rss.livelink.threads-in-node

Viva Topics still alive?

lucamondini — Thu, 15 Feb 2024 10:33:26 GMT

Hi all,

I just noticed that Topics is no longer listed among the products of the Viva suite.

Is the product still alive?

Thanks

Topics won't show up in SharePoint Online

jahaco — Wed, 31 Jan 2024 12:49:40 GMT

Hi,

we are using Viva Topics for 3 weeks now. I can manually link topics in chats and channels in Teams via hashtag. It works fine. On the other hand SharePoint does not work at all. The topics aren't really recognized.

Just for comparison I attached a screenshot.

One time I had it working with just 1 Word on the SharePoint Page. But immediately after I wrote another word it stopped working again. Hashtags won't do anything on the SharePoint Pages.

My Demo Tenant from cdx transform isn't working either and I am supposed to showcase Viva Topics to one of our customers next week. Why doesn't it work?

Regards

Jannis

Challenge with "Related topics" webpart in Viva Topics SharePoint Pages

hkusulja — Sun, 21 Jan 2024 09:42:14 GMT

Hello, I have a challenge with "Related topics" webpart in Viva Topics SharePoint Pages.

1. Navigate to Viva Topics SharePoint Site, Manage Topics > New Topic Page

2. Create a new Topic / Page, Name "TestA" SharePointe Page is created, and Topic is visible under Topics you can manage having Status Published. Origin has "User" value, without "Topics" part.

3. Crate another new Topic / Page , Name "TestB"

Challange: 4. Inside TopicB SharePoint page, under webpart "Related Topics, clicking "+" sign to related the TestA, it is not found.

Also the same after 3 days of waiting.

What is issue / how to see some list of topics, that are properly connected to related SharePoint Pages ? Where are topic relations stored in backend?

Feature Request: SharePoint web part to display filtered/specific Topics

TSchnaible — Tue, 17 Oct 2023 20:09:09 GMT

This is a request for updates/modifications to the existing SharePoint webpart "Topics"

Currently there isn't any way to control which topics appear - and as we're building a knowledge management tool, we want to display segments/tagged topics on specific pages. We are trying to find a "highlighted content" like webpart control that let you display topics on pages by filtering for:

Topic Title
Segments - display all topics that are included in a particular segment
Topic "contains" filter text
Columnar filters - since published Topics are Pages, can we use columns to further "tag" topics by topic (example: a column called "Department")

How to crawl Service Now Knowledge Space in Viva Topics?

NandaEvol365 — Fri, 22 Sep 2023 18:44:57 GMT

How to crawl Service Now Knowledge Space in Viva Topics. I can find the below URL but it will allow us to crawl to Microsoft Search but not sure whether it get crawled in Viva Topics?

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftsearch/servicenow-knowledge-connector

Viva topic creation

Richard1270 — Tue, 08 Aug 2023 17:04:40 GMT

I am having trouble creating a topic page after setup the Viva topic. can anyone assist me?

How will Copilot leverage Viva Topics?

Barba1330 — Wed, 02 Aug 2023 13:51:44 GMT

Is there existing documentation around how Copilot will leverage Viva Topics? They both leverage the Microsoft Knowledge Graph, but I would like to be able to explain how Copilot will benefit from a thorough implementation of Viva Topics.

Viva Topics lightweight management and Viva Engage Legacy Topics migration

jhaleyip — Mon, 24 Jul 2023 17:03:35 GMT

Do we need to purchase a Viva Topics license to migrate from legacy data store in Viva Engage to Viva Topics? I only want to use Viva Topics lightweight management. I can see the topics page in https://tenants-domain.sharepoint.com/_layouts/15/TopicsManagement.aspx, but I don't see the topics I created in Viva Engage.

July 2023 – Introducing Viva Topics lightweight management in Viva Engage

Tehzeeb — Wed, 05 Jul 2023 17:07:18 GMT

Microsoft Viva Topics applies next-generation AI to empower people with knowledge and expertise in the apps they use every day.

Viva Topics automatically organizes content and expertise into related topics like projects, products, processes, and customers.

This month, we are excited to announce lightweight management of manually created topics outside the Viva Topics license.

Viva Topics provides a central knowledge base for manually created topics and definitions inside apps like Viva Engage. These topics do not use Viva Topics' AI, topic cards, or pages, but can be selected to classify conversations and posts in Viva Engage.

With this release, we are providing a way for Viva Engage admins to edit, create, and delete these "simple" topics without Viva licensing to make knowledge management more accessible to more users.

We introduce the lightweight management experience of manually created topics to Viva Engage networks that have been migrated from the legacy data store in Viva Engage to Viva Topics. There is no change to the management permission for Viva Topics in Yammer, and we automatically grant it to Viva Engage admins so that they can manage topics as knowledge admins in the Manage topics page.

Updates to this feature can be tracked with Roadmap ID: 118672 and will reach GA in July 2023.

You will need to visit the 'Manage topics' page via the URL below, replace tenants-domain with your company’s name to find new experiences:
https://tenants-domain.sharepoint.com/_layouts/15/TopicsManagement.aspx

Management experiences without a Viva Topics license:

We allow those with management permission to access the Manage topics page to govern all “simple” topics, including.

• View the list of all manually created topics inside apps like Viva Engage.
• Search for a specific topic in the list.
• Create a simple topic (with only name and description) on the management page.
• Edit the name and description of an existing topic.
• Remove a topic.

Note: Removed topics cannot be restored in the lightweight management page.

With an active Viva Topics license:

You can also purchase Viva Topics licenses or get a free trial for your tenant to enable advanced management experiences and AI technology to enhance the central knowledge base in your organization.

• After purchasing Viva Topics licenses or getting a free trial, the lightweight management no longer works. When visiting the lightweight management page, we will prompt you to complete Viva Topics setup in your M365 Admin Center to enable premium features.
• Once Viva Topics setup is completed, we will automatically redirect users to the premium management page in Topics Center from the lightweight management page.

Preparation:

There is nothing you need to do to prepare, but you can let your admins and knowledge managers know about this new management of manually created topics outside the Viva Topics license.

Closing: 

Join us for an AMA session on July 24, 2023, at 9am PST. Learn more about Microsoft Viva Topics, and join the Viva Community, your destination for best practice guidance, conversations with experts, and peer-to-peer learning. 

Viva Topics lightweight management in Viva Engage

EmilyPerina — Mon, 24 Jul 2023 16:59:22 GMT

Join the Viva Topics product team live as we share the details of our recently announced capability: Viva Topics lightweight management in Viva Engage. We will be answering our customers top questions asked, feel free to post below ahead of time or ask it live!

An AMA is a live text-based online event similar to an “Ask Me Anything” on Reddit. This AMA gives you the opportunity to connect with Microsoft product experts who will be on hand to answer your questions and listen to feedback.

Feel free to post your questions about Microsoft Viva Topics anytime in the comments below beforehand, if it fits your schedule or time zone better, though questions will not be answered until the live hour.

Viva Topics: Updated Adoption Guide and a New Pilot Guides

Tehzeeb — Tue, 13 Jun 2023 15:28:07 GMT

Microsoft Viva Topics applies next-generation AI to empower people with knowledge and expertise in the apps they use every day. Viva Topics automatically organizes content and expertise into related topics like projects, products, processes, and customers. Topic cards deliver knowledge just-in-time across Outlook, Microsoft Teams, and Office. And topic pages—created and updated by AI—enable experts to cultivate and share knowledge with simplicity.

This month, we’re excited about the updated Adoption guide and the new Pilot guide for Microsoft Viva Topics to enable Viva Topics across your organization.

Updated Adoption Guide

Rolling out new tools across an organization can be challenging. The updated adoption guide makes it simple. The product team has compiled best practices from customers that have successfully deployed Viva Topics in their organization, so you can do the same. It explains the fundamental concepts of Topics in-depth and how to construct timelines, assign roles, build deployment plans, run workshops, measure success, and more. The guide is full of rich content such as communications templates and OKR examples. You can access the updated Adoption Guide here.

New Pilot Guide

If you are just starting out with Viva Topics, your organization is likely starting with a pilot and may have questions like what is the best way to run a Viva Topics pilot to evaluate the product in an efficient and scoped amount of time? The product team has built a step-by-step guide that demonstrates how any organization can run a successful pilot and leverage the full value of Viva Topics, all within 60 days (about 2 months). You can find the new Pilot Guide here.

New Filters for Manage Topics

New filters in Manage Topics will give Knowledge Managers more control when searching for topics. Topic Origin Filter indicates where the topic was sourced from. Engage and Taxonomy topics are called out specifically because they may lack information that is associated with a typical topic. An additional filter will enable Knowledge Managers to filter based on description.

Topic level metrics on topic experiences

We are adding topic level metrics of a topic to measure the impact and performance of the topic as well as identify the topics that require contributors’ attention. The first release will include metrics that show the:

Active consumption of topics: Number of times topic details were viewed.
Reach of the topic: Number of topic impressions
Sharing the topic using picker: Number of times topics were shared.
Topic edit and publish: Number of times topic page was edited and published.
Feedback on the topic: Number of times feedback was given on a topic.

Closing

In case you missed it, watch the Microsoft Viva Summit on-demand to learn more about how Viva empowers organizations with next-generation AI and data-driven insights to continuously improve workforce engagement and performance. To learn more about Copilot in Microsoft Viva, read the Microsoft 365 blog and join the new Viva Community, your destination for best practice guidance, conversations with experts, and peer-to-peer learning.

Announcing Copilot in Viva Topics

Tehzeeb — Thu, 09 Nov 2023 04:19:44 GMT

This month, we’re excited to announce several new features that will free up time by making it easy for people to find information and put knowledge to work - including Copilot in Viva Topics, Teams app, and more.

Copilot in Viva Topics

With Copilot in Viva Topics, you can harness your organization’s shared intelligence to distribute best practices and knowledge to everyone. You will have the ability to uncover new opportunities by summarizing complex topics across multiple connected documents, translating topic pages based on sources in other languages, and analyzing connections between seemingly disparate concepts. With humans in the loop, you can also validate & augment the source of organizational knowledge to ensure accuracy and credibility.

This is expected to be available for preview in September 2023.

Explore and query your organization’s knowledge graph with relevant people & resources

Answers in Viva

Also powered by Viva Topics, Copilot is coming to Answers in Viva. When an employee asks a question, Copilot can help suggest additional details to improve the clarity of the question. It can also recommend existing resources and potential answers. Copilot even helps curate knowledge by providing a summary of all the replies and contributors and brings it all together into an aggregate view with FAQs, experts, and other resources.

These exciting Copilot capabilities utilizing natural language AI interfaces to improve employee experience are targeted for private preview by September of this year.

Copilot can help people provide answers to questions by recommending existing resources and potential answers.

Viva Topics Teams app:

The new Viva Topics app in Teams will be available for all licensed Viva Topics users.
You can now use the Viva Topics app in Teams as a destination to see ‘their’ associate Topics, and knowledge managers can even access Manage Topics and the upcoming analytics tab. You will no longer have to navigate out of Teams to access their Topic Center. The app will also include new Viva components that will allow Viva Suite users to easily transition between Viva apps, submit feedback, and get support.

Updates to this feature can be tracked with Roadmap ID: 118592 and will reach GA in May 2023.

Multi-Hop queries for Related Topics

This generally available version of Related Topics adds a second layer of connections so that topics that are two degrees of connection away from the focal node are shown. Clicking on a node will expand the visualization to show more topics connected to that node.

Viva Topics in Feed

Microsoft Feed is a dedicated Feed experience in Office.com and Edge New Tab Page that helps Microsoft 365 users feel connected and up to date on the people, topics, and tasks most important to them-files, meetings, tasks, news, links, people highlights and community posts.

We have added further value to your Feed, by showing you relevant Viva Topics that are highlighted within your Feed. When a SharePoint object that is already associated with a Topic is shown in Feed items, you will be able to see a corresponding Topic to help you further understand the context and do more. Only SharePoint objects that are associated with an existing Viva Topic are highlighted with a Topic.

Updates to this feature can be tracked with Roadmap ID: 118063 and will reach GA in April 2023.

Viva Engage conversations and Q&A appear on Topic Card as Activity

Viva Topics will become a continuous source of information with Viva Engage conversations and Q&A associated with a topic appear on the Topic Card as new activity.

Updates to this feature can be tracked with Roadmap ID: 118588 and will reach GA in May 2023.

Verified Topic badges

You can now mark published topics as verified and add a specific group of SMEs as editors to the topic. Verification helps readers identify topics with added reliability. Topics that are verified are identified by a special badge and indicate the content is reviewed for accuracy and are regularly updated by assigned editors.

Updates to this feature can be tracked with Roadmap ID: 118239 and will reach GA in April 2023.

Topic engagement analytics for knowledge managers

Usage and engagement analytics showing Viva Topics adoption and value will be available to knowledge managers in a new analytics tab in topic center. Analytics will include:

• Unique user counts and Usage counts for:

o Topics activities overall
o By activities like consuming, contributing and sharing Topics

• Detailed breakdown for Topics consumption usage from Topic card, page, search, Topic center cards; Usage count details for;
• Detailed breakdown for Topics contribution activities like Editing and publishing topics, providing feedback.

Updates to this feature can be tracked with Roadmap ID: 118768 and will reach GA in May 2023.

Topic Engagement Analytics for Admins

This update will introduce usage and engagement analytics on topics (views, edits, etc.) to the Microsoft Admin Center for Admins.

Updates to this feature can be tracked with Roadmap ID: 88699 and will reach GA in May 2023

Controlling topic highlights on SharePoint

SharePoint includes a Viva Topics experience that identifies topics on SharePoint pages, news posts and automatically highlights them on the page. With this feature, page authors and editors can control which topics get highlighted on the page to ensure the messaging and styling of the content is accurate. Along with this, there will be a new dedicated space for Viva Topics within SharePoint pages. This will allow you to discover and consume all the topics on the page in a single place without scrolling to look for a highlight.

Updates to this feature can be tracked with Roadmap ID: 100245 and will reach GA in April 2023.

Close

Copilot in Microsoft Viva will begin rolling out to customers later this year. In case you missed it, watch the Microsoft Viva Summit on-demand to learn more about how Viva empowers organizations with next-generation AI and data-driven insights to continuously improve workforce engagement and performance. To learn more about Copilot in Microsoft Viva, read the Microsoft 365 blog and join the new Viva Community, your destination for best practice guidance, conversations with experts, and peer-to-peer learning.

Learn About Knowledge Sharing Through Viva Topics at KMWorld November 7-10, 2022

Tehzeeb — Tue, 08 Nov 2022 14:00:00 GMT

Over the past few months, we have been working on several new, exciting features for Viva Topics that add extensive value for executive management, CKO and knowledge managers, helping them shape a knowledge-sharing culture. We’ll be discussing these features and their impact during our keynote: Create a Knowledge Sharing Culture with Viva Topics by Naomi Moneypenny, Director of Product Development for Microsoft Viva Topics at KMWorld, on November10.

Naomi will discuss how customers and Microsoft itself have implemented Viva Topics in addition to best practices for getting deployed, garnering adoption, and scaling across organizations. The focus will be on the practical application of how People + AI work together to generate a useful, engaging, up-to-date knowledgebase. Get lots of tips and ideas to ramp up knowledge sharing in your organization.

Here are three of our key functionalities:

The Adoption Health Status and Adoption Metrics Dashboard

The Adoption Health Status and Adoption Metrics Dashboard will help you see how your organization is using and getting the most out of Viva Topics. You can analyze organizational progress and what you can do to further drive healthy adoption – from consuming topics to contributing to topics.

The Adoption Health Status and Dashboard can be tracked with Roadmap ID 100028 and will be GA in February of 2023. More details are available in our Oct blog.

Gain insights through adoption metrics

Topics in Teams Channels

Updates to this feature can be tracked with Roadmap ID: 100254 and will reach GA in March 2023. More details included in our Oct blog.

This integration builds on the rollout of our Topic Center app for Microsoft Teams

Language expansion

As mentioned in our Oct blog, Viva Topics will support indexing content and generating topics from documents written in Italian and Portuguese (in addition to English, French, German, and Spanish, which are already available). This will ensure that topics can be edited and experienced in your selected language.

Updates to this feature can be tracked with Roadmap ID: 100252 and will reach GA in November 2022.

Indexing content and generating topics written in Italian and Portuguese

KMWorld 2022

We’re excited to connect with organizations and knowledge workers at KMWorld 2022 in Washington, DC, to share more about these great features and others in Viva Topics and how Topics can help organizations create a knowledge sharing culture.

We look forward to seeing you at the keynote:
Create a Knowledge Sharing Culture with Viva Topics
Naomi Moneypenny, Director of Product Development for Microsoft Viva Topics November 10, 2022, 9:15am ET.

To learn more about KMWorld 2022, visit the conference page: https://www.kmworld.com/Conference/2022

To read about other Topics featured that are planned for the coming months, visit our October product announcement blog.

To learn more about Viva Topics, visit our resource center.

Thanks!

Viva Topics: New adoption dashboard and experiences in Teams Channels, Viva Connections and Outlook

Tehzeeb — Thu, 09 Nov 2023 04:21:41 GMT

Last month, we introduced several new features for Viva Topics that our partners and customers have been eager to see and use. And this week, during Ignite, we announced several new enhancements that will be released throughout the end of the year and beyond.

If you are curious about how your organization is progressing on its road to healthy adoption, we can help. Introducing the adoption metric dashboard – a new tool coming in early 2023 that knowledge managers and admins can use to keep a pulse on how the organization is progressing and what you can do to keep your adoption journey on track.

And to help your team members connect to the knowledge and expertise quickly, we’re releasing new experiences in Team Channels, Viva Connections and Outlook Desktop, along with other features for knowledge contributors.

Adoption health status and dashboard

Knowledge managers and admins can gain this insight through adoption metrics accompanied by health benchmarks. When an organization has not reached the health benchmark, knowledge managers and admins will receive recommended actions that they can take to help drive their organization to health.

The Adoption Health Status and Dashboard can be tracked with Roadmap ID 100028 and will be GA in February of 2023.

Gain insights through adoption metrics

New experiences with Viva Topics

In building Viva Topics, it has been our mission to drive value by identifying latent knowledge in organizations, surfacing it in the flow of work while creating and maintaining a culture of knowledge sharing to make organizational knowledge available to everyone within a company.

We have been working towards this goal by bringing experiences such as topic cards and answers into all canvases across Microsoft 365. However, continued engagement with topic experiences and contributing knowledge is a critical part of the knowledge lifecycle. Hence, while we continue to surface topics in meaningful and innovative ways across different apps, we are now working on making Topics experiences continuously valuable to you – our users - every time you encounter them and making curating Topics easier and part of your day.

The features listed below are focused on bringing new, dynamic information on topics to you through optimized experiences and building the right motivators to contribute to your organization’s knowledge base.

Viva Topics cards in your Daily Briefing email 

The Daily Briefing email, a daily email sent by Outlook helps you stay in control of your calendar and be intentional about your day by surfacing outstanding commitments, requests, follow-ups, and other suggestions to help you throughout your workday.  

As an additional resource, you will receive actionable Viva Topics cards to your Daily Briefing email. Like the Topic Center, this card surfaces suggested topics based on your activity and will ask you to confirm your connection to the topic. With this card, you can: 
• Learn which topics Viva Topics has suggested that you are connected to 
• Confirm or reject your suggested connection 
• Understand why the topic was suggested for you 
• Discover or explore the topic pages and topic center 

This feature can be tracked with Roadmap ID: 100246 and will be available in November 2022.

Receive actionable Viva Topics cards through The Daily Briefing email

Topics in Outlook Desktop

You can learn more about topics being discussed in your organization without leaving Outlook Desktop. With this feature, when an email is in “read mode”, Viva Topics can detect where a topic is mentioned. When this happens, Viva Topics will prompt you to open the Viva Insights panel where you can see a list of all topics referenced in the email along with a view of the topic descriptions, the people and resources associated with the topics.

This feature can be tracked with roadmap ID: 100247 and it will GA in January of 2023

Viva Topics can detect where a topic is mentioned in Outlook

Topic cards in Viva Connections

Viva Topics encourages knowledge discoverability, engagement and sharing. By integrating topics actions in Viva Connections, Viva Topics helps you and your team explore knowledge and confirm expertise at any time, from anywhere.

Viva Topics will have two different action cards that can be used on the Viva Connections Dashboard. One is a "discover topics" card that can be used to explore topics and knowledge areas across the company for people who could be interested in learning more or contributing to a topic. Topics and knowledge areas are dynamically displayed in the card based on your interests, current projects, and expertise. When you engage with the card, you will be directed to the topic center where you can learn more about topics and contribute.

The other card allows you to review topics associations and determine whether you want to remain listed as an expert from your company’s knowledge base. You can confirm or reject associations by clicking on the “Yes” or “No” button.

Updates to this feature can be tracked with Roadmap ID: 100253 and will reach GA in November 2022.

Knowledge discoverability from Viva Connections

Topics in Teams Channels

Earlier this year, we rolled out new Viva Topics integrations with Microsoft Teams. To widen the reach of Topics into the areas team members work, Viva Topics will expand from chats in Teams to channels in Teams, allowing users to mention topics and see topic cards within a given channel.

This addition to the Teams integration will make the Topics experience more intuitive and approachable, allowing you to interact with topics in the spaces you are used to collaborating with team members.

Updates to this feature can be tracked with Roadmap ID: 100254 and will reach GA in March 2023.

Language expansion

Viva Topics will support indexing content and generating topics from documents written in Italian and Portuguese (in addition to English, French, German, and Spanish, which are already available). This will ensure that topics can be edited and experienced in your selected language. In 2023, we will continue expanding language support to Japanese and Simplified Chinese.

Updates to this feature can be tracked with Roadmap ID: 100252 and will reach GA in November 2022.

Indexing content and generating topics written in Italian and Portuguese

Topic highlight control in SharePoint

SharePoint already includes a Viva Topics experience that identifies Topics on SharePoint pages, news posts and automatically highlights them on the page. With this feature, page authors and editors can control which Topics get highlighted on the page to ensure the messaging and styling of the content is accurate.

Later this year, there will be a new dedicated space for Viva Topics within SharePoint pages. This will allow you to discover and consume all the topics on the page in a single place without scrolling to look for a highlight.

You can be tracked feature with Roadmap ID: 100245, and it will GA in Dec 2022

Context region for search

To ensure topics are easily referenceable and searchable, we are re-designing the results page for Microsoft Search – presenting topic cards in the right – rail of search results. By adding topic cards to the “context region” of the search page, team members will have access to more comprehensive search results.

You can track the feature with Roadmap ID: 100248 and it will GA in March of 2023

Resources: 

We’re excited to introduce a large set of upcoming updates this month to Viva Topics. If you’re interested in Viva Topics adoption, we recommend visiting the Viva Adoption Hub to find videos, demos hackathon toolkit and more.

Closing: 

To learn more about other Viva news and announcements for Ignite, watch the Ignite session Microsoft Viva: Latest innovations and roadmap for the new digital employee experience and read the blog post by Seth Patton. Thank you.

August 2022 – Language support and management updates for Viva Topics

Chris McNulty — Mon, 08 Aug 2022 15:49:51 GMT

Microsoft Viva Topics uses AI to empower people with knowledge and expertise in the apps they use every day.

This week, we’re excited to spotlight our language indexing support for Viva Topics - and new admin capabilities to help you shape and deliver knowledge at scale to your organization.

Multilanguage indexing in Viva Topics.

This month, we’re rolling out support for Viva Topics to index content and generate topics from documents written in French, German, and Spanish (as well as English). Topics can be edited and experienced in your selected language. Later this year, we will expand language support for Italian and Portuguese content, with Japanese and Simplified Chinese coming in 2023.

Today, our customers are engaged in Viva Topics globally. Although Viva Topics has supported English since launch, content is written in many languages. Now, Viva Topics can identify knowledge in any of our supported language sources and aggregate them into a single linked topic when they share a common topic name.

A sample topic in English

The same topic in Spanish

Our support for multilingual indexing builds on multilingual interface support, which allows the Viva Topics UI to be displayed in over forty languages. Your language preference can be set in each application (e.g., Teams, SharePoint, Outlook) and Viva Topics uses your preferences to show topic content in other languages.

Multilingual support for viewing and curating a topic page in Spanish, French, or German

Soon, we’ll empower you to merge topics discovered by our AI across multiple languages – for example, linking “Allemagne,” “Deutschland” and “Germany.”

Topics are first edited in the tenant’s default language. Then you can curate topics in additional supported languages. Topics also uses the tenant’s default language as a “fall back.” For example, in an English language tenant, if a topic is missing a description in German, Viva Topics will show the English description, when available. Viva Topics doesn’t automatically translate extracted content among languages but supports human-driven curation and augmentation of discovered topics.

Full details on supporting Viva Topics multilingual curation and publishing process can be found in our support documents

Multilingual support will be released to general availability on August 16, 2022. Admins don’t need to activate it to take advantage of our expanded AI capabilities. See Roadmap ID 72186 for more information.

Enhanced topic management dashboard

In the past year, our customers have indexed over two billion documents with Viva Topics, generating millions of topics. Managing high volumes of discovered knowledge takes attention. And indexing content from more languages will further accelerate the growth of your knowledge base.

That's why we're proud to unveil our enhanced topic management dashboard.

The new topic management dashboard allows you to view a consolidated list of topics rather than having separate lists per life cycle (Suggest, Confirmed, Published). This makes it easier to find, sort, and filter based on lifecycle, name, update, quality, engagement and more to focus on the precise sections of your knowledge base that need additional attention.

Topic management dashboard

Our enhanced topic management road map has been in private preview for several months, and we'll roll it out to general availability customers in August 2022. Please see roadmap ID 72182 for more details.

Conclusion

We’d love to get your thoughts her on the Tech Community or on our community feedback forum. You can also use the "Feedback" on the topic page itself, to communicate directly with the product team.

Check out the Microsoft Viva blog to learn more about product updates coming to Viva Topics and other Viva modules. For more guidance, we recommend reading our three-part series: The Journey to Viva Topics adoption success or visiting the Viva Adoption Hub. Thank you.

April 2022 – Viva Topics Integrations with Teams, Syntex, Outlook and Yammer

Chris McNulty — Thu, 09 Nov 2023 04:21:32 GMT

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.

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)

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.

January 2022 – Viva Topics Updates and Year End Recap

Chris McNulty — Thu, 20 Jan 2022 18:28:46 GMT

In February, we’ll celebrate year 1 of Viva Topics in general availability- and what a year it’s been! As our customers have adopted Topics, we’ve expanded our use cases and continued to work through improvements and release new features.

Let’s look at some of the features that are coming soon and some that released in the few months.

Coming in early 2022

Yammer integration: Integrating with Yammer will make community-sourced knowledge in your organization easily accessible and support a consistent experience across Microsoft 365. To learn more about this integration, check out our Yammer Topic API article.
Outlook integration: Spread knowledge quickly in context for recipients of an email by adding a hashtag to your message or letting Viva Topics suggest topics based on the content you type or received in a thread. Public roadmap item 88693.
People profile cards: Find the topics connected to experts more easily with topics displayed on people profile cards. Public Roadmap item 88697.
Syntex taxonomy for generating topics: Select terms from the taxonomy service to kick off the creation of Viva topics. Public Roadmap ID 82049.
GCC: Viva Topics will be shipping to the US Government Community Cloud in the next few months. Public Roadmap ID 72185.

To read about more of our upcoming feature releases, read our Ignite blog.

Now available

Topics in Viva Connections: You can use topics in Viva Connections by adding the Topics webpart to Connections, and page authors can mention a specific topic using # to ensure a topic card appears. Of course, in News pages, topic highlights will appear automatically.
Transform your Topic Center into an app in Teams, by using your Topic Center URL by using a simple script available at https://aka.ms/TopicsApp
Accessibility: Low vision users can magnify topics on their screen up to 400% for a better experience. This is just one of many efforts we’re making to improve accessibility for our users. Learn more about our commitment to accessibility.
Topics visibility: Empower knowledge managers to enable or prevent general visibility of AI-suggested topics. Public Roadmap ID 82050.
Topic management dashboards: Track topics discovered by Viva AI, as well as how topics are progressing through the topic lifestyle stages. Public Roadmap ID 81977.

Check out the Microsoft Viva blog to learn more about product updates coming to Viva Topics and other Viva modules. If you’re interested in learning about Viva Topics adoption, we recommend reading Matt Wolodarsky’s three-part series: The Journey to Viva Topics adoption success. Thanks.

The journey to Viva Topics adoption success: Implement

Matt Wolodarsky — Tue, 30 Nov 2021 17:00:09 GMT

This is the third and final post in our three-part blog series about how to successfully adopt Viva Topics.

Check out the other two posts:

Part 1: Intro
Part 2: Initiate

In this series I have shared what you need to do to prepare for your implementation. To summarize what this preparation entails leading into launch and post-launch, consider the sample project plan below. Your timeline will be unique to your scope, resourcing, and culture.

In this blog post I will focus on the implementation phase, including running an early adopter program, building your knowledge base, and scaling Viva Topics in your organization.

Early adopter program

The primary purpose of an early adopter program (EAP) is to better understand what works (and what doesn’t work) in terms of knowledge discovery within your organization. Based on the insights collected from your EAP you will be able to refine your adoption plan prior to the broader launch. An EAP should also serve to deliver some quick wins for future influencing efforts and allow you to develop a pool of potential knowledge managers and champions to recruit from. An EAP is not user acceptance testing, you want to dry run some select scenarios in a production environment amongst a select group of EAP participants.

For your EAP we recommend recruiting important influencers, likely champions, leaders who will become advocates and representation across your extended knowledge team, including knowledge managers, champions, and topic contributors. Each of these roles should be filled with people from the different departments and business units of your organization. You want an extended knowledge team that understands the domain area, is connected to internal networks, and has social capital to spend in their respective organizations.

Build knowledge base

A quality knowledge base is critical for Viva Topics adoption. Users need to see value quickly and a quality knowledge base showing up in the flow of work is a quick path to that value.

Building a quality knowledge base consists of knowledge identification, capture (both explicit and tacit knowledge), curation and crowdsourcing. At scale, this can only be accomplished through the combination of artificial intelligence (AI) and people. Viva Topics leverages AI to bootstrap your organization’s knowledge base, as well as the power of your people – subject matter experts and the crowd – to curate knowledge.

As you scale Viva Topics you will want to seed your organization’s knowledge base with some initial, high-quality topics. We recommend prioritizing a subset of important and high visibility topics for human curation prior to launch. This will deliver early value to users and help spark the flywheel of using the knowledge base and contributing to the knowledge base that is necessary to build and sustain it.

Scale

After you’ve worked out the kinks of your plan through the EAP, delivered some early success stories and began the ongoing cycle of building and sustaining a knowledge base, you are ready to scale. To scale Viva Topics effectively this means expanding to new stakeholders and scenarios, crawling new sources for knowledge, delivering new types of value and growing user engagement.

There is a snowball effect ready to be put to work. The initial success you achieve through your early adopter program increases buy-in from other leaders, teams, and users. This leads to greater levels of knowledge use and more contributions to your knowledge base, increasing the value of knowledge in your organization. As more and more impact with Viva Topics is demonstrated, more stakeholders will get engaged and the snowball grows bigger and bigger. This is how you go from initial buy-in to the most mature stage where knowledge is embedded into work processes and culture.

As you expand to new stakeholders, business units and departments; it’s critical to enable them to be self-sustainable in their curation, adoption, and culture evolution. They are experts in their knowledge domain and need to be empowered to embed knowledge discovery into everything they do.

Next steps

Now that we’ve reviewed what a successful Viva Topics adoption looks like, what’s next? It’s time to get started. I’d suggest getting your core team onboarded and using the Viva Topics adoption guide to navigate your way through this exciting knowledge journey.

Reach out to us and your peers who are also on this journey by checking out the Microsoft Viva - Microsoft Tech Community. We look forward to hearing about your Viva Topics success story!

The journey to Viva Topics adoption success: Initiate

Matt Wolodarsky — Tue, 30 Nov 2021 18:35:54 GMT

This is the second post from our three-part blog series on how to successfully adopt Viva Topics.

In the initial post I shared some of the scenarios early adopter customers were using Viva Topics for and the importance of people, culture, and curation to a successful adoption.

This post will focus on the initiate phase of the Viva Topics adoption journey, inclusive of planning, team onboarding and set up.

Planning

Much of the planning and set up of Viva Topics stems from the scenarios you identify and prioritize for your implementation. Scenarios describe the different ways people and teams in your organization can use the capabilities of Viva Topics and organizational knowledge to achieve their goals. While we published a catalogue of common Viva Topics scenarios to help inspire, you will want to make them relevant to your organization and identify more custom scenarios. There are a variety of ways to define scenarios, I like the framework below.

As you define your scenarios, make sure to identify the knowledge assets that are required. In the sales enablement scenario above this could include proposals, product related content or customer information. The sources that contain this content will be where you point the Viva Topics Artificial Intelligence at to identify relevant knowledge and people, and automatically organize them into topics.

Culture is an important consideration for planning your Viva Topics implementation. Both the culture of your organization today and what you aspire it to be in the future. There are five knowledge culture characteristics that can be used to assess your organization’s cultural readiness for adoption:

Value: Is knowledge viewed as an asset in the organization?
Capture: Is knowledge in the organization captured?
Recognition: Is knowledge sharing promoted, recognized, or rewarded by the organization?
Share: Is knowledge shared in the organization?
Trust: Are employees trusted to not overshare and to provide accurate information?

Culture is not static and while implementing Viva Topics will help galvanize a more knowledge centric culture, it’s important to be proactive and implement change that will help close any knowledge culture gaps that exist.

One of the areas that culture plays the biggest role in is building your knowledge base. Viva Topics brings Artificial Intelligence (AI) and people together to help build your organization’s knowledge base. AI is used to identify and organize knowledge and subject matter experts help curate the knowledge. Knowledge curation is a people led process with a spectrum of models to consider.

Select the knowledge curation model that suits your organization culture today. We recommend a crowdsource model to increase the diversity and breadth of your knowledge base, remove bottlenecks and to improve the capture of tacit knowledge. Some organizations will need to build a more knowledge focused culture first before moving to a fully crowdsource model.

To build your organization’s knowledge base and drive adoption of Viva Topics, run a communications campaign and enable your knowledge team. To help we have developed a Viva Topics Hackathon toolkit, some communication asset samples you can make your own, and a Viva Topics learning path.

To demonstrate the business value you’ve helped your organization realize with Viva Topics, and to drive adoption, you will need to define a measurement framework for your implementation.

There are three types of measures to include in your framework:

Knowledge quality: Conduct end user and knowledge manager surveys, and use the topic insights available on the Manage topics page to measure the quality of your knowledge base. New analytics are coming to the Microsoft 365 Admin Center to let you monitor the scope of document indexing and topic discovery (Roadmap ID 88696).
End user adoption: Track Viva Topics adoption using the Topic Center site usage report (Go to Topic Center, select site usage from settings) and the topic impression view from Manage Topics.
Business value: Our early adopter customers have identified a common set of business value metrics and methods for measuring.

Onboard team

To scale the impact of Viva Topics, and build a high-quality knowledge base, there are some key roles to onboard to your team:

Knowledge managers: Maintains the health of organization’s knowledge base and manages a network of contributors.
Topic contributors: Contribute to knowledge base of organization by using their subject matter expertise to create, curate, publish and edit topics.
Champions: Helps their colleagues along the knowledge journey.

Setup

Begin your configuration of Viva Topics once you have prioritized your scenarios and identified the relevant knowledge sources. It can take up to two weeks or more to fully index your content. The configuration of Viva Topics is straightforward but there are some important considerations:

Assign topic licenses: Only users with a license can see information on topics including highlights, topic cards, topic pages and the topic center.
Configure topic discovery: Decide which SharePoint sites should be crawled for topics during discovery:

Index all SharePoint sites when planning an enterprise-wide rollout; or
Index a subset of SharePoint sites that align to initial Early Adopter Program (EAP) scenarios, and grow to include all sites over time

A larger set of content is required for topic discovery, ideally 20,000+ documents for your EAP. For enterprise-wide rollouts, strive to have Viva Topics crawl hundreds of thousands or millions of documents across your SharePoint tenant.

3. Assign permissions: Determine which users should have elevated permissions to manage and contribute to topics. Viva Topics uses existing content security features in Microsoft 365, with administrative controls, to control what AI-generated content is shown to users.

4. Create Topic Center: Select a desired name and URL for the Topic Center. You can change the site name later, but you can't change the URL after you complete setup.

To build an initial, high quality knowledge base in preparation for implementation, we recommend prioritizing topics for curation that are of high value and have high visibility in the organization.

Now that you have planned, onboarded team members and done the initial set up, you are ready to progress to the implementation phase. In the final blog post I cover running an early adopter program and scaling your implementation.

In the meantime, check out our Viva Topics Adoption Guide to get started.

The journey to Viva Topics adoption success: Intro

Matt Wolodarsky — Tue, 30 Nov 2021 18:11:14 GMT

Welcome to our three-part blog series about Viva Topics adoption. In this series I’ll share insights from our early adopter customers and proven best practices, about how to be successful with Microsoft Viva Topics.

Harnessing the collective knowledge of employees to improve business outcomes has been a decades long challenge for organizations. Many organizations have kept at it because of the payoff – increased productivity, just-in time learning, knowledge retention, cost savings, improved innovation, and better decision making. It’s why we created Viva Topics and now you and your colleagues can be empowered with knowledge and expertise in the apps you use every day.

Early adopter customers are using Viva Topics for a variety of scenarios across human resources, sales and customer service, operations, and product/service development. Just a few examples include:

New employee and role onboarding: Provide new employees (and existing employees starting a new role) with the knowledge they need to successfully onboard and accelerate their time to productivity
Product knowledge base: Help employees learn about company products and services with easy access to product details, announcements, roadmaps, and a place to ask questions
In-context learning: Enable employees to learn about topics relevant to their jobs in the flow of their work
Knowledge networks: Enable employees with a common interest in a topic to share knowledge, connect, learn, solve, and create together

Check out the Viva Topics scenario catalogue to see how Viva Topics can help with these scenarios and more.

The right product is only part of the knowledge equation - people, culture, and curation need to be addressed. To realize the full value of Viva Topics, the values, attitudes, and behaviors of a knowledge culture need to persist in an organization. It’s not a switch you can just turn on, it’s a series of stages to progress through.

To help our customers move through these stages and accelerate their time to value with Viva Topics, we have designed an adoption golden path customers can follow.

I’ll go into depth on each phase of the golden path in this blog series. Next week I will cover the Initiate phase, outlining the planning, team onboarding, and set up necessary to prepare for implementation.

Check out our Viva Topics Adoption Guide, and Part 2 and Part 3 in this adoption blog series.