Viva Topics Blog articles

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: 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.

Microsoft Viva Topics helps unleash collective knowledge with new features at Ignite

Chris McNulty — Thu, 09 Nov 2023 04:22:07 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. Topic pages and a topic center—discovered and updated by AI—enable to cultivate and share knowledge with wiki-like simplicity. And topic cards deliver knowledge just-in-time across Microsoft 365.

We released Viva Topics in February 2021, and since then we’ve been working with our Early Adopter Program customers to help them put knowledge to work in their organizations – and help learn how to enhance and extend Topics to deliver great experiences for our customers.

We’ve collected the most common knowledge sharing scenarios and applications from our early adopter customers, and included them in the Viva Topics Use Case Catalog as a quick way to get started applying Viva Topics and driving value from knowledge in your organization.

This week, at Microsoft Ignite, we’re excited to share our latest updates on Microsoft Viva, examples of customer success from Avanade, and resources to learn more.

Our product updates have three goals:

Improving the quality and availability of knowledge experiences for employees throughout Microsoft 365
Accelerating adoption by helping knowledge managers with powerful tools to manage and deliver knowledge to their stakeholders
Enhancing our knowledge platform capabilities for embracing more sources of information – across multiple languages and clouds.

You can learn more about Viva Topics at these Ignite sessions:

“Accelerating business content process with Knowledge and Content Services – Viva Topics, SharePoint Syntex, Search, and more" (OD118) | Speakers: CJ Tan, Chris McNulty, and Sean Squires
“Microsoft Viva Topics: What’s New and Next” | Speakers: Naomi Moneypenny, CJ Tan, Kerem Yuceturk, Maeneka Grewal, and Eric Gradel

Now, let’s look at what’s new and next in Viva Topics.

New user experiences

Finding knowledge in the flow of work is a great way to enhance employee experiences. We’re happy to introduce Viva Topics to more apps across Microsoft 365 with richer experiences for interacting with knowledge and expertise.

Delivering Viva Topics through Teams has been one of the most awaited capabilities since our launch earlier this year. In July, we released an update to enable you to pin your Topic Center as a left rail app in Microsoft Teams. In our next update, you’ll be able to add topics to your chats and link to topic cards from highlighted topics in Teams. This feature will start rolling out to our Early Adopter Program customers in early 2022 and will reach general availability by March 31, 2022. You can track this update on the Microsoft 365 public roadmap under item 72189

You’ll also soon be able to use Viva Topics inside Outlook. When you’re reading messages, you’ll see a simple indicator to show you all the topics referenced in an email. And when you’re composing email, you can use a hashtag to add a topic highlight or have Viva Topics suggest topics based on the content you type. Outlook integration will preview for Outlook Web Access users by December 31, 2021, and you can track this update on the Microsoft 365 public roadmap under item 88693.

We’ll also integrate Topics into people profile cards, Yammer, and Microsoft Search in Bing – all coming to preview by year end.

User opt-in as suggested associations a topic page - To meet some customer governance and privacy standards, we now allow users to control being displayed as potentially associated with the topic. For these circumstances, you’ll be able to empower users to opt-in to be added to a specific topic page and card. This feature is scheduled to rollout by December 2021 and is being tracked under roadmap ID 82103.

Viva AI will suggest related topics, and a topic page web part and topic card can soon display those relationships. This feature is scheduled to rollout by December 2021 and is being tracked under roadmap ID 88695.

Knowledge managers

Viva Topics was built to scale. Recently we’ve accelerated publishing times so that changes to new or manually edited topics will be visible to information workers in minutes.

We’ve listened to you and added tools to help knowledge managers oversee large knowledge domains, including support for topic center search and automatic grouping of related topics into segments. We’re adding new workflows for feedback and updates and supplying new telemetry and analytics to help managers understand how people use knowledge. We’ll automatically build live visual maps of related topics, and let you group or merge those topics as needed.

Initial configuration and indexing topics can take a few days. We’ve introduced new analytics to the Microsoft 365 Admin Center to let you monitor the scope of document indexing and topic discovery (Roadmap ID 88696, December 2021).

And soon, you’ll be able to manage topics in the Topic Center more easily. We’ll start with improved metadata to help you sort and filter on additional usage data in the topic center, including metrics, usage, quality, and more (Roadmap ID 88700). We’re also integrating all stages of topic lifecycles into a unified list with filtering and sorting by lifecycle stage and other data. Combined with a new topic search function, you’ll be able to find selected topics even when the volume of topics in the system is large (Roadmap ID 88701). These features will ship by March 31, 2022.

And Topics users will be able to automatically create topics built by the automated taxonomy services of Syntex. Knowledge managers will be able to select terms and term sets from the taxonomy service to initiate creation of topics, using the term definitions and tagged files. This feature will roll out by December and is being tracked under roadmap ID 82049.

And there’s plenty more coming, including:

Sensitivity Label Support - Use MIP sensitivity labels to control which files should not be included in topic discovery (Roadmap 82047, shipping by January 2022)
Simple topic segmentation - Create automatic segments of related topics based on site collection and information architecture (Roadmap 88694, shipping by December 2021)
Disambiguation - Allow users to select a topic among several when they share similar or matching names (Roadmap 72183, shipping by January 2022)
Topic types - Support to automatically identify a topic with a category or type, such as projects, products, or organizations, and ability to edit that type (Roadmap 72181, shipping by March 2022)
Get early feedback from specific users - This feature in the Admin Center delivers a control to let you select specific users to see preview features for customers enrolled in our Early Adopter Program (Available now)

Clouds and languages

We’re opening more sources for generating topics. We're adding preview support to crawl knowledge from content written in French, German, and Spanish by year end (Roadmap ID 72186). We’re also shipping Viva Topics to the US Government Community Cloud (GCC) this winter (Roadmap ID 72185). Finally, in 2022 we’ll rollout indexing remote content using the Graph content connectors, starting with preview access to sources such as ServiceNow by March 31, 2022 (Roadmap ID 72187).

Working with managed content and integrations to Syntex

SharePoint Syntex enriches content with metadata, making it easier to turn that content into knowledge for Microsoft Search and for Viva Topics. Here’s how:

Automatic topic access control

Syntex automatically adds Microsoft Information Protection labels to content based on your models. Then, Viva Topics uses those sensitivity labels to exclude content from topic discovery, even if it is shared with overly broad permissions. This improves multi-level security.

Accelerating knowledge capture

Now, you can automatically add Syntex based taxonomy terms to term sets and content. In Viva Topics, knowledge managers can select terms from MMS to be topics and pull in related content.

For example, if a contract is scanned from a new customer, the customer’s name can be added to the term set and tagged in the doc. Knowledge managers can use the term to create a new topic page with tagged content automatically included.

Improving employee experience

In the future, you’ll be able to use knowledge in Viva Topics automatically when you generate new content in Syntex content assembly. Accelerating content creation improves the quality of employee experience by minimizing hunting, reading, summarizing, and pasting efforts, allowing employees to focus on what’s important.

Learn more at Microsoft Ignite

In addition, we’re sharing updates during Ignite all week. Here are some of the most relevant sessions to learn more:

Keynotes and core themes

Hear from Microsoft leadership revealing the latest innovations shaping the flexible, innovative, and secure business environments of the future.

“Microsoft Ignite Opening” (KEY01) | Speaker: Satya Nadella | November 2, 8:15 AM – 8:50 AM
“Empower everyone for a new world of hybrid work” (CTS01) | Speaker: Jared Spataro | November 2, 8:55 AM – 9:20 AM

Breakout sessions

Take the opportunity to select the sessions best suited for your role and interests. All breakouts are packed with news, demos, customer stories, and insights into product and solution strategy.

“Microsoft Viva: Latest innovation and roadmap for the new digital employee experience” (BRK204) | Speakers: Seth Patton, Chuck Friedman, Sunita Khatri, Abe Lubetkin, and Geeta Ramakrishnan | November 2, 3:30 PM – 4:00 PM
“Rich, secure content and collaboration for hybrid work” (BRK206) | Speakers: Jeff Teper, Lincoln DeMaris, Ian Todd, Naomi Moneypenny, Navjot Virk, Cathy Dew, and Yina Arenas | November 3, 8:30 AM – 9:00 AM

Related ATE after | “Ask the Experts: Content and collaboration across OneDrive, SharePoint and Teams” (CONATEBRK206) | Speakers: Numerous product experts | November 3, 9:30 AM – 10:00 AM [live, interactive]

New Microsoft Mechanics show with Omar Shahine, CVP SharePoint and OneDrive | “Improve your hybrid work and collaboration experiences across Microsoft 365”

On-demand sessions

The learning and skilling continue, on your own time. On-demand sessions are the double-click into soaking up more knowledge, seeing more of the ‘what’s next’ – in context.

“Accelerating business content process with Knowledge and Content Services – Viva Topics, SharePoint Syntex, Search, and more" (OD118) | Speakers: CJ Tan, Chris McNulty, and Sean Squires
“Microsoft Viva Topics: What’s New and Next” | Speakers: Naomi Moneypenny, CJ Tan, Kerem Yuceturk, Maeneka Grewal, and Eric Gradel

Microsoft Ignite post-event, ½-day AMA

“Microsoft Tech Community Live: Microsoft Viva Edition” [final event link coming soon]

When: November 16 from 8am – 12pm PDT

Join us for a half-day, interactive Q&A session designed to help you plan and prepare for what’s new and next for Microsoft Viva. This is your chance to connect with our product teams and engineers, get answers to your questions, gain valuable insights, and hear best practices. We’ll host four Ask Microsoft Anything (AMA) Viva sessions, each one-hour long, on the following topics:

Microsoft Viva: Product scenario and overview [8-9am]
Microsoft Viva: Preparing your environment [9-10am]
Microsoft Viva: Deployment and adoption [10-11am]
Microsoft Viva: Platform and extensibility [11am-12pm]

Learn from our customers

Avanade is a leading provider of innovative digital and cloud-enabled services, business solutions, and design-led experiences, and it relies heavily on the power of people. Sharing expertise, project or deliverable examples, templates, and other knowledge among one another is key to the company’s success and the success of the businesses it serves.

As an organization whose services are built on and around Microsoft technologies, Avanade’s workforce of 50,000 professionals are experienced, heavy users of collaboration solutions like Yammer and Microsoft Teams. But even with top-notch approaches to collaboration, finding the right people, the best examples of deliverables, or the best templates often required some digging and building what some employees refer to as a “chain of experts.” Many knowledge experts are familiar with this concept, in which an employee starts a conversation with one expert and is then handed off down a chain of people until the correct team member is identified.

Unlike most organizations where new technologies are gradually rolled out from one department to another, Avanade chose to offer Viva Topics to the entire company, enabling all employees to contribute to the curation around topics. “The power of Viva Topics is in bringing together AI and the smartness and experience of our people,” says Marci Jenkins, Workplace IT Executive at Avanade. Crawling the documents in SharePoint, Viva Topics has begun identifying thousands of topics across the company’s Microsoft tenant, including Avanade offerings, Microsoft solutions, industries, customers, and even strategic initiatives.

Learn more in today’s customer story, “Connecting content and expertise at a people-centric company: Viva Topics simplifies knowledge sharing at Avanade”

Do more with the Viva Topics Hackathon

This week, we’re also releasing the Microsoft Viva Topics Hackathon.

Microsoft Viva Topics Hackathons are designed to jumpstart Viva Topics adoption in your organization by creating a fun, collaborative environment for employees to try out the new technology and begin contributing to the shared knowledge base. A hackathon is a fun way to collaborate with your colleagues. It doesn’t require coding, all are welcome. And you can get started by downloading our free hackathon toolkit, with invitations, presenter decks and instructions to run your own event.

We look forward to hearing from you as you use our latest innovations and put knowledge to work in your organization. Please stay connected through the Microsoft Tech Community. Thank you.

Viva Topics brings new integrations with Yammer

Chris McNulty — Fri, 15 Oct 2021 22:23:45 GMT

Microsoft Viva Topics brings knowledge to workers in the apps they use every day. We’re continuing to build new capabilities for Viva Topics. Our most recent update is API integration with Yammer.

Yammer integration

Yammer is integrating with and adopting Viva Topics to make community-sourced knowledge easily accessible across an organization and support a consistent experience in Microsoft 365. Among others, this provides the following benefits for an organization:

Topics will mean and refer to the same subject - whether in Yammer, Viva Topics, or elsewhere in Microsoft 365.
Premium Viva Topics experiences like topic cards will show in Yammer.
Premium Viva Topics experiences like pages and cards will include content from Yammer such as questions and answers, and conversations.
Topics can be managed centrally.
Permissions can be managed for who gets to create or edit topics.

Over time, users with the appropriate licensing will see topics in Yammer enhanced with Viva Topics experiences, such as topic cards, while unlicensed users can continue to use topics in Yammer the way they are used to. Only Yammer networks in Native Mode networks are eligible for the premium Viva Topics experiences.

Today, we're spotlighting our API integrations with Yammer. Learn more about the Yammer Topic API changes in this article.

We’ll continue to expand Microsoft Viva’s capabilities. Keep an eye out for new blog posts or register for our newsletter to stay up to date on the latest feature releases.

ClearPeople helps Northumbrian Water tap the fountain of knowledge with Viva Topics and Syntex

Chris McNulty — Fri, 16 Jul 2021 04:06:15 GMT

It’s been an exciting year for Microsoft Viva Topics, and our community. From our preview program through our February 2021 launch and beyond, we’re honored to see so many customers and partners put knowledge to work with Viva.

This week at Microsoft Inspire we’re sharing news about how we’re helping partners deliver solutions for Microsoft Viva, and how our customers are succeeding with our partners.

Knowledge is vital for employee experience – but water itself is essential to life. Northumbrian Water Limited (NWL) provides water and sewage services to over 4.4 million people in the UK and aims to be the most innovative water company in the country.

With Viva Topics, employees at NWL can now identify assets, construction projects, and even processes for the work they do, without leaving the applications they’re in or running a massive search query.

And using the power of AI, Northumbrian Water is teaching SharePoint Syntex how to recognize specific drawings – including maps of infrastructure – so they can capture key information from the drawings, record it, and make it easier for experts across the organization to find. They’re projecting a return on their investment of £50 million over the next 3 years.

ClearPeople, a Preferred Partner in our Microsoft Content Services Partner Program has been with NWL and Microsoft on every step of their journey, helping NWL envision, pilot, and rollout Syntex and Viva Topics to thousands of staff across the UK. ClearPeople builds their Atlas solution on top of Microsoft 365 to accelerate the transformation of NWL’s digital workplaces and employee experiences.

Learn more about NWL's journey with Viva Topics and Syntex.

Custom development and extensibility

Microsoft 365 opens multiple paths to knowledge discovery. Partners and customers alike are using Viva Topics to help organizations like NWL and more. Viva Topics provides both a great experience out of the box and a great way to customize and tailor your experiences.

With Viva Topics, you can customize topic centers and topic pages, and integrate solutions built using the SharePoint Framework. Tools and techniques used for branding, styling, or composing web parts for SharePoint can also be used to extend Viva Topics.

Remote content can by integrated to Microsoft Search with Microsoft Graph content connectors, with over 130 sources published by Microsoft and our partners, and an API to let you build your own. By year end, remote sources like ServiceNow and MediaWiki will be integrated natively into Viva Topics. And you can further enrich content for knowledge discovery in Microsoft Search and Viva Topics using Syntex and the Syntex APIs.

Viva Topics in Microsoft Teams and Viva Connections

You can also extend Viva Topics to Microsoft 365 experiences like Microsoft Teams and Viva Connections. The topics web part provides an easy and flexible way to add Viva Topics to any web page in SharePoint, Teams, or Viva Connections. And of course, topic highlights and cards are available through the Connections app in Microsoft Teams.

Want another easy way to add Viva Topics to Microsoft Teams? Just pin the topic center to the left rail as an app in Teams. We have a simple script you can run to generate a Teams app from any internal site – including your topic center. All you need to supply are icons for the app and a title. We originally built the script for Viva Connections, and it works for any portal site hosted in SharePoint – including the Viva topic center.

We’re continuing to develop even more integrations for Microsoft Teams, Outlook, Yammer, and more, and we’ll share updates on the Microsoft 365 public roadmap.

Product updates

We’ve heard your feedback – many of you want more ways to manage the flow of knowledge around your organization. Here are three updates to help you share the right knowledge for your teams.

Microsoft Information Protection (MIP) labeling

Viva Topics fully respects file permissions. Users can’t use Viva Topics to discover content where they don’t have permissions. But what about files shared with overly broad permissions – intentionally or accidentally?

That’s where Microsoft Information Protection (MIP) can help. MIP sensitivity labels can be used to set access control policies for content, such as sharing, download prevention, and watermarking. Soon, you’ll be able to exclude labeled content from Viva Topics even if the content is widely shared. Sensitive content labeled as Highly Confidential, for example, can be automatically shielded for Viva Topics. And because MIP labels can now be automatically set by SharePoint Syntex, you can combine Syntex and Topics to provide multilayer security for sensitive content indexed by Viva, even if users share documents broadly, or don’t set a sensitivity label.

This feature will begin roll out in July 2021, and is being tracked on the Microsoft 365 public roadmap under ID 82047 and 82048.

SharePoint Syntex taxonomy integration

Today, you can use taxonomy services in Microsoft 365 to provide centralized hierarchies of terms for documents and list items. Taxonomy has been enhanced as part of the Syntex rollout. This summer, you’ll be able to select terms and term sets from the taxonomy service to initiate creation of Viva topics, using the term definitions and tagged files. And as Syntex creates discovers new terms and content and adds those to the term store, those terms can also be used to generate topics for Viva.

This feature will begin roll out in July 2021.

Multi-geo support

You can already process content in the home region for your organization as well as query from any region. Microsoft Viva Topics also supports region moves. Now, we’re extending indexing and processing locally to each data region, according to data sovereignty standards.

This feature will start to roll out in late July, and is being tracked on the Microsoft 365 public roadmap under ID 82044.

User opt-in as suggested experts

Viva Topics can also identify suggested experts to display on topic cards and pages. Some of our customers’ governance and privacy standards allow users to control being displayed as potentially associated with the topic. For these circumstances, you’ll be able to empower users to opt-in to be added to topic pages and cards. This feature will begin roll out in July 2021.

Check back with us next month to see what new capabilities and features we’ve added to Viva Topics. You can visit the Microsoft 365 Public Roadmap for a full view of what’s coming soon to Microsoft Viva. And to read about recent enhancements to SharePoint Syntex, check out our SharePoint Syntex Blog. Thanks.

Announcing the topic management dashboard for Microsoft Viva Topics

Chris McNulty — Fri, 21 May 2021 21:37:52 GMT

Microsoft Viva Topics is our newest addition to Microsoft Knowledge and Content Services – helping you automatically organize and discover knowledge and expertise across your organization.

At Microsoft Ignite in March, we spotlighted a handful of our continuing enhancements to Viva Topics, including our vision for topic management. Today, we’re announcing our next feature to help you manage topics.

Topic management dashboard

Viva Topics was built to scale. Many of our early customers have discovered tens of thousands of topics in their content. Managing thousands of suggested and published topics over time is crucial to their success with Viva Topics.

With the topic management dashboard, knowledge managers can track topics discovered by Viva AI, as well as how topics are progressing through the topic lifestyle stages: Suggested, Confirmed, Published, and Removed. You’ll find the dashboard on the Manage Topics tab of the topic center.

This feature will begin rolling to Targeted Release in May 2021, and is being tracked under Roadmap ID 81977.

Roadmap

We’re continuing to listen to and work with our customers to deliver new features and drive transformational user experiences. Check back with us in June to see what new capabilities and features we’ve added to Viva Topics. You can also visit the Microsoft 365 Public Roadmap for a full view of what’s coming soon to Microsoft Viva.

And to read about recent enhancements to SharePoint Syntex, check out our SharePoint Syntex Blog.

Get started on Microsoft Viva Topics with Microsoft Mechanics

cjtan — Thu, 03 Jun 2021 18:23:18 GMT

Our Microsoft Mechanics series on Microsoft Viva kicks into high gear this week with our first module deep dive on Viva Topics. I’ve joined Jeremy Chapman, our Microsoft Mechanics host, to give you a quick overview of the module and the foundational technologies that deliver the experience. We also cover the critical role of knowledge managers and the granular admin controls that determine how information is identified, curated, and discovered.

Viva Topics overview. Viva Topics is a system that transforms information into knowledge and actively delivers it to you in the context of your work. The module works with two basic information “currencies,” actual data and information and expert colleagues, and then surfaces them as combined knowledge in the apps you’re already using. You’ll see these experiences in SharePoint Online, Microsoft Search, and Search in Word and PowerPoint now, and we continue to work to bring this to more apps. The result is topic pages and topic cards for things you might consider “tribal knowledge”: acronyms, terms, or project names. Topic pages look a lot like wiki entries. They include the people, files, and sites relevant to the topic, as well as related topics and a comments section—basically, a starting point to the insider knowledge someone needs to more fully understand that topic.

Topic cards are quick summaries of the associated topic page. These appear when users hover over topic page words or phrases and include a link to the associated page itself.

The magic of Viva Topics is that it suggests and gathers all this content for you, leveraging powerful AI, like natural language understanding and entity recognition, and Microsoft Graph to surface the right knowledge to users.

Any information protection and compliance controls you have configured in Microsoft 365 are respected in Viva Topics. The module only shows users the topic pages, topic cards, and resources they are permitted to access, which means they don’t need to spend time requesting (and waiting) for approvals and can’t access knowledge that is inappropriate for their role.

Knowledge managers. While AI provides the initial topic page suggestions and resources, domain knowledge managers help ensure that knowledge is accurate and appropriate. You’ll need to determine the knowledge managers for your organization, but we suggest choosing experts close to the content instead of just assigning the role to IT. Knowledge managers are care how the knowledge in their domain is shared and are ultimately responsible for promoting and engaging their community to contribute to suggested topic pages and their content. They can edit the topic description and add or remove people, files, sites, and related topics as they see fit.

Users. Users can contribute to Viva Topics as well. Users with “topic contributor” permissions can edit topic pages and create new ones manually, while all users can provide feedback on a page’s comments section if the comments are enabled. Users who are authoring and publishing SharePoint pages can also enhance their pages with topics by inserting topic highlights in the content they are creating. These highlights then appear as topic cards to other users.

IT admins. Getting the right knowledge to the right people starts with IT. If you’re an existing Microsoft 365 customer, adding Viva Topics to your tenant is easy. In the Microsoft 365 admin center, navigate to Billing and type “Viva” into the search box. Then, select Details under Viva Topics > Start free trial > Try now > Continue. The one-month trial can help you determine if Viva Topics is right for your organization without a financial commitment upfront.

Signing up for the trial only adds Viva Topics to your tenant; you’ll need to configure the module to make it live for users. There are four simple configuration pages that will determine how Viva Topics functions within your organization: topic discovery, topic visibility, topic permissions, and topic center. To get to these, go to the Microsoft 365 admin center, select Setup, scroll down to the Files and content section, select Connect people to knowledge > Get started.

Once configuration is complete, you can review your selections and select Activate to formally launch Viva Topics for your organization. It might take a couple days for the AI to start suggesting topic pages, so hang tight. In the meantime, try manually creating a couple pages yourself, which you can start doing immediately.

The Microsoft Mechanics video on Viva Topics has even more technical details on the module, so scroll back to the top and check it out. This is Part Two of our Microsoft Mechanics video series about Microsoft Viva. Keep visiting this site or aka.ms/VivaMechanics for the rest of the series. If you’d like more information on Viva in the meantime, head over to aka.ms/Viva.

As always, we want to hear from you! If you have any suggestions, questions, or comments, please visit us on our Microsoft Viva Tech Community page. We will also be hosting our first Microsoft Viva Ask Microsoft Anything (AMA) event on June 23, 2021. Join us then to post your questions about Microsoft Viva and Viva Topics, where members of the Viva team will be available to respond.

Learn more:

Get started with trials for Microsoft Viva Topics

Chris McNulty — Thu, 25 Mar 2021 16:00:00 GMT

It has been awesome to watch customer excitement growing since last month’s launch of Microsoft Viva Topics. Viva Topics applies AI to empower people with knowledge in the apps they use every day, automatically organizing content and expertise across your systems and teams to create topics with built-in security, compliance, and workflow. Across the team we’ve been humbled by the enthusiasm and uptake.

We know many of you are eager to start working with Viva Topics, and we want to provide answers to some of the most frequently asked questions.

How can I set up a trial of Microsoft Viva Topics?

You can start today by registering for a free 30-day, 25-user Viva Topics trial. You’ll need to be a global admin or billing admin to activate the trial, and you need to use a standard commercial tenant. Trials aren’t available for development or educational licenses. Once you activate a trial, a global admin or license admin needs to assign a license to the specific users who’ll be involved in the trial.

What if I need more time for my testing?

You can always work with your Microsoft account team to request an extended trial for a pilot or proof of concept. Additionally, members of our Microsoft Content Services Partner Program also have access to expanded trial licenses to help you get going as part of a pilot or proof of concept.

How should I get started?

This has been an incredibly frequent question! In general, it’s a good idea to start with a focused set of users, rather than turning it on for everyone in the entire organization, to take a phased approach to adoption. Microsoft Viva Topics was built to work on extremely large pools of content. Because it respects the pre-existing security of your files, we strongly recommend indexing a larger set of content -- ideally at least 20,000 documents -- for the best quality and quantity of topics.

What if I have to start with a smaller set of content?

We still encourage you to think big. Microsoft Viva Topics is based on statistical analysis of text patterns and components of contact. The more content we have, the higher the quality of the generated topics.

Trials work best on production data – not on test tenants with low usage and small numbers of files. Generally, we start seeing good results above about 20,000 documents, and at least 50-100 active users in the organization. We also look for file activity to determine processing priority and relative relevance.

OK, I just activated Microsoft Viva Topics and told it to scan all my content. Where are my topic cards?

Topic indexing is based on search indexing in the Microsoft Graph, but it runs as a separate process with a different timetable. It can take anywhere from 10 to 14 days for Microsoft Viva to work through all your content to generate an initial set of topics. Once the initial scan completes, topic indexing will continue as new content is added or modified.

When Microsoft Viva discovers topics, they are proposed as suggestions on SharePoint news posts. All topics, except removed topics or ones excluded by name, will be proposed as suggestions, but the administrator can identify the people who can view topic highlights.

It’s been a few weeks and I have 50 topics - when and where can my users start to see them?

If you’ve assigned licenses to users and given them permission to view topic highlights in the admin center setup, you’re in good shape. If your user has rights to access the underlying content for a topic, they’ll start seeing topics in modern SharePoint pages, pages in Microsoft Viva Connections, SharePoint mobile, and Microsoft Search results.

They can also see topic cards inside the Office clients. If they run a highlighted search inside Word, Excel, or PowerPoint, if that word matches a known topic that the user has permissions to, they will see the topic card there.

We are working to bring topic experiences to the rest of the suite, including Outlook, Yammer, and Microsoft Teams soon.

What happens at the end of my trial?

If you’ve purchased licenses, you can assign those to your users and Viva Topics will continue running as it had throughout the trial. If users do not have licenses, at the end of the trial, they will no longer be able to see topic highlights, topic cards, topic pages, or the topic center. Any topics that have been updated with additional content will remain in the Topic Center pages library, although AI discovered content will be removed from those pages.

What happened to Project Cortex?

Project Cortex was the code name used when we first announced our Knowledge & Content Services solutions. They’ve now been released as SharePoint Syntex (October 2020) and Viva Topics (February 2021).

Thanks again, and please share your feedback here on the TechCommunity.

Learn more about the future of Microsoft Viva Topics at Microsoft Ignite

Chris McNulty — Tue, 02 Mar 2021 20:27:24 GMT

Last month we announced Microsoft Viva, the first Employee Experience Platform built for the digital era. Microsoft Viva includes four modules: Viva Connections, Viva Insights, Viva Learning, and Viva Topics.

Viva Topics applies AI to empower people with knowledge in the apps they use every day, automatically organizing content and expertise across your systems and teams to create topics with built-in security, compliance, and workflow. And it’s available now for customer trials and purchases.

This week at Microsoft Ignite we’re spotlighting our continuing enhancements to Microsoft Viva Topics. We’re also sharing an update on recent enhancements to SharePoint Syntex, and announcing our latest expansion of the Microsoft Content Services Partner Program. Now, let’s look at Viva Topics.

Microsoft Bing integration

Our next updates will add new capabilities to show topic answers inside Microsoft Search via Microsoft Bing. Topic cards are already available to licensed users inside SharePoint pages and Microsoft Search. Our new integration brings knowledge from Viva Topics into Bing. All information stays within customer’s trust boundaries, and topic answers will be available to licensed users inside federated search results. Topic answers in Bing will start to rollout this spring.

Microsoft Teams

Integration to Microsoft Teams will proceed in several stages. With the rollout of Microsoft Viva Connections for the Microsoft Teams desktop, we’ll begin introducing topic cards and highlights to Microsoft Teams in SharePoint pages integrated to the Connections desktop app for Teams. We’ll have more updates to Microsoft Teams integration throughout 2021.

Roadmap

Our team is working with our customers as we deliver additional updates to Microsoft Viva Topics and SharePoint Syntex. We’ll continue to drive user experiences, foundational services and APIs, expanded language support, and government cloud coverage (GCC) as our top priorities for 2021.

We’ll share more detail on all of these and more on the Microsoft 365 roadmap.

Microsoft Viva Topics at Ignite

There’s lot of great content at Microsoft Ignite this week for Microsoft Viva Topics, including:

Keynote

The hybrid workplace by Jared Spataro
We think of 2020 as the year many of us worked from home. In fact, it’s the year that work moved to the cloud. Flexible work is here to stay. Join Jared Spataro to learn how we’re empowering people to work from home, on the go, and at the office.

Tuesday, March 2 | 9:45 – 10:15 AM PST

Tuesday, March 2 | 7:15 PM – 7:45 PM PST

Featured Session

Meet Microsoft Viva: a new kind of employee experience by Chuck Friedman
The first employee experience platform built for the digital era, Microsoft Viva brings together communications, knowledge, learning, resources, and insights into an integrated experience that empowers people and teams to be their best, from anywhere. Join us as we introduce a new approach and a new category of technology solutions. Powered by the full breadth and depth of Microsoft 365, Viva is experienced through Microsoft Teams and other Microsoft 365 apps that people use every day.

Wednesday, March 3 | 12:00 PM – 12:30 PM PST

Wednesday, March 3 | 9:30 PM – 10:00 PM PST

Ask the Experts

ATE-FS193 | Ask the Experts: Meet Microsoft Viva: a new kind of employee experience
Now that you have the basics covered, we invite you to ask the questions that may not have been answered in other sessions. There will be a team of Subject Matter Experts available to answer questions both on camera and in chat and point you in the right direction to get started on your own Microsoft Viva journey. Come with questions about all four modules – Viva Connections, Viva Topics, Viva Learning, and Viva Insights.

Wednesday, March 3 | 2:00 PM – 2:30 PM PST

On-Demand Sessions

OD372 | Microsoft Viva Topics: Put knowledge to work with content and AI by Chris McNulty and Naomi Moneypenny
Viva Topics frees up time by making it easy for people to find information and put knowledge to work. And SharePoint Syntex uses advanced AI and machine teaching to amplify human expertise, automate content processing, and transform content into knowledge.

For details on all the Microsoft Viva sessions at Spring Ignite 2021, please read the Viva Guide to Ignite blog post.

Thanks a lot, and hope to see you at Microsoft Ignite and here on the TechCommunity.

Introducing Microsoft Viva Topics

Seth_Patton — Wed, 17 Feb 2021 17:33:06 GMT

By Seth Patton, General Manager, Microsoft 365 Next Gen Productivity & Employee Experience

Microsoft Viva Topics uses artificial intelligence (AI) to empower people with knowledge and expertise in the apps they use every day and to connect, manage, and protect content across systems and teams.

Viva Topics connects people with knowledge and expertise in the apps they use every day.

Viva Topics is one of the four modules of Microsoft Viva, the employee experience platform built on Microsoft 365 that empowers people and teams to be their best from wherever they work. Viva brings together communications, knowledge, learning, resources, and insights into an employee experience that integrates seamlessly into the apps you use every day, such as Microsoft Teams. Learn more about Microsoft Viva.

We’re pleased to announce that today, Viva Topics has reached general availability for our commercial customers - one of four modules announced today as part of Microsoft Viva.

Microsoft Viva, the employee experience platform built on Microsoft 365, is introduced by Satya Nadella, Jared Spataro, thought leaders, and customers.

A growing sea of information

Each day, our pool of shared information grows, and the complexity of gaining knowledge grows with it. Today, the average employee spends more than an hour a day searching or recreating information that already exists in their organization—more than triple the time they spent just five years ago. Onboarding, skill development, and knowledge drain are paramount issues for leadership and information workers alike.
(source: Spiceworks/Ziff Davis. Knowledge Sharing in a Changing World. February 2021. [Commissioned by Microsoft].)

Wasted time is frustrating and unproductive, but solutions are available. Based on an analysis by Forrester Research, a typical organization can see benefits of US $42 million to $127 million by adopting Viva Topics as part of Microsoft 365 solutions for Knowledge and Content Services.

(source: Forrester Research commissioned by Microsoft. New Technology: The Projected Total Economic Impact™ of Microsoft 365 Knowledge & Content Services. February 2021.)

Our commitment

Preserving knowledge, reducing disruptions, optimizing people’s time, and improving decision-making are goals that leaders and employees share. We recognized that combining the capacity of the Microsoft Cloud with the AI power of the Microsoft Graph created an opportunity to help our customers transform content into knowledge.

Almost two years ago, we launched the Project Cortex Preview Program. We were humbled at how many customers were eager to help shape the product. For more than a year, dozens of companies, such as Arla Foods, Mott MacDonald, Unilever, and Siemens Healthineers, have been using Viva Topics to put knowledge to work across their organizations.

Viva Topics

Starting today, we’re making this powerful solution available for all Microsoft 365 customers to try or purchase. Let’s look at how Viva Topics works.

Turn content into knowledge that works

Viva Topics builds on the Microsoft 365 apps and content you already use every day and the connections you have with people across your organization. Viva Topics uses AI to reason over your organization’s data and automatically organizes content and expertise across your systems and teams into related topics, such as projects, products, processes, and customers.

Soon, Viva Topics will integrate information from outside the Microsoft 365 cloud using our Graph–based content connectors—available from both Microsoft and our partners—which integrate knowledge from more than 130 data sources, including Salesforce, ServiceNow, MediaWiki, file shares , and Microsoft Azure services. Connectors also include a robust set of APIs to facilitate development of your own connectors.

“In an increasingly distributed and hybrid workforce, companies need to create consistent and frictionless experiences that make it easy for employees to get work done, regardless of where they are working,” said Melanie Lougee, Head of Employee Workflow Strategy at ServiceNow. “Our integrations with Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Viva provide one-stop-shop access to information and services for employees across IT, HR, Facilities, Legal and Finance. ServiceNow Employee Workflows provide unified experiences for employees across the enterprise, and we’re thrilled to continue to partner with Microsoft to enhance engagement, collaboration and productivity for the future of work.”

When Microsoft Viva discovers topics, they appear as suggestions in the topic center. In the future, the topic center can be accessed from Microsoft Teams or SharePoint. You will be able to use the topic center to discover recommended content based on the topics you follow or manage, personalized by the Microsoft Graph. You can also manage your connections to shared topics.

Suggested content and topics are governed by privacy controls, security and the Microsoft Graph. Users can only see the content where they already have access. Relevance and suggested people are based on open signals from the Graph – activities such as authoring a document. People can control which topics they wish to be associated with. Passive activities like reading a document are excluded from relevance calculations.

Additionally, the Topics web part is available for all licensed users to view suggested and personalized topics and manage their connections to topics. You’ll be able to add this web part to any pages in SharePoint or Microsoft Teams, so you can build knowledge into your existing employee experiences, such as intranet sites.

Organize knowledge into topic pages

When Microsoft Viva identifies topics, it collects and curates related information in topic pages. Topic pages are built automatically by AI and augmented by experts. Topic pages enable your organization’s experts to share and refine knowledge about the topic by adding and editing pages with wiki-like simplicity.

Topic pages provide a comprehensive view of related information, including:

Alternate names.
Definitions.
Recommended and suggested people.
Recommended and suggested content.
Related sites and teams.
Map of related topics.
Optional web part integration, such as Yammer communities.

Over time, human expertise and AI combine to improve the quality of shared knowledge.

Make knowledge easy to discover and use

While working in Microsoft 365 apps, you’ll see topics highlighted when they appear in pages, messages, and content. These highlights reveal topic cards. Topic cards provide knowledge in context without searching or changing apps. Cards summarize the topic with alternate names, definitions, experts, and recommended resources.

If you’ve ever joined a new company or project and encountered unfamiliar acronyms or terms, topic cards provide a quick way to connect to shared knowledge. They also connect you to topic pages for more detail.

And Viva Topics is integrated into other Microsoft applications, such as SharePoint and Microsoft Search. Topic highlights will be integrated into Microsoft Teams, Outlook, and other Microsoft 365 apps throughout 2021, creating a personalized experience and putting knowledge right at your fingertips.

Viva Topics also makes Microsoft Search better. When your search query relates to a topic, the topic card is returned as the primary answer.

Viva Topics connects people to recommended experts as well. Expertise is added to user profiles and extended to people cards throughout Microsoft 365—another way for knowledge to find you as you work.

Soon, you’ll also be able to use Viva Topics to find answers to common questions. If Viva knows the answer, you’ll get it immediately. If not, Viva can ask known experts for their response. Over time, their accepted answers are added to everyone’s shared knowledge, so everyone benefits.

Security, compliance, and administration

Viva Topics delivers the security, privacy, and compliance you expect from Microsoft 365 and the Microsoft Graph. Users have access to only those topics to which they’ve been granted access.

In addition, the topic center enables knowledge managers to shape the knowledge life cycle. They can review suggested topics and decide whether to approve or remove them. They can also review interactions and feedback to find the topics that are the most helpful—and those that require refinement.

As an administrator, you’re in control of knowledge discovery. You can control which content is included in Viva Topics based on selected sites, teams, or labels. Only licensed users have access to topic cards, topic pages, and topic centers.

Microsoft Viva Topics works with our other content management tools, including Microsoft 365 E5 Compliance and SharePoint Syntex, to apply security and compliance policies to content automatically. Licensed users see topics based on the content they can access. You can also shape the visibility of the topics themselves to further shape knowledge with appropriate security.

Next steps

We invite you to learn more about Microsoft Viva, Viva Topics, and Microsoft’s solutions for knowledge and content services. Want to see more? Just visit the Viva Topics Resource Center for an interactive demo.

Tune in to this special #MSFTViva episode of #TheIntrazone podcast with Jared Spataro: "Viva Las Microsoft." Hear from Jared about the design of Microsoft Viva and its four main components: Connections, Insights, Learnings and Topics.

In addition, we’re proud to introduce the Preferred and Charter members of the Microsoft 365 Content Services Partner Program. These members have been trained to envision and deliver solutions based on Viva Topics and other Microsoft 365 capabilities for knowledge and content services. Microsoft Viva will provide an open and extensible platform as well as a strong and growing ecosystem of partners so that it works seamlessly with your existing systems and tools. Partners can sign up today for more information.

If you’re ready to try Viva Topics, trials and purchases are available today.

Please join our community on the Microsoft Tech Community, or visit our Viva Topics Resource Center for demos, white papers, analyst research, videos, and more. We look forward to hearing from you as we put knowledge to work, together. Thanks.

- Seth Patton, General Manager, Microsoft 365 Next Gen Productivity & Employee Experience