Microsoft Viva Topics applies AI to empower people with knowledge and expertise in the apps they use every day. Viva Topics automatically organizes content and expertise across your systems and teams into related topics like projects, products, processes, and customers.
This week, we’re excited to spotlight some long-awaited integrations for Viva Topics with Microsoft 365 apps - and new admin capabilities to help you shape and deliver knowledge at scale to your organization.
Viva Topics in the apps you use every day
In April 2022, we’ll begin rolling out our integration to Microsoft Teams [Roadmap ID 72189]. Customers will be able to use hashtags to attach topic cards to any chat, and then users can engage the topic card by hovering over the highlight:
This integration builds on the rollout of our Topic Center app for Microsoft Teams, already available at https://aka.ms/TopicsApp
In addition, we’ve introduced the following new integrations across Microsoft 365:
- To help you start building your knowledge base, we've integrated the Syntex taxonomy service. Syntex can manage and build business taxonomies automatically from the content you save to libraries across Microsoft 365. Then Topics can use those taxonomy tags to prebuild topic pages, and automatically attach tagged documents to the topic pages as new content is found and tagged. This feature was released in February and is tracked as Roadmap ID 82049.
Requesting topic auto-creation from the taxonomy term store
- If you need extra levels of security for sensitive content, Syntex can automatically apply Microsoft Information Protection (MIP) sensitivity labels to content before it’s indexed by Viva Topics. Then you can pick sensitivity labels to exclude SharePoint sites and files from topic discovery. Any description or alternate names extracted from those files will also be removed from the AI-suggested topic. (Roadmap ID 82047 and 82048)
- For Outlook on the web, you can use hashtags to attach topic cards to any message. Viva Topics can then display those to your readers with suggested additional topics in the message pane. You can see a click-through demo of this experience or in the embedded interactive below:
This feature is already rolling out and is tracked under Roadmap ID 88693.
- We’re also integrating Viva Topics more closely to Yammer. Topic pages will automatically allow users to post questions about the topic to a linked community and bring in recognized experts to answer questions. This is being tracked under Roadmap ID 72184.
User experience
- We’re adding multiple answers to Microsoft Search results so you can see topic answers together with other answer types like bookmarks and acronyms. Roadmap ID 88702
- You’ll have First Run Experiences to guide initial usage of Viva Topics in SharePoint to teach you what Viva Topics is and how to consume knowledge as well as contribute your knowledge. (Roadmap ID 93215.)
- Today, topic pages display a manual map of related topics. To enhance these visual maps, we’re adding automatic AI-discovered connections to related topics on the topic map and the topic card. Over time, we’ll add multi-level connections among topics as well. (Roadmap ID 88695)
Discovered connections on the topics map
Topic management
- The first set of topic discovery insights for Viva Topics will appear in the Insights area under Search & Intelligence in the Microsoft 365 admin center. Review these insights to learn what topics have been discovered, added solely by the people in your organization, and what has been removed. For new customers, you’ll see these insights change as Viva Topics is indexing your content even before you see these topics appear in Topic Center. You’ll need to be a SharePoint admin and a Groups admin to see this dashboard. (Roadmap ID 88696.)
- A streamlined Topics experience will enable user to search for and filter the list of topics from a single, consolidated list. You’ll also be able to search for suggested and published topics from the Topic Center. The Search box will provide a better interaction for surfacing Topic suggestions to accelerate your knowledge search from organization. (Roadmap ID 72182)
- Sometimes the best references may live outside SharePoint. To add resources for external content, you can now pin external links on topic pages alongside pinned files and pages. The external links are viewable and clickable from topic cards and answers as well. (Roadmap ID: 93204)
- To meet customer governance and privacy standards, admins can control whether or not users are shown as automatically associated with a topic. Users will have to opt-in to be added to topic pages and cards. Roadmap ID 82103
Other April updates:
- Viva Topics will be available in the Government Community Cloud (GCC) environments. Viva Topics in GCC will include all features released to clients as of April 2022, including topic cards and topic pages, topics integration in SharePoint & Office, and topic management in the Viva topic center. (Roadmap ID 72815)
We’re excited to deliver a large set of updates this month. Check out the Microsoft Viva blog to learn more about product updates coming to Viva Topics and other Viva modules. And if you’re interested in Viva Topics adoption, we recommend reading Matt Wolodarsky’s three-part series: The Journey to Viva Topics adoption success or visiting the Viva Adoption Hub. Thank you.
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