Plan your Viva Topics adoption

  • 5 minutes

To plan for a Viva Topics rollout strategy, you need to include as much content in scope as possible in topic discovery for better artificial intelligence insights to discover. To ensure you are including the appropriate content for your users, you need the right people for crowdsourcing and resources.

You can use the following six-step checklist to launch Viva Topics in your organization:

  1. Decide on a model.
  2. Build a champion network.
  3. Create a success plan.
  4. Share success stories.
  5. Discover Topics.
  6. Plan for Viva Topics pages.

Step 1: Decide on a model

To prepare for Viva Topics rollout strategy, choose from one of two models:

  • Fully crowd-sourced model where everyone in the organization can add and edit topics.
  • Authoritative model where a set group of people is responsible for adding and editing topics. They can rely on other people, but they are the ones responsible for doing it. In this model, everyone else is just a consumer where they can view Viva Topics in the term store.

Engage your organization:

  • Identify the business groups and teams to be involved and gain alignment across those and the scenarios you're planning. These include IT, security, and legal teams to remove potential roadblocks.
  • Start thinking about how to engage some early adopters to get critical, early feedback so you can iterate to get to the best solution. Use a mix of users to get feedback from multiple use cases: such as people new to a topic, people looking for specific information or experts on a topic.
  • Start building the community on using Viva Topics across your organization by these different groups.
  • Train your organization. Most people will intuitively understand the concept of topics and how topic cards compile relevant information and understand and see the value. But you might want to create training tailored to your own culture and organization and to show how you want Viva Topics to be used.

Step 2: Build a champion network

You might have communities of practice or champion networks already in place. These are great ways to socialize and evangelize and get peers involved in helping each other. And they can share success stories that can be valuable. They can offer advice and generate excitement.

Build a champion network in your organization as champions can:

  • Create a circle of influence within their teams.
  • Drive topic management and maintenance.

You can recruit champions from different roles – Knowledge Managers and subject matter experts.

Step 3: Create a success plan

Use Topic usage indicators to measure the success of Viva Topics in your organization:

  • Topic impressions
  • Quantity of topics – both confirmed and unconfirmed in your curated topic list.
  • Number of published topic pages.
  • End-user feedback from topic cards.

You can use surveys to measure employee satisfaction. Viva Topics should improve your employees' ability to find information, so find ways to gather their input and feedback.

Your goal is to create positive impact to search analytics. As topics appear in the search experience, over time you might see lowered rates of abandoned searches because people are more easily finding the topics in search.

Step 4: Share success stories

Host engagement events to share stories or introduce new features, set challenges for people, and run competitions.

When you're ready to roll out Viva Topics, you'll need to get people involved. Gather the stakeholders and create scenarios. These could be discovery workshops or use design-led thinking to brainstorm ideas.

Start introducing the feature set and getting them to think about their scenarios. Drive the community and think about how you're going to engage them.

Then complete the preparation steps. Some may be technical readiness and some business readiness.

Finally, socialize and promote.

Step 5: Discover Topics

  • Improve Topics discovery when more content is available.
  • Preserve the security, privacy, and location of your data even though the information is presented in a new experience.
  • Users need a license to view, create, edit, and manage Viva Topics.
  • Discovery is initially scoped to English language content.

To help prepare for topic discovery, think through these questions:

  • What content should be used for topic discovery?
  • Who will manage topics?
  • Who will see topic cards and highlights?
  • Which topics are expected and should be excluded?

Topic discovery only includes content on SharePoint sites, and topic cards can only be surfaced on modern pages. You can control whether topics are included or excluded from Search or Delve with the Microsoft Graph* settings.

Step 6: Plan for Viva Topics pages

Topic pages provide the full detail on a topic and can be curated by designated users in your organization. While the topic card shows only two people and resources, you'll see the full list on the topic page. Edit the page to improve the description or update the connections to people and resources. While everyone can provide feedback to improve the network, your organization may restrict who can edit topics directly. Only people with permissions to these resources will be able to edit topics.

To ensure high-quality topics are shown to your users and users have the right permissions to consume and contribute, ask yourself:

  • Are there SharePoint sites with content not helpful for discovering topics?
  • Which topics, if any, do you want to exclude from topic experiences?
  • Which users should your topics visible to?
  • Which users should have permissions to manage topics in the topic center?
  • Which users should have permissions to create or edit topics in the topic center?
  • What name and URL address do you want to give your topic center?

Security and privacy of your data are respected, as topic experiences don't grant users additional access to files, they don't have rights already.