Viva Topics is one of the five modules in Microsoft Viva, which Microsoft released in 2021. It acts as a Wikipedia for business by presenting business users with a Topic card when they see a word or acronym they don’t recognise. Topic cards can be found in SharePoint online and will soon be available in Teams and Outlook.

Topic cards will provide information about the Topic, including files and sites related, a description, and people who know about the Topic and related Topics. Topics help employees understand what it means and who is involved. A good use case for Topics is an organisation that runs many projects, as your project names can be Topics. Law firms may also find use with legal terms and cases as Topics.

How are Topics created?

Topics are created by a mixture of Microsoft’s AI and people in your organisation who have the “knowledge manager” role. AI will create Topics as a first draft, and employees can choose to add to them or remove them if they are irrelevant.

You can assign a few roles to help manage Topics in your organisation. Those roles are:

• Manage topics: Can confirm and reject topics, typically knowledge managers.
• Create & edit topics: Can edit and create new topics.
• Topic viewers: See information on topic pages, search results and topics in SharePoint pages.

This helps ensure Topics are up-to-date as employees are working day-to-day.

Topic Centre

Knowledge Managers can manage Topics in the Topic Centre, a SharePoint site where users can view, manage and create topics. Each user will have a bespoke view of suggested topics relevant to them based on what they do in Microsoft 365.

From here, knowledge managers can see if a Topic has impressions and choose to approve or remove Topics that the AI has suggested.

The Topic Centre is where employees can view the full details of the Topic and even update it as they go.

Topics will become available in Teams chat, channel messages, and Outlook emails later in 2022. This means I can find the correct information wherever I am working at the right time.

How do I get Viva Topics?

You can purchase a Viva Suite license that includes all of the premium Viva features across Insights, Learning, Topics and Goals if you want to use all of Microsoft Viva. Viva Topics is an additional license cost of £3.00 per user/month. Each user will need a license if they want to view Topics.