Discover best practices for Viva Topics

  • 2 minutes

Use this seven-step checklist of best practices to launch Viva Topics, identify improvement areas, and find roadblocks.

  1. Assess your current governance model.
  2. Perform permissions planning.
  3. Develop strategic ownership & budget.
  4. Assess your content readiness & category of topics.
  5. Check your SharePoint usage reports.
  6. Review search connectors & search improvements.
  7. Consider a pilot of topic management or content processing features.

There are several key questions to consider before launching Viva Topics:

  • Are there specific sites with sensitive data you don't want Topics to be discovered from All Sites or All except sites with sensitive data?
  • Is there sensitive data that need sensitivity labels to ensure it isn't discovered?
  • Who should be able to see the Topic insights?
  • Who will be managing and creating Topics where required?
  • What do you want to be the URL of your Topic center? You will need to provide a SharePoint address.

Step 1: Assess your current governance model

Understand and define the business problems and objectives to address for your knowledge strategy by looking at:

  • What is the knowledge culture, how do people share and collaborate, where does innovation happen?
  • What and where does knowledge currently sit in your organization? Where are the gaps and overlaps across organizational departments, geographies, applications, and repositories? This should include tacit and explicit knowledge, structured and unstructured content.
  • What solutions have you already implemented, which are adopted, where are overlaps and gaps and how can Viva Topics help streamline knowledge and put people in the center of knowledge?
  • What are the different common types of topics? Some options include project names, customers, and products.

Step 2: Perform permissions planning

Viva Topics respects the permissions already set for your content across Microsoft 365. Beyond standard team or site permissions, use sensitivity labels or data loss prevention to restrict access to content. Also, periodically review user access to sensitive information. Use these tools to ensure your content permissions are set appropriately inside your organization. Then Topic experiences can provide useful and appropriate information.

The content inventory and user access across current content need to be managed correctly and secured. For example, a new product for a project with information about company investments should only have authorized people with access to this. If the content is on SharePoint and permissions are set to a broader group of people, sensitive information could be accidentally shared when it should be confidential.

Use best practices for security and privacy

We recommend you use these tools to ensure your content permissions are set appropriately inside your organization. Topic experiences can then provide useful and appropriate information to your users.

If there are topics you want to exclude entirely from topic experiences, you can also:

  • Exclude sensitive SharePoint sites from topic discovery. Content in these sites will not appear in topic experiences.
  • Exclude topics by name. Topics explicitly excluded will not appear in topic experiences.
  • Have Knowledge managers remove topics in the topic center.

We recommend these security and privacy best practices:

  • Recruit Knowledge managers from different areas of your organization with a variety of expertise - and access to the underlying content used by AI. This can help you curate the most useful knowledge for your users and remove sensitive information if found.
  • Set up a workflow for requesting changes. Knowledge managers or team or site owners should have a process to request exclusion of topics or sites as new projects are started within your organization or if they find content with inappropriate permissions settings.
  • Be aware of the audience and the sensitivity of information when creating topic descriptions. These descriptions may be visible to users who don't have permissions to the source content for the topic. While you can change the permissions on individual topic pages to narrow access to a specific group of users, we don't recommend this approach because of the high degree of administrative effort required.

Step 3: Develop strategic ownership & budget

For Viva Topics general best practices, develop strategic ownership and budget associated with operating the technology for leadership approval. Ask yourself:

  • Should we start with a limited pilot or limited roll-out?
  • How should we move forward with purchasing Viva Topics?
  • What licensing considerations are required for Viva Topics?
  • What's the process for securing resourcing for this effort?
  • What's the applicable business use case to focus on to determine appropriate value and ROI? 

Step 4: Assess your content readiness & category of topics

Perform an analysis of your current environment. This analysis is known as a Content Inventory, which will give you a clear picture of all your content, indicating what you have and highlighting what's missing. Improve the network by adding topic definitions, editing connections and category of topics.

Step 5: Check your SharePoint usage reports

Analyze SharePoint usage by pulling SharePoint usage reports. These reports will provide insights into how specific regions or departments are utilizing SharePoint and Office 365 from the SharePoint server to share with your team. ​
The Analytics Processing Component generates two reports based on usage event types:

  • Popularity Trends show usage event statistics for a site collection, site, or individual item in a library or list.
  • Most Popular Items show usage event statistics for all items in a library or list.

The reports are broken down per usage event type. The default usage event types are as follows:

  • Views: number of views for a single item, page, or document.
  • Recommendations Displayed: number of times an item, page, or document is displayed as a recommendation.
  • Recommendations Clicked: number of times a single item, page, or document was clicked when it was displayed as a recommendation.

Step 6: Review search connectors & search improvements

Viva Topics uses Graph content connectors in the Microsoft and partner ecosystem to connect and push items into the Microsoft Search index. The basic process includes the following steps:

  1. Add a Graph content connector in the Microsoft 365 admin center.
  2. Name the connection.
  3. Configure the connection settings.
  4. Manage search permissions.
  5. Assign property labels.
  6. Manage schema.
  7. Refresh settings.
  8. Review connection.

View the list of resources at the end of this module for information on how to configure Graph content connectors*.

Step 7: Consider a pilot of topic management or content processing features

Before rolling out Viva Topics to your entire organization, consider testing its topic management or content processing features with a pilot group of users. Set clear goals, decide on a pilot period length, choose your champions, and develop an onboarding and communications plan.