January 2022 – Viva Topics Updates and Year End Recap

[Chris McNulty]

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.