Knowledge Management

Featured Karl Kocar

Adding the Human Touch to a Viva Topic

By default Viva uses AI to add content and associate people to Topics it discovers for an organisation. Often, this is good enough and end users save time and effort by accessing these automatically generated Topics within the flow of their everyday jobs.

However, there might be times when a subject matter expert will want to ensure specific information about a Topic stands out. They might even want to create the Topic themselves and ensure their page is engaging. To do this Topic administrators will use standard SharePoint Web Parts and the AI can then add additional suggested content to help improve upon and maintain the subject covered.

If you are not familiar with Web Parts they are easy to use building blocks you can use to customise a SharePoint page.

The following video provides a short overview of how easy it is to customise Topics pages to highlight important documents, links, videos and tools.

Video Featured Karl Kocar

Viva Topics 101

Viva Topics leverages AI services from the Microsoft Cloud to pull together and surface knowledge for users to quickly and easily consume. More details on how Topics are discovered and curated can be found in the Microsoft Documentation. When a user navigates through Modern SharePoint pages or types a relevant query into Microsoft Search they are presented with a Topic Card that provides a summary for the specific subject the Topic covers. The end users simply view the details to dive deeper.

So what about security? The key point to know is that Viva Topics complies with an organisation’s Microsoft 365 security settings so that end users will only ever see content they already have permission to access. More details can be found in the Security and Privacy chapter of the docs.

Clear as mud? To help, I’ve created this 4 minute video to provide a concise overview of some of the main components of Topics and highlight where the cards are currently presented. Over time Topic Cards will start to appear across Microsoft 365 services such as Teams. There are also plans to link Topics to 3rd party content using Graph Connectors and future APIs will allow for new custom use cases.

If you want to access some free training on Viva Topics check out the modules on Microsoft Learn.