Fueling Microsoft’s knowledge sharing culture with Microsoft Viva Topics

At Microsoft, we’re evolving our culture of learning. Part of that evolution is ensuring that our employees always have access to the information they need. We’re using Microsoft Viva Topics to consolidate and govern the vast breadth of collaborative knowledge sources across Microsoft, giving our employees access to the knowledge and expertise from their peers when they need it, in the flow of work.

Growing knowledge management at Microsoft

Like many large, global organizations, Microsoft has a wealth of information available to our employees that spans every aspect of our business, how it works, and how we can work together to make in better. We host more than 10 petabytes of uncategorized content and data in search that spans more than 353 million search items. Prior to Microsoft Viva Topics, less than 1 percent of those search items were actively classified and organized.

Historically, information content has been difficult to manage at Microsoft, as it is for many organizations our size. Content was isolated, potentially duplicated, and not universally curated. In many cases, our employees had to search out their own path to find the content they need.

We wanted to grow our knowledge management capabilities to better anticipate employee knowledge needs and put knowledge into our employees’ hands, in context, when and where they needed it. We needed better methods to disseminate knowledge content to support a knowledge sharing culture that fosters the broader culture of learning at Microsoft.

[See how we’re evolving our culture with Microsoft Viva internally at Microsoft. | Check out the lessons we’ve learned from our adoption of Microsoft Viva internally at Microsoft. | Learn how we’re fostering a culture of learning at Microsoft with Microsoft Viva Learning.]

Creating a vision for Microsoft Viva Topics

Microsoft Viva Topics turns content into usable knowledge. AI capabilities enable us to survey our organization’s content and automatically identify, process, and organize it into easily accessible knowledge. We can organize knowledge and enable experts across the organization to share and refine knowledge through curated topic pages, automatically generated and updated by AI. Viva Topics makes it easy to discover and use knowledge in context through relevant topic cards in the apps our employees use every day.

Leading in adoption as Customer Zero

Microsoft is the first and best customer of its own products. We are our own “Customer Zero.” As a large enterprise customer and employer, many of the issues Microsoft faces when deploying its own products are not unique. They are shared by other large multinational enterprises, and even by small-and-midsized customers.

As part of Customer Zero for Microsoft Viva Topics, our Microsoft Digital team has a unique opportunity to inform product development by aligning closely with product teams and internal stakeholders responsible for deployments, granting us the ability to address challenges other customers may experience through early and extensive feedback.

We collaborate closely with the Viva product development team to share employee feedback that improves the experience. As part of the Customer Zero partnership, Microsoft HR and Microsoft Digital teams get early access to new features and a chance to steer the product roadmap in a direction that best meets real enterprise knowledge management needs. This enables our own experts at Microsoft to provide industry-relevant context and feedback into the Microsoft Viva Topics development process and help grow Viva Topics into a single knowledge management platform for the entire organization and Microsoft customers.

Configuring Microsoft Viva Topics for the enterprise

Topic identification forms the basis of knowledge management and content consolidation in Microsoft Viva Topics. AI and Microsoft Graph are used to identify knowledge and people and automatically organize them into topics. We ran topics identification across our entire SharePoint Online tenant, except data classified as highly confidential or non-business. We’ve used an established taxonomy service at Microsoft to govern knowledge classification and dissemination. By seeding topics from this taxonomy service, we were able to better inform the AI about the kind of knowledge we wanted to keep in the organization. This increased the efficiency of the subsequent topic curation.

Topic curation enables our experts to refine and add topics identified by the identification process. After initial topic identification, we had a small team curate existing topics and begin the process of engaging our experts in becoming knowledge managers for Microsoft Viva Topics. Engaging knowledge managers and onboarding them to topic curation was essential to a relevant and dynamic knowledge repository in Viva Topics.

Our topic curators operate primarily in two areas: Either as knowledge managers for authoritative or regulated content, or as collaborative topic contributors for the remainder—and majority—of our knowledge content. We’re continually refining our processes for gathering and establishing topic curators. Onboarding active topic curators is the primary goal, but we also want to build our topic curators into advocates for their topic area and influencers in the organization for Microsoft Viva Topics. Our curators are discovering that Viva Topics makes their knowledge more discoverable across the organization and provides an easy-to-use experience for curation. It also offers a single location for everything related to their topic, transfers their personal knowledge into a reusable topic resource, and inspires knowledge sharing and new ideas.

We provide resources for any employee at Microsoft to promote their topic within Microsoft Viva Topics. These resources include Yammer and Teams post suggestions, digital signage, topic curator success stories, slide decks, and videos. It’s all designed to build our community of topic curators.

We’re experimenting with motivating our employees to contribute through email and Teams, contacting contributors that have made edits or left an incomplete draft and inviting them to come back and continue making changes.

—Rene Sanchez Almaguer, senior product manager, Microsoft Digital

Sanchez Almaguer poses for a portrait photo. — Rene Sanchez Almaguer is a senior product manager in Microsoft Digital who is heading up a team responsible for engaging topic curators for Microsoft Viva Topics.

We’re also using several methods outside of Microsoft Viva Topics to identify potential topic curators. We’ve integrated our internal search to track knowledge sources across the organization and who is creating and contributing those resources. SharePoint portal owner information can point us to authoritative sources for information across portal sites that provide information such as user guides, corporate guidance, compliance regulations, or specific instructions for an application or business process.

We crowdsource most knowledge management in Microsoft Viva Topics, aside from authoritative HR and legal topics. Anyone can see a topic and edit a topic. We’ve partnered with Microsoft HR to offer learning experiences and guidance for topic curation to make it as easy as possible to begin contributing to a topic.

“We’re experimenting with motivating our employees to contribute through email and Teams, contacting contributors that have made edits or left an incomplete draft and inviting them to come back and continue making changes,” says Rene Sanchez Almaguer, a senior product manager in Microsoft Digital who is heading up a team responsible for engaging topic curators for Microsoft Viva Topics.

Continuing to encourage contributors and reminding of the benefits of Viva Topics is growing the community of topic curators at Microsoft. Almaguer adds, “We’ve also been recognizing contributors through Microsoft Viva Insights; sending praise to top contributors and giving them kudos through that tool, saying, ‘Hey, the 30 topics that you curated last month have contributed to this number of impressions or views. So just keep going and keep helping others in the company find information.’”

Putting information in the hands of our employees

We’ve progressed through multiple phases of Viva Topics deployment. In Phase 1, we limited topic contribution to a small team of dedicated topic curators that helped curate the initial set of topics that the topic identification AI identified and created. We limited discovery endpoints to SharePoint and our internal search. In phase 2, we introduced crowdsourcing for topic curation, along with the ability to suggest new topics. In our final phase, we expanded discovery endpoints to include Outlook on the web, Yammer, Bing, and Teams.

Topic discovery endpoints enable our employees to discover the knowledge they need in the context of the app they’re using. Our currently deployed discovery contexts include:

SharePoint modern pages. Topics are automatically suggested in SharePoint modern pages as highlights. Employees can hover over the highlighted text, display a topic card, and discover information. Site owners can manually add topics into their pages by typing # and selecting the desired topic.
Yammer topics. Topics in Yammer have now become Viva Topics. Employees can continue adding a topic to their Yammer post or question. These Yammer conversations are aggregated and displayed inside topic pages, respecting privacy and permissions settings.
Search. We’re surfacing topics across Microsoft search in Microsoft SharePoint, Bing, Microsoft Office apps, and Office.com, using topic answers, a topic card that is showcased within search results, pointing employees to most relevant topics related to their search queries.
Teams chats. Employees can reference Microsoft Viva Topics inside Microsoft Teams chats for sharing knowledge quickly by typing # and selecting the desired topic. Soon, this functionality will be available in Teams channels.
Profile cards. Within Microsoft 365, we’re connecting topics to people and people to topics by showcasing an employee’s involvement with specific topics on the profile cards for employees that pop up across Microsoft 365 apps and interfaces.
Email. Microsoft Outlook on the web shows our employees topics that are relevant to any email thread they have in focus. It enables them to establish context for email conversations directly from Outlook on the web, and soon, the Outlook desktop app.

Driving change management and governance

We’re using Viva Topics to help employees get information from both collaborative and authoritative sources. We’re managing this convergence of knowledge in ways that ensure we set appropriate standards for how AI content creation and human curation coexist.

We prioritize applying our standards to existing content ahead of creating new content. We’re focusing on refining and consolidating existing knowledge in Microsoft Viva Topics to reduce topic duplication and unnecessary effort involved in creating duplicate topics. We’re also standardizing how Viva Topics integrates with other components of the Viva suite such as Viva Connections and Viva Engage.

Examining the current state of Viva Topics at Microsoft

Microsoft Viva Topics is currently in full deployment at Microsoft, with almost 90,000 AI suggested topics available and more than 2,500 of those topics managed by human topic curators. As Customer Zero, we’ve worked with the Viva Topics product team to introduce several features and improvements to Viva Topics throughout our implementation.

Evaluating and sharing user feedback from our 140,000-employee user base helped identify gaps or strengths in product functionality and helped the product team with compliance reviews. Our internal knowledge management experts at Microsoft Digital, along with HR, Legal, and Privacy teams helped the product group shape guiding principles for topic identification and knowledge management policies built into Viva Topics.

Our internal taxonomy definitions helped define Microsoft Viva Topics internal taxonomies and the product group leveraged telemetry from popular internal searches to help identify valid topics to curate with the built-in AI. We’ve also created a library of reusable material such as videos, slide decks, animated GIFs, and Yammer and Teams post templates that other Viva Topics customers can use to champion Viva Topics.

Though Microsoft Viva Topics is fully deployed at Microsoft, we’re far from done. We’re working on expanding topics into new endpoints across Microsoft 365 to make our employees more productive by bringing the knowledge across Microsoft 365 productivity tools. Our ongoing efforts to promote crowdsourcing culture at Microsoft will continue to grow our community of topic curators and propel the knowledge culture forward at Microsoft. We’re identifying search session results, especially failed searches, to generate new topics where information isn’t already available in Viva Topics.

We understand that content from authoritative sources, such as sites curated and published by internal groups like human resources, legal, and facilities, need to coexist with AI generated and crowdsourced content. We are exploring ways to improve curation and management experiences of authoritative content.

Across all these efforts, we’re measuring satisfaction and success to determine where we’re succeeding—and failing—to engage our employees in a knowledge sharing culture at Microsoft. As we continue, we know that Viva Topics will be a critical factor in growing knowledge sharing at Microsoft where every employee feels valued for their contribution to the larger culture of learning and growth that defines Microsoft.