First in Part 1 we looked at how to do the initial setup of Viva Topics. Secondly in Part 2 looked at how to review topics that were suggested to you by the AI and how to add your own.  Now, we are in Part 3 we are going to see how this all comes together in Microsoft 365.

Provisos and Quid Pro Quos

• Most importantly, for people to see the topics in M365 the end user has to have a Viva Topics license.  These are add-on licenses that are $5/user/month.  Should everyone in your organization have a license?  Let’s consider that because its a difficult question to answer.  In the end, your particular organization’s situation will dictate the correct response.  I can see a situation where a Font Line Worker can benefit from being able to see topics in their Teams App and get more information.
• This only works in Modern Pages at the moment.  This should change over time as Microsoft rolls this out, but if you are hoping for this to work in Office, or Teams, or Outlook, its not there…yet.
• Lastly, this doesn’t work in rolled up content, only in the text in pages.

Viva Topics in Use

As you can see, I have a number of topics published to my tenant.

Now I should be able to see these topics on modern pages.  To make this simple, I created a new Modern page and added some filler text using Bacon Ipsum.  I then published the page and voila!

Wrap-up

This is pretty cool in and of itself.  We can allow Viva Topics to:

• Automatically mine our M365 instance for potential topics.
• Create our own topics as well.
• End users can curate and expand on topics to make them richer
• Topics are automatically highlighted on pages

In the near future (summer of 21?) we can expect more surfaces to show Viva Topics.  You can see this in action in the Viva Topics Demo.