Review the roles available in Viva Topics
Viva Topics uses Microsoft AI technology, Microsoft 365, Microsoft Graph*, Search, and other components and services to bring knowledge to your users in Microsoft 365, starting with SharePoint modern pages and Microsoft Search. Viva Topics can harness collective knowledge and empower people and teams to learn, upskill, and innovate faster through crowdsourcing of content.
There are four Viva Topics roles in your organization:
- Topic viewer
- Topic contributor
- Knowledge manager
- Knowledge admin
Viva Topics uses the security and compliance of Microsoft 365 for content. You can apply restrictions on the scope and availability of Viva Topics' topic information for your different roles. Users have access to only those topics to which they've been granted access.
Topic viewer
All users in your organization can be Topic viewers to view topics highlighted in their SharePoint modern site, Microsoft Search through SharePoint and Office.com and the Topic center. They can view more details about a topic on the topic page by hovering over when a topic is identified and view the topic card. Topic viewers can provide feedback on how useful a topic is to them.
For topic highlights and their topic pages to be visible to a topic viewer, the user must:
- Be assigned a Viva Topics license by their Microsoft 365 admin.
- Be allowed to have visibility to topics. The knowledge admin does this task in the Viva Topics settings page in the Microsoft 365 admin center.
Topic contributors
Topic contributors are users in your organization that not only have topic viewer permissions, but who also can edit an existing topic or create a new topic. They have an important role in manually "curating" the information in a topic page (both AI and manually provided) to ensure its quality.
Users who have topic contributor permissions will see an Edit button displayed on Topic pages, which allows them to make updates to and publish a topic.
A topic contributor can also create and publish a new topic through their topic center.
If your organization decides to allow all users to be contributors, this will help them feel empowered; they can contribute and author their knowledge to get the most value from Viva Topics. You can still limit certain topics for select groups even if settings are enabled for everyone globally in an organization.
To create and edit a topic for Topic contributors, the user must:
- Be assigned a Viva Topics license by their Microsoft 365 admin.
- Be assigned permissions to create and edit topics. The knowledge admin does this task in the Viva Topics settings page in the Microsoft 365 admin center.
Knowledge managers
Knowledge managers are users who manage topics in your organization. Topic management is done through the Manage Topics page in the topic center, and it's only visible to Knowledge managers.
People who have a good overall knowledge of your business can be good candidates for the knowledge manager role. They have the knowledge to know if topics are valid or not, and might know people related to those topics.
In the Manage Topics page, knowledge managers can do the following tasks:
- View AI-suggested topics.
- Review topics to confirm they're valid.
- Remove topics you don't want visible to your users.
- Additionally, a knowledge manager can edit existing topics or create new ones.
To manage topics, the knowledge managers must:
- Be assigned a Viva Topics license by their Microsoft 365 admin.
- Be allowed to have visibility to topics.
Topic contributors are users in your organization with topic viewer permissions and can edit an existing topic or create a new topic. They have an important role in manually "curating" the information in a topic page (both AI and manually provided) to ensure its quality.
Knowledge admin
Most solution architects and admins going through this learning path are Knowledge admins who can set up and configure Viva Topics in Microsoft 365. You can manage the Viva Topics settings after setting up has completed. The knowledge admin role requires you to be a Microsoft 365 global admin or SharePoint admin since setup and management are done in the Microsoft 365 admin center.
During setup, you can configure Viva Topics to:
- Select which SharePoint sites will be crawled for topics.
- Select which licensed users who can view topics (topic viewers).
- Select which topics will be excluded from being identified.
- Select which licensed users who can create and edit topics (topic contributors).
- Select which licensed users who can manage topics (knowledge managers).
- Name the Topic center.
Check out Setup overview for Graph connectors by Microsoft for more information on how to configure Graph content connectors*.
Knowledge managers need to be able to coordinate with all Viva Topics stakeholders in their organization to know how to configure it. For example, if a new project has sensitive information, the knowledge manager needs to inform the Knowledge admins to make sure the SharePoint site is not crawled for topics, or specific topic names need to be excluded.