Viva Topics will retire – how about your content management?
Yesterday, Microsoft announced the retirement of Viva Topics, one of the Viva employee experience platform solutions. This made me wonder what are the options to continue content management in an organisation? Read my 5 tips in the end! But first, what is happening to Viva Topics?
What did Viva Topics do?
Viva Topics uses AI to automatically identify and organise topics in the organisation and displays the topics as a small hover cards all over the M365 suite. The idea is to help users to easily find more information about organisation wide topics they encounter in their daily work, like within a discussion in Teams, SharePoint, or Outlook. If they found an interesting topic and wanted to know more, they opened the topic page by clicking the hover card.
Now, as M365 Copilot and other generative AI tools in M365 are becoming more and more universal, some earlier AI products like Viva Topics are discontinued. Viva Topics will be available until February 2025, but then it will be gone.
What happens to my Topic pages?
The good news is that existing Viva Topics pages published by a user are not deleted but converted into regular SharePoint pages. This means the information gathered is not going to waste. This also means that you can still access the information on those pages and edit and publish updates as on any other page, but they will no longer be updated or maintained by AI. AI-suggested and confirmed topics will no longer appear as topic pages. Only topics that appear in the Site Pages library will remain after retirement.
Also, if you used Viva Topics in Viva Engage, the topics in Viva Engage will return to a simplified public topics model (= regular #s) and the integration with Viva Topics will be retired.
You can read more details about the retirement at Microsoft learn.
How to continue your organisation’s knowledge management without Viva Topics?
If you have been using Viva Topics in your organisation, it indicates that you already are on the path of taking control of your organisation’s knowledge management. Here are 5 things to consider next on that path:
Create a plan how to use the existing Topics pages as a knowledge base. Maybe connect them to your intranet? Use them as a good example of how a topic page should look like with the connection to essential resources and connection to people as well as other topics.
Use tags and metadata to organize your information and make it easier to find. But be careful not to overdo it! If you add too many metadata fields without automation, users are not going to fill them all and you end up missing a lot of metadata.
Teach your users how to use the M365 search efficiently. Make sure, that people understand how the organization level on search works. Add metadata as filters and new verticals (tabs), if necessary. Analyse the search regularly.
In case you have bought the licenses, make sure you teach your users how to properly use M365 Copilot (and Microsoft Copilot). Teach them how to prompt and how to take the results with a pinch of salt.
Explore the possibilities of SharePoint Premium (ex. Microsoft Syntex). SharePoint Premium offers advanced features for knowledge management, such as content understanding, automation, and compliance. You can use AI to automatically capture, classify, and extract information (metadata) from your content, making it easier to find and use.