Blog posts

In early 2021 Microsoft launched Microsoft Viva as an employee experience platform designed specifically to help businesses manage the changes brought about by hybrid working.  

For many people, Microsoft Viva’s appearance in our daily working lives has become quite familiar, but there are still the finer points of the full Microsoft Viva offering that could do with a closer look. In this blog, I’m focusing on Viva Topics and I chatted to ClearPeople Director & Co-Founder Gabriel Karawani to provide an overview – and a review – of Viva Topics. 

In this blog:
How Microsoft Viva Topics is related to Microsoft Viva 
Microsoft Viva Topics explained 
How does Microsoft Viva Topics compare to other knowledge tools?  
Viva Topics reviewed 
How do Atlas and Microsoft Viva Topics work together? 
Microsoft Viva Topics pros and cons 
Summary: what Microsoft Viva Topics does
How can I set up or trial Microsoft Viva Topics? 
Microsoft Viva Topics: the roadmap 
Microsoft Viva Topics pricing

A knowledge base is a mine of useful information for your customers, but it can also be useful for your own team members? Here’s a way to enable your internal customers to self-serve and complete the tasks they need to, using Microsoft technology and software you already have.

• What is a knowledge base?
• Key benefits of having a knowledge base
• How do I build a knowledge base?
• Common knowledge base tools & software
• Microsoft SharePoint as a knowledge base
• How do I build an internal knowledge base
• Knowledge base best practices

What is a knowledge base?

A knowledge base is a library of information about your company, product or service and the questions or issues people might ask about it. A knowledge base allows people to find answers and solve problems on their own so it's an essential part of good customer service, whether your customers are members of the public or internal customers – i.e.; your colleagues.

The best knowledge bases typically include frequently asked questions (FAQs), a user forum, articles, whitepapers, how-to articles, video tutorials, case studies and glossaries.

A knowledge base allows you to create self-service content around recurring questions, issues and themes. It’s important to note that the point of a knowledge base is to help users complete a task or solve a problem. The knowledge in your knowledge base needs to be actionable.

An organisation with a call-center or a team of customer service representatives will undoubtedly use a knowledge base to ensure that each customer receives the same information and as an easily navigable database for a wide range of queries. The use case for a knowledge base within a company or B2B environment is perhaps less obvious, but extremely beneficial – and the focus of this blog.

Digitizing case law documentation is one thing, but can you actually find anything in those millions of bytes of data? Here’s how custom metadata in Atlas saves time and quite possibly the legal professional’s sanity. 
 
Case Law – when previous legal cases constitute a binding precedent where the rationale, judgements, legal principles and interpretations of previous cases are documented so they can be applied to new cases – ensures the same practice and application of the law over time. A famous example from the United States is Roe v Wade, but each political jurisdiction, whether local, regional, or national will have hundreds, if not thousands, of cases lawyers are able to review.  

With remote working or work from home practices growing, filing cabinets are hardly fit for purpose when it comes to SharePoint document management. So how do legal firms create a SharePoint document management system where previous case law can be collated, stored, and easily accessed online?

Uploading digitized case law documentation is one thing, but without a powerful search and easy-to-use filtering configuration, that particular case you so urgently need becomes the proverbial ‘needle in a haystack’. An intuitive, user-friendly experience here could be essential to a lawyer finding the right case law document … and winning their case. 

Preventing corporate memory loss in your business will contribute enormously to your people feeling like they’re part of a team and knowing what’s expected of them. In the ‘age of the employee’ it’s the secret ingredient to company success.  

MS Viva Learning is available as an app within Teams. Organisations and their users can access Viva Learning's features either through a 'seeded' or 'premium' license.

Microsoft Viva Topics is the name announced on Feb 4th 2021 as the official name for what was until now known as Project Cortex Topics, Topic Experience or Intelligent Topics. Watch a quick video on how a Viva Topics page is created.

Collective intelligence is the process by which a large group of individuals gather and share their knowledge, data and skills for the purpose of solving societal issues.

In 2020, ClearPeople was announced as one of just 17 Microsoft global launch partners and recognised with Preferred Partner status for Project Cortex (now called Microsoft Viva Topics), Microsoft’s initiative to make AI capabilities available within Microsoft 365.

Here we go again… lockdown mk2.

So, like everyone else, you’ve been forced into adopting Teams, Zoom or some other collaboration platform to enable your business to survive and thrive in 2020 and beyond.