4 Fun Facts You Need to Know About Microsoft Viva Topics

We’ve heard all about the exciting new features coming to the Viva suite. Today more than ever, as we’re continually seeing the rapid growth of data, Viva Topics has become a powerful tool to equip organizations in bringing the right content to the right fingertips.

Christian Buckley, AvePoint Brand Alliance Director and Microsoft MVP/Regional Director, recently sat down with Sarah Fennah, Microsoft 365 Apps and Services MVP and founding member of Viva Explorer, in a recent episode of Office 365 Hours to go deep into what makes Viva Topics click.

Together, they unraveled some fun information about Viva Topics and its role in empowering productivity. Watch the full video or read below to check out the highlights of their conversation:

1. Viva Topics History: It Grew Out From Project Cortex

Project Cortex was a previous Microsoft project that aimed to utilize the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to improve the way organizations work with documents that are locked away in Microsoft 365.

Cortex, however, never became a product. Instead, two products branched out of it: Viva Topics and SharePoint Syntex.

While Syntex works around extracting the metadata from your documents, Viva Topics looks into finding, collating, and presenting information and grouping that information according to a certain subject or theme.

Syntex is a complementary tool to Topics, but it’s not necessarily required to run Topics. It helps speed up the process for larger organizations, but user training around metadata may be enough to make Viva Topics work for your unique requirements.

2. Viva Topic’s Magic: Its Capability to Link Everything Together

One of the most time-consuming tasks employees go over is looking for resources—documents, related information, people, etc. With Topics, linking all your resources together to get the right information to the right person at the right time is made easier and more accessible.

This does not only apply to searching and surfacing for specific, dormant documents, but also supports a user’s productivity by providing all the resources one might need right into their flow of work, despite the challenges of changing organizational structure and information architecture.

With this capability, Topics just evolved Microsoft’s search functionality into a much more powerful tool!

3. You can easily curate your Viva Topics!

Another cool fact about Topics is how you and your experts can curate your Topics to ensure updated, relevant information across your Microsoft 365 environment.

Because Viva Topics leverages AI to improve the human aspects of your information architecture, Topics can keep up with dynamic changes and still be able to collate relevant information together, wherever they are stored.

Your subject matter experts can then easily go through this updated information and curate an information page that’s more relevant, accessible, and better structured to make knowledge more accessible to your users.

4. Powerful search functions come with security

No matter how powerful Topics’ capabilities are, it still puts security above everything else. Viva Topics recognizes who you are and what you’re trying to do, as well as the permissions you have.

That means you can still rest assured that your users are only unlocking knowledge they should know and are not accessing sensitive or confidential information you don’t want everyone to have access to.

Ready to leverage Viva Topics?

Viva Topics is one of the premium Viva modules, so you need a Viva Topics or a Viva Suite license to be able to utilize it in your Microsoft 365 environment.

To know more about Viva Topics and the rest of the Viva suite, check out Viva Explorers, a group of MVPs from a wide variety of different backgrounds who champion Microsoft Viva by bringing in diverse backgrounds to help customers and other MVPs learn about Microsoft Viva. Check out their events, roadshows, and sessions here: Home (vivaexplorers.com)

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