Topic cards are now available in OWA for Microsoft Viva Topics.
Microsoft announced in April that OWA now supports Viva Topics. What does this mean? Well, it allows users with a Microsoft Topics (or Viva Suite) license to now add topic cards to their messages and the recipients will then see these topics cards, if they are licensed.
Support for topic cards in Teams chat is just around the corner and personally I think this is one we are all waiting for. Being able to use topic cards in your day-to-day applications will really increase the value of Microsoft Viva Topics. Will this be enough to entice more organisaitons to adopt this way of knowledge management into their everyday workflow?
To start doing this it’s as simple as adding a #hashtag followed by the topic name as you can see from the below screenshot
For recipients without the correct licensing applied they will not see topics cards and the tagged topic will simply add a hyperlink to the Viva Topic SharePoint site that’s created for each topic so they will still get some of the functionality however it will take them out of their current application and disrupt their flow of work. As I said I’m most excited about it becoming available in Teams with this roadmap item which should be GA in May 2022. Then we just need to have the Viva Topics API opened up so we can start using automation with topic cards in Microsoft Teams.