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
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.
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.