Success with Viva Topics

Viva Topics one of the founding Viva Suite modules focused on User Experience. Search has been one of the challenges users face in any corporate enterprise environment. Struggling to get up to speed, or earnestly trying to be aware of what’s going on around you. Viva Topics helps one keep in tune and be aware of what’s going on around them through a series of topics pages that are intertwined in the work we do everyday. The goal of any organization should be to capture knowledge and make it repeatable and easy to access, securely of course. Knowledge at your fingertips.

The Viva Suite is known as the user experience platform. While Viva is still relatively very new to most organizations, Viva Topics has been beyond reach to most organizations. It’s been a struggle to even imagine what it could be as it’s a challenge when you’re trying to build a pilot environment without documents, collaboration signals, active employees and taxonomies. Prepping for Viva Topics will stretch your technical team in a number of unusual ways. Ultimately the management of the Topics should find it’s home somewhere in the business, but just like getting someone to get the Acronyms of the organization started, it takes someone caring enough to get the Topics center started. The ways to find success in Viva Topics come from a number of unusual practices not seen in other areas of technology.

1. Seed taxonomies and terms to Topics
   1. Departments
   2. Customers
   3. Project, Teams, Sites,
   4. Acronyms
   5. Locations
   6. Offices, Buildings, Conference Room names
   7. Industry Specific Terminology – You really don’t want thousands of random topics in a short period of time, but if you had approved terms that made sense it could really give you a massive jumpstart.
2. Gathering Ontologies, I like to think of Information Architectures and Connecting the Structure in Centers of Excellence, Communities of Practice, Knowledge Centers, Knowledge Bases
3. Hand Holding Adoption Change Management: Training on the power of using #Hashtags and @mentions in email, yammer, SharePoint pages and news, Teams chats, etc… integration with ToDo and Viva Insights
4. Feedback and Office Hours
5. Expertise Finding Strategy – Focused vertical for Who bot or Search based results
6. Connectors – where is the company knowledge?
7. Topic Page Template and considerations
8. Syntex – Structured and Unstructured content that can help drive answers, taxonomies, and terms.
9. Sensitivity – Topics does give you an opportunity to ensure that people are using Terms. Topics is security trimmed by default, but also has additional layers for keepings rights restricted or even from displaying the topics cards. Topics won’t just show up… they take approval, editing and review prior to publishing. What I call the curation process of culling the topics into the things that add the most value.
10. Organizational knowledge, preparation and integration

An effective pilot may be a limited scope of users, a limited set of sites and teams, with a limited set of licensed or trial users. Imagine an engineering group and the very specific terminology, expertise, and processes. Even a sales team, there’s the customers, the deals, the locations, and so on which all could drive to a powerful hierarchy of information surrounding and connecting the knowledge to the expertise. Not you don’t need to license Viva Topics immediately, you can start with this scoped set of up to 25 users in a trial. Tony Redmond put together an article worth reading on getting started with a Viva Topics trial.

I’m excited to share my experience setting up a demo tenant loading up documents adding relevant taxonomies and then building the topics, topic pages, and exploring the #hashtags in the UX that are now working in SharePoint pages and news, Outlook web access, and soon to see Teams and yammer.

If you’ve been waiting to get your hands dirty, I’m hopeful you’ll be excited about what is possible today.

Free Webinar: Success with Viva Topics

>> Register Here

Join us on June 7 at 9am Pacific. In addition to hearing about my stories of working with Viva Topics and sharing steps to find success. You’ll also get some updates from Microsoft’s CJ Tan and Chris McNulty and hear about the latest from WAND to help accelerate your investigations, trials, or deployments with seed taxonomies.

Note: This webinar will be delivered in Microsoft Teams Webinars.