Microsoft Viva Topics

Viva Topics is an AI-powered solution that discovers, organizes, and surfaces what matters. It automatically organizes content and expertise across your systems and teams into related topics such as projects, products, processes, and customers. People don’t need a separate application or search—knowledge simply finds them in the apps they already use. Experts can rapidly curate and share knowledge through simple, highly customizable web pages.

Viva Topics is available as a user-based add-on for Microsoft 365 plans for commercial customers. For more details on Microsoft 365 plans, please see our Microsoft 365 Enterprise Licensing page.

Anyone viewing, accessing, or curating topic cards, topic pages, or topic centers or otherwise benefiting from Viva Topics capabilities requires a license. This includes the following scenarios:

• Discover topics through topic highlights on a SharePoint page
• Open a topic card to view and select related team members, resources, and related topics
• Open and view a topic page
• Create a new topic
• Curate a topic by updating the description, adding additional resources, and suggesting team members
• Manage mined and added topics for accuracy and relevance

Viva Topics is available to customers worldwide and currently offers English language support. We plan to add support for Spanish, French, and German in the second half of 2021.

Yes, we plan to make Viva Topics available for government cloud in the future.

In the U.S., we go through a FedRAMP certification process that happens twice a year – in April and December. We’ll start the certification process when the next cycle opens. The earliest Viva Topics could be available for government cloud is the second half of 2021.

Yes, we have a full set of admin controls for the functionality. It will ship “Off” by default so that you are able to plot the right adoption journey for your organization.

Viva Topics is based on the security and compliance of content enforced across Microsoft 365. For example, access, retention labels, data sovereignty, and information barriers are all maintained consistently before and after the activation of Viva Topics. In addition, organizations can apply restrictions on the scope and availability of topic information shared by Viva Topics.

There are two ways to generate topics: 1) users can create topics manually and 2) AI can detect and generate topics automatically. Once a topic is created, AI will update the topic and related resources as it discovers new information. For manually created topics, AI will attempt to add additional content based on the topic’s context. In addition, users can also manually update topic cards and pages to adjust the topic description or highlight new resources and connections. These scenarios are part of the human and AI story where machine learning and human curation together can build a better experience for end users.

Microsoft Graph helps supply insights about content and knowledge throughout Microsoft 365, and Viva Topics builds on top of the Graph to create your knowledge network. Viva Topics powers new user experiences for knowledge – including content integration via Microsoft Search, and knowledge sharing via the topic center and topic cards, for example.

Microsoft Graph provides a consistent API for addressing Microsoft 365 data and personalized insights and is used throughout the suite in places such as Microsoft Search and OneDrive suggested files.

Later this year we’ll ship a set of APIs which will allow customers to highlight topics and show topic cards in applications other than Office 365. This is an essential ingredient in allowing other Microsoft application teams and our ISV partners to build integrations into Microsoft Viva.

While Viva Topics is going to work most optimally for organizations using Microsoft 365 as their content management system, we understand that topics and knowledge exist outside of Microsoft 365. There are content connectors and APIs available – and more being developed – to help customers integrate the information from third-party systems into the Microsoft Graph.

With connectors and topics, you have the capability not only to bring information into your Microsoft apps through topic cards, but also to make connections between the content in Microsoft 365 and the content coming from external sources – providing your users a more holistic view of the organization’s knowledge.

For more information on Microsoft Graph content connectors, including how to use them and build your own, visit https://aka.ms/iwantconnectors.

For Viva Topics, topics will be discovered from files and pages stored in modern or classic sites. However, topic highlights will only appear on modern SharePoint pages. These pages may exist in a modern type of site such as a Communication Site or a Group Site connected to a Team. In addition, where a classic site has had modern pages added these will also feature topic highlights.

Because Viva Topics leverages SharePoint, we want you to be able to use all the customization features inside of SharePoint to make this really yours. This is about helping you to populate what you would want in your knowledge center and to be able to use the branding that's appropriate for you and your culture.