Information overload is plaguing organizations of all sizes. Employees get lost in the jungle of available content, failing to find relevant results to their queries in the tangled thicket. The result? Loss of user adoption, engagement and most importantly, loss of trust.
Improving findability therefore becomes critical for any organization to tackle. But before you start, you need to do a reality check: what content do you have, how is it stored, how is it being used and who are the key users. Just as critical is to understand what you don’t have — yet.
For those in a Microsoft 365 environment, a systematic review of your content and information architecture may point to a gap in knowledge management. Viva Topics in Microsoft 365 can be a valuable tool to contribute to your organization’s knowledge management journey — provided it’s implemented, used and governed well.
Vendors offer a number of tools and options to prevent organizations from the critical failure of information overload, including:
- Auto-tagging and auto-classification.
- Machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI).
- Intelligent search.
- Knowledge graphs.
- Any combination of these.
Microsoft also competes in this market, which is why it invests so much into tools like SharePoint Syntex and Microsoft Viva. While both tools are both important, they serve different purposes:
- SharePoint Syntex uses AI and ML to automate content processing. The engine can be trained with Models and Entity Extractors to automatically label content by various keywords.
- Viva Topics, one of the four modules of Microsoft Viva, uses AI to extract topics from Microsoft 365 content and organize content around these topics, such as projects, products, processes and customers.
While organizations can use both tools to improve user satisfaction with content findability and usability, there are a couple of significant differences in how to implement these tools, too.
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