The Viva Topics retirement announced on February 22, 2024 is an inevitable side-effect of Microsoft’s ongoing focus on Copilot. It is difficult to argue against the retirement. Business, technology, and implementation factors stack up against Viva Topics. The future of Microsoft Knowledge Management is firmly in the grasp of Copilot.
As part of its rebranding of Yammer to Viva Engage last week, Microsoft added the Viva Engage Core service plan to user accounts. Which is nice, unless a tenant had blocked Yammer. The new service plan means that accounts can now use Yammer In many cases, it won’t matter too much that users can now access Yammer, but in other instances it will. In any case, we should tidy up by removing the Viva Engage Core service plan from any account that already blocks Yammer. Some PowerShell does the trick, but it would have been nice if Microsoft had thought things through a little more.
Microsoft announced that OWA supports Viva Topics, meaning that users with Topics licenses can add topic cards to messages, and those who receive the messages will see topic cards if they also have licenses. Support is coming soon for topi cards in Teams chat. Being able to use topic cards in mainline applications increases the attractiveness of Viva Topics a lot. Whether it’s enough to convince more Microsoft 365 tenants to plunge into knowledge management with Viva Topics remains to be seen.
Microsoft says that its Microsoft Viva platform has ten million users after one year. That’s good, but does it mean success when measured against the user numbers for Office 365 and Teams? And how has the technology evolved during the year. All explained here.
The Viva Learning app is available for deployment to Microsoft Teams users. The Viva Learning app delivers courseware to users to allow them to browse and access content created by Microsoft, the tenant, or external courseware providers such as Skillsoft and Pluralsight. In this article, we describe the three quick and easy steps to get Viva Learning up and running to help expand the minds of your Teams users.
To help you recover from the blizzard of Microsoft 365 information released at Fall Ignite 2021, here are some notes about features and functionality you might have missed. Like any list created by a conference (virtual) attendee, it reflects my interests and what I was looking for. Feel free to disagree on the importance of any or all of the topics discussed here… and suggest some of your own in the comments.
Microsoft is applying their Viva brand to the features currently known as MyAnalytics. Viva Insights will span a monthly email digest, the Outlook insights add-on, and the Insights dashboard. If you don’t want users to access these features, you can disable the features individually or remove the service plan from user licenses. The rebranding is happening now and due to complete in November.
Viva Topics is one of the four modules in the Microsoft Viva employee engagement platform. You can run a 25-user trial for 30 days to create some topics and see how things work. A trial should help an organization decide if they want to pay the $5/user/month Microsoft asks for Viva Topics licenses – and everyone needs a license to see topic cards, which is the point of Topics.