In the previous article, I showed you how to configure Viva Topics in Office 365. This time I will explain how to manage topics. We will go through topics discovered by AI, edit topics, and publish them. We will also go through creating a new topic from scratch.
Topics
Topics are information distilled from documents and pages in your organization. Viva Topics AI discovers topics based on an internal AI model and connects all related information together (e.g., people, documents, pages, descriptions). This is an automatic process and when it’s done you can check the results on the Topic page. By default, all discovered topics are waiting for human verification.
Based on my demo tenant Viva Topics discovered 81 topics from 6.6K documents stored in my SharePoint Online sites.
Topic management
1. Navigate to your Viva Topic center and go to the Manage topics section
There are 4 sections:
- Suggested – display all topics discovered by AI
- Confirmed – topics validated by a user
- Published – topics curated and published by a user
- Removed – removed topics (not available for users)
2. Select a topic from the Suggested list and check if it is important to your organization and should be visible to users. To confirm it click on the Confirm icon.
All changes on the Topics page require time to propagate. When you confirm a page it’s visible as confirmed after a while (up to 1 hour).
3. To publish a specific topic, go to the Confirmed section, select a topic, and click Review and publish
4. On the topic page, click on the Edit button and review the content of the topic.
5. Modify the content if you need to adjust the description, suggested people, etc. At this stage, you can even remove the entire section (for example, Pinned people) or add a new webpart. This is a common SharePoint page, and you can use any SharePoint webpart. When you’re ready click the Publish button.
6. Your topic is now published! If you want to remove a published topic, go to the Published section, select a topic, and click on the Remove icon.
A removed topic can take up to 24 hours to stop appearing to users.
Create a new topic
If Viva Topics didn’t find a topic you need, you can create it from scratch.
1. Go to Viva Topic Center and navigate to the Manage topics section. Click on the New topic page.
2. Provide basic information – topic name and topic short description.
3. Add additional information that you want (Pinned people, Pinned files and pages, Pinned sites, Related topics). If some section is not relevant to the topic you can remove it.
4. You can also add content using SharePoint webparts (for example, text, images, and quick links).
5. When you’re ready click the Publish button. Your topic page will be immediately published without any early stages (no confirmation needed).
Summary
In this post, we went through basic topic management tasks. From curating topics discovered by AI to creating a new one from scratch. All those tasks don’t require much time but keep in mind that the most important and time-consuming part is validating topics.
You need to spend enough time to be sure that information is valid, related content is relevant, and your users need this topic.
