Viva Topics – AI making it easy to find information and knowledge!

In understanding Viva Topics, it is also important to understand how Microsoft has organised its own Metaverse which interlinks the various productivity and reporting / insight tools that you use. Over the last few years, the centre of this world has become Microsoft Teams and the various applications that then obtain and push information around the other tools. Whether this has been the move of OneDrive plus files and web content into SharePoint, Stream for Video, To Do, Planner and many more, the links all come together to form a large Metaverse for data and therefore searchability. 

What is Viva Topics 

Viva Topics makes use of this AI technology in order to organise information and knowledge from around the company and presents this to those that actually need it. 

Enabling a new, more efficient and productive way of working, this knowledge management intergrates with integrates with Microsoft Search, SharePoint Contributions/News, Teams, Outlook, Office tools (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint) and Power Tools. It recognises so-called “Topics” in texts and highlights them as links giving you the chance to hover over the link and preview information or to jump straight to a topic page with all the information. 

Some people may see this as a form of internal wiki but the main difference here is that the AI is doing the searching for you and building the wiki links on the fly, automatically searching your Microsoft 365 for topics or terms including Projects, Abbreviations, Organisations, Applications, Products, Events and Locations amongst others. 

When the AI identifies a topic and collects enough information about it, it indexes the topic on a central page in SharePoint Online (Topic Center). Knowledge managers and editors must share and manage the topics in the Topic Center. Once approved, a topic page can be created with a description and also linked documents, other topic pages and contacts. Once the topics are published, you can jump from text content to topics and learn about linked content, whichever productivity tool you are in, the example above shows this within Outlook or below in Viva Connections. 

The main uses for you as an organisation can be shown in three main ways: 

• Turning content into knowledge – With AI constantly analysing and organising your data, creating Topic pages as it goes, this reduces the need to look for these areas yourself. The links with other relevant topics brings information and data together and allows for expertise from all areas. 
• Organising knowledge - AI will suggest topics and cards but will also suggest definitions, related content, conversations and also expert knowledge. This may come from emails, videos, general files or news items around the whole Microsoft tenancy.  
• Make knowledge easier to find – Viva Topics are available across all Microsoft applications within Microsoft 365 with two examples shown above. Even more important though is that they are available direct from the main Microsoft Search function making it as easy as possible to discover the knowledge you need. 

The Role of Knowledge Managers 

Playing a central role in implementing Viva Topics, Knowledge Managers are responsible for the entire Topics lifecycle. This can be time consuming, but AI is there to support as well, whether you are writing, managing, publishing or deleting Topics. They must identify relevant topics and communicate with suggested people who contribute content and linked items for Topics. Sometimes the contacts suggested by the AI don't fit the topic because they have only created contributions as editorial members for example. 

Along with Knowledge Managers though come the Topic Contributors, think of editors really. While the Knowledge Managers keep control of the whole Topic Lifecycle, Contributors can create and edit the topics along the way putting them above the end user consumers of these topics, namely Topic viewers. You do have the option of opening up editing to any employee with a more “Community” approach but with the control then coming through the Knowledge Managers. This gives the option for content to grow very fast and uptake to be maximised but you may want to divide the role into more editor groups instead. 

Is this available to everyone? 

Viva Topics is available to everyone regardless of their Microsoft Plan but it is not included as a part of current Microsoft plans, business or enterprise. It can be purchased as a stand alone product or as part of the Viva Suite plans with both options including all features of Viva Topics. 

How could we use Viva Topics? 

Viva Topics, and in particular its AI benefits, delivers great potential. In particular, it helps connecting employees with knowledge whether they are fresh to the company, have changed role or departments, or work in specialist areas, by giving them knowledge simply and quickly reducing any uncertainty.  Plus the workforce reduced time spent searching for information usually resulting in them being more motivated.   Information content is constantly growing and Microsoft Viva Topics is playing a central role in creating greater clarity by filling the knowledge gap.

In Human Resources, why not try and incorporate Viva Topics into your new employee and role onboarding by providing new employees with the knowledge they need to onboard and accelerate their time to productivity. Or maybe within In-context learning where you can enable employees to learn about topics relevant to their jobs in the flow of their work. Or how about in knowledge transfer where you can capture and transfer the knowledge of employees leaving the organization or changing their role. 

In Sales or Customer Service you could potentially use within sales enablement where you could improve sales outcomes and reduce proposal production time by helping salespeople find SMEs and reuse existing content and knowledge. Creating topics around a product and service knowledge base could then help employees learn about business products and services with easy access to product details, roadmaps, announcements, and a forum to ask questions. How about creating topics that bring together a customer knowledge base which helps sales executives, account managers, and support reps serve customers in a more effective manner by providing easy access to a customer knowledge base. 

Operations could create an Asset Knowledge base or a Process and procedure knowledge base while Product and Service Development could create Knowledge networks or Service Delivery. 

The options are numerous and the AI technology within Viva Topics can help deliver personalised content, increase engagement, and improve the overall employee experience.