and reading Events from Exchange (for timetabled events that need to surface on the dashboard). All three support delegated permissions so the ACE shows the current user's own data — not a shared dataset.

News Governance at Scale

Universities generate a high volume of internal news: faculty research announcements, HR policy updates, committee outcomes, events, and student-facing crossover content. Without a governance model, the home page news feed quickly becomes a firehose that nobody reads. A sustainable model for a 2,000-staff institution typically involves three tiers:

Tier 1 — All-Staff News (Home Site)

Reserved for institution-wide announcements: policy changes, senior leadership communications, campus-wide events, regulatory updates. Only a central communications team has author rights to this tier. Target audience: all staff. Publish cadence: 2–4 items per week maximum.

Tier 2 — Faculty News (Faculty Sites)

Published by faculty marketing or admin coordinators. News posts tagged to the relevant faculty audience group. These aggregate into the home site via the Hub News web part, filtered by the viewing user's faculty membership. A lecturer in the Science faculty sees Science news in their home page feed without Central Comms having to manually curate it.

Tier 3 — Team Announcements (Team Sites)

Published by team owners for specific working groups. Not promoted to the hub news feed — these remain discoverable through the team site and SharePoint search, but do not push to the home page. This tier is self-governed.

Unified Search Across University Systems

Search is where many university intranets fail. Staff expect to type a colleague's name and find their office location, phone extension, and research interests. They expect to search for "GDPR policy" and find the current policy PDF regardless of which faculty uploaded it. They expect to find "room booking" and land on the room booking system link — not a 2019 announcement that mentions room bookings.

SharePoint Online's modern search covers all hub-associated sites by default — a correctly architected hub means cross-site search works without configuration. The gaps to close are:

• People search: Ensure all staff profiles in Azure AD are populated with department, job title, office location, and skills. Missing fields create poor people search results. A one-time bulk update using PnP PowerShell and data from the HR system is usually the fastest fix.
• External content: For content in non-Microsoft systems (the library catalogue, the room booking system, the VLE), use Microsoft Graph Connectors to index external content into the M365 search index. The custom connector framework allows any system with an API to be indexed.
• Acronym answers: University staff use institutional acronyms constantly. Configure SharePoint Search answer cards for common acronyms (DLHE, REF, TEF, HESA, etc.) so search results lead with a plain-English explanation before the document results.

Mobile Experience with Teams & Viva Connections

For many university staff — particularly estates, facilities, and clinical health professionals — the intranet is accessed primarily on a mobile device through the Microsoft Teams app. Viva Connections is surfaced as a tab in the Teams app, meaning your dashboard cards and Viva feed are automatically available on iOS and Android without a separate app or mobile-specific build.

ACE cards must be tested on the Teams mobile client as well as the web browser. The Quick View panel renders as a bottom sheet on mobile — wide tables and multi-column layouts inside Quick Views will be clipped or overflow. Design Quick View templates for a single-column mobile-first layout; the wider two-column layout can be applied via an isNarrow check in the card template.

For universities where some staff are not licenced for Microsoft Teams (common in hybrid licencing arrangements where visiting lecturers have only F1 licences), ensure the Viva Connections web experience on the SharePoint home site is equally functional — do not put critical content only in the dashboard that requires the Teams client.