If I were to classify the issues that we hear often with two aspects of content services, then the first one would be about content discovery and the second is content management.

People waste hours every week just trying to find the right information. Information is often found in disparate locations and it is difficult for users to know which tool to use to search the information they are looking for. The result of this is that users often do not feel confident that the results that they get are the single source of truth. This often leads to users having a constant need for context switching between different tools & applications to find the information that they need.

The second aspect of content services is content management. In many organizations a lot of time is still spent on manually managing, and maintaining metadata and taxonomies, to organize and process information. Users have little or no knowledge of how a piece of information should be classified and tagged. Information silos are difficult to secure and ensure compliance on, but also costly and often resource-intensive to maintain. This of course adds to the cost of productivity loss driven by poor search experiences and user dissatisfaction. Data entry is often perceived & in some ways really is labour intensive.

We hear it often from customers that users don’t want to spend time filling up metadata each time they upload a document. Imagine having to read thousands of documents to figure out the metadata. It is both time-consuming and error-prone. While a part of the problem can be managed by supplying default metadata values, not all metadata can get default values, especially when the metadata value is going to be different for each document and is really based on certain values present in the document itself.

All these challenges result in poor compliance and governance of information.

With the introduction of AI / ML based capabilities in content services, you can remove the dependency on end users to discover & classify information and design a holistic information governance solution that enriches user experience.

Let’s look in detail on how these services which are a part of project cortex come together to resolve both these challenges that I have just described.

Microsoft has recently launched a new offering, Microsoft Viva, an employee experience platform that brings together four related services that help employees stay highly productive

Viva Connections – Personalized dashboard of news, conversations, tasks etc.,

Viva Insights – Personalized and actionable insights into the ways of working for employees and teams.

Viva Learning – Aggregation of all learning resources in one place.

Viva Topics – AI based content discovery services.

For the content discovery issues, Microsoft Viva Topics under its “Project Cortex” applies AI to automatically organize related resources and relevant people to create a topic page to curate knowledge about that topic.

Viva Topics will highlight the topics in pages automatically where it finds a reference about it. User will also have the option to reference these topics manually. Readers will then be able to view a short topic card that provides a summary of topic. They will also be able to click a link in the card which will take them to a full blown page about the topic in topic center.

Let’s move our focus to the second problem described above, content management. As a part of the Project Cortex, SharePoint Syntex is used to solve all our content services issues like tagging content automatically while ensuring information security and compliance. SharePoint Syntex uses advanced AI and machine teaching to enable AI models to think like humans while reading documents, automate content processing, and transform content into knowledge.

Both these services from Project Cortex, Microsoft Viva Topics & SharePoint Syntex leverage Microsoft Graph, Artificial Intelligence & SharePoint.

When companies buy software as a service, the only lasting asset to manage is the information. Effective customer engagement, business operations, and compliance all rely on one thing: effective information management. Organizations use information to add value, minimize risks, reduce costs, and allow the business to identify new opportunities. Infotechtion is a Microsoft Gold partner and a charter member in the Microsoft Content Services program. We are a consulting firm specializing in content services to improve information discovery, classification, and governance. Infotechtion combines Microsoft’s leading product innovations across Content Services, Compliance and Information Protection into a single framework to deliver value out of information.

Please contact us to discuss how to best manage information in M365.