Microsoft is retiring the draft-and-enabled workflow for Viva Connections and moving management of multi-home site configurations from the Microsoft 365 admin center to the SharePoint admin center, with a general availability rollout targeted for August 2026. The update, detailed in Microsoft 365 Roadmap entry 567887, dissolves the legacy double-object model—where a Connections instance and a SharePoint Home site existed as separate administrative concepts—and consolidates everything under SharePoint’s intranet controls.

What’s Changing Technically

Administrators who oversee multiple SharePoint Home sites—often used for distinct frontline, regional, or departmental intranets—will manage them directly inside the SharePoint admin center rather than the Viva Connections section of the Microsoft 365 portal. The new experience supports creating and removing sites, assigning audience targeting so that specific groups see the right home site, and setting the priority order that dictates which site appears first in the Teams SharePoint app or browser.

Entry points in the Microsoft 365 admin center that previously linked to Viva Connections multi-site settings will redirect automatically to the new SharePoint location, Microsoft says. Behind the scenes, the system will upgrade any existing Viva Connections experiences to full-fledged SharePoint Home sites, eliminating the old “draft” and “enabled” states entirely. This means no more toggling an experience between a hidden draft mode and a live state; the SharePoint site itself becomes the single source of truth.

In the current setup, an admin creating a new multi-home experience must define a name, audience, and site URL in the Microsoft 365 center, then separately ensure the site is a Home site in SharePoint. Post-migration, the SharePoint admin center becomes the single control plane. A new interface—likely an updated “Home sites” or “Viva Connections” tab within SharePoint admin—will surface all home sites, their associated audiences, and priority rankings in a unified list.

The core requirements for multi-home deployments remain unchanged. Organizations still need the appropriate Microsoft 365 licenses—typically those including SharePoint and Viva licensing if features like audience targeting across multiple sites are used—and site owners must maintain proper permissions, content governance, and site lifecycle practices. The shift is purely administrative, not a new intranet model or a rebranding of Viva Connections itself.

What the Move Means for You

For IT and SharePoint Administrators

If you are responsible for your organization’s intranet, this change erases a long-running point of confusion. No longer will you need to navigate separate interfaces in two admin centers to configure the same employee experience. All site management, including priority ordering and audience mapping, lives in one place. That should reduce training overhead and help avoid misconfigurations where a Connections instance and its underlying Home site drift apart.

However, the transition requires proactive steps. Your help desk documentation and internal runbooks that reference the Viva Connections area in the Microsoft 365 admin center will need updating. Any automated scripts or third-party tools that interact with the multi-home configuration APIs might require adjustments if the endpoints change. If your organization uses the SharePoint Online CSOM or REST API to manage home site properties, verify any dependencies on the old Connections-specific endpoints. Microsoft typically provides backward compatibility for a transition period, but early testing is wise.

You should also reassess any governance policies tied to the old draft state concept, such as approval workflows for enabling a new Connections experience. Since the draft state disappears, you may want to implement SharePoint site policies or check-in workflows that serve the same purpose.

For End Users and Content Creators

Employees who simply navigate their company’s intranet via Teams or SharePoint will notice no visible difference. The home sites they access remain the same; the branding, navigation, and content do not change. Site owners and editors creating pages within those sites won’t see disruption either. This administrative shift happens entirely behind the curtain.

That said, if content creators were accustomed to a separate “Viva Connections” publishing process—such as submitting a draft for approval before enabling—they might find that the process now mirrors standard SharePoint site publishing, which may already be familiar. For most knowledge workers, the update is invisible.

How We Got Here: The Viva Connections Admin Journey

Viva Connections launched in 2021 as Microsoft’s employee-experience gateway, designed to bring company intranets, dashboards, and feeds into Teams. From the start, it relied on SharePoint Home sites as the content backbone, but Microsoft kept administrative controls split: site settings lived in SharePoint, while Connections-specific configuration—including multi-home site management—lived in the Microsoft 365 admin center under the Viva section.

That duality created friction. An admin could refine audience targeting and priority in the Microsoft 365 center, but if they needed to adjust permissions or branding, they’d jump into SharePoint. Over time, Microsoft moved to tighten the relationship. Documentation updates earlier in 2026 began describing SharePoint Home sites as the primary object powering the SharePoint app in Teams, downplaying the Connections brand. The roadmap item now formally closes the gap.

The deprecation of draft and enabled states also reflects a broader Microsoft philosophy: simplify object lifecycles. Instead of a separate staging mechanism, administrators can use SharePoint’s native site features—such as site-level version control, test environments, or communication site templates—to achieve the same ends without an extra layer of abstraction. This mirrors previous consolidations, like the retirement of classic publishing features in favor of modern page management, and aligns with the “One SharePoint” direction the platform has taken since 2022.

Your Pre-Migration Checklist

With a rollout window in August 2026, actionable steps can be taken now:

  1. Inventory current multi-home setups. Document every Viva Connections experience tied to a separate home site, including the audience groups assigned and the configured priority order. You can find this information today in the Microsoft 365 admin center > Setup > Viva > Viva Connections > Manage multi-site experiences.
  2. Audit site ownership and permissions. Since management shifts to SharePoint, confirm that the right people have administer access to these home sites. In the new model, managing multi-home settings likely requires SharePoint admin or global admin privileges.
  3. Update internal documentation. Help desks, IT runbooks, and onboarding guides that point users to the Microsoft 365 admin center for Connections management must be revised to reference the SharePoint admin center path. Don’t leave redirects as the only clue for your team.
  4. Review licensing compliance. While Microsoft hasn’t signaled a license change, multi-home audiences often rely on Microsoft 365 E5 or Viva licensing tiers. Ensure your organization’s subscription covers the configured number of home sites and audiences.
  5. Prepare for the redirect. Test any current bookmarks or deep links that your admins use; they will automatically redirect, but you may want to create direct links to the new SharePoint admin center location once it’s known.
  6. Communicate with stakeholders. Inform intranet owners and departmental leads who manage their own home sites that the configuration interface is moving—no change to their content, but they’ll need to adjust if they regularly modify audience settings.

You do not need to migrate any site content or rebuild experiences. The upgrade from legacy Connections instances to full Home sites is automatic and seamless, according to Microsoft’s announcement.

What’s Next: The Bigger Picture

This move hints at further convergence between the Viva suite and SharePoint. Already, parts of Viva Engage (formerly Yammer) and Viva Learning are integrated into SharePoint web parts. As Microsoft invests in its “employee experience” narrative, expect more admin controls to land in SharePoint, the home for content and sites, while Viva becomes more of a set of apps and insights layered on top.

The retirement of the draft-enabled model may also set a precedent for how other Viva modules handle lifecycle management. Viva Amplify, for instance, currently uses its own campaign publishing model; could it one day align with SharePoint’s page management? That remains speculative, but the trend is clear.

For now, the August 2026 shift is a straightforward administrative improvement that trims the complexity many mid-sized and large organizations face when deploying multiple intranet experiences. Keep an eye on the Microsoft 365 admin center’s message center for the final rollout timeline and any last-minute API changes, and make sure your IT team has the SharePoint admin center bookmarked—it’s about to become busier.