In short
With Microsoft officially retiring Viva Topics on February 22, 2025, internal communication leaders must shift from automated AI knowledge cards to governed SharePoint topic pages. Here is how to track content discovery, measure page engagement, and maintain cross-channel visibility.
Key takeaways
- Viva Topics will officially retire on February 22, 2025, leaving organizations to rely on SharePoint and Microsoft Copilot for knowledge.
- Published topic pages will convert to standard SharePoint pages, requiring manual maintenance and active, data-driven governance.
- Knowledge workers lose up to 3.1 weeks per year to poor digital experience and findability issues, making page tracking critical.
- Relying on custom Power BI builds can cause reporting gaps, as Microsoft Graph API metrics frequently mismatch native SharePoint data.
Understand the retirement of Viva Topics and the transition to SharePoint
Microsoft officially retired Viva Topics on February 22, 2025, marking a significant shift in how organizations manage and surface corporate knowledge[1]. As an internal communications leader, this retirement directly impacts how your employees discover critical resources and connect with relevant subject matter experts. The automated knowledge cards that once appeared seamlessly across SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, Outlook, and Microsoft Search are no longer active. Instead, the focus of corporate knowledge curation moves entirely toward manual governance, requiring a structured approach to your intranet architecture.
| Feature | Under Viva Topics | Post-Retirement SharePoint |
|---|---|---|
| AI-Generated Pages | Created automatically by algorithms to aggregate organizational information | Permanently unavailable: only user-published pages are converted |
| Knowledge Cards | Hover cards displayed automatically across SharePoint, Teams, and Outlook | Retired: automatic hover cards and topic pill visual cues are gone |
| Governance Dashboard | Managed via dedicated Viva Topics knowledge and analytics center | Discontinued: topics must be tracked via standard SharePoint reporting |
| Viva Engage Integration | Hover cards and direct links to knowledge pages built into feeds | Returned to a simplified public topics model without card previews |
Manage the shift to manual SharePoint governance
The transition turns your published topic pages into standard SharePoint pages, while deleting any pages generated solely by AI that were never published by users[1]. Consequently, the responsibility of organizing information and keeping it discoverable falls back on you. Without automated hover cards, employees must rely on Microsoft Search or direct links, turning manual search-engine optimization on SharePoint into an absolute necessity. To evaluate whether your knowledge pages are actually reaching your staff, you need robust reporting. However, relying on standard SharePoint reporting presents major challenges, as many communicators struggle with well-known SharePoint analytics limits such as fixed six-month data retention and the lack of deep audience segmentation.
At Tryane, we understand that sending information into a black box is frustrating. To overcome the restrictions of SharePoint native analytics and the simplified metrics of Viva Engage, we developed Analytics for SharePoint and Analytics for Viva Engage. These solutions are seamlessly integrated into our all-in-one cross-channel analytics platform, Communication Insights. While some organizations attempt to build custom dashboards, Microsoft Graph reporting APIs are not always reliable, which often causes IC teams to see different KPI values in Power BI than in native SharePoint. Tryane bypasses these reliability issues by providing its own dedicated dashboards with executive-ready templates, while keeping Power BI integration on our future roadmap. Our platform is SOC 2 Type 2 certified and GDPR compliant by design, EU-hosted by default with US data residency available on demand, and deploys in a couple of hours with SSO via Azure AD or Entra ID. It gives you unlimited data history and powerful audience segmentation via Active Directory or HR file imports.
- Track readership reach by department or location to see which groups are missing out on key corporate knowledge.
- Monitor active read time and scroll depth on your standard SharePoint topic pages to ensure employees are consuming the content rather than just clicking on it.
- Analyze search-term volume and search success rates on your intranet to find out what knowledge gaps still exist after the retirement of Viva Topics.
- Evaluate cross-channel engagement trends to see if employees are discussing these converted pages within your enterprise social networks.
Measure the impact of knowledge cards on employee content discovery
When Microsoft Viva Topics originally launched, it promised to turn information overload into organized knowledge. Contextual knowledge cards, which appeared as on-page highlights or hover-cards across SharePoint pages and Microsoft Teams, acted as an essential bridge for employee content discovery. They automatically connected employees with definitions, relevant documents, projects, and internal subject-matter experts directly in their workflow. However, following Microsoft’s retirement of Viva Topics on February 22, 2025[2], organizations can no longer rely on these automated knowledge surfaces to spark discovery, meaning internal communications leaders must find new ways to prevent critical information from slipping into silos.
Track the discovery drop post-retirement
The removal of these automated hover-cards changes how employees interact with your intranet. When knowledge is no longer served passively, employees are forced to take an active role: they must either search for terms explicitly or rely on structured page navigation. If you depend purely on default tools, identifying how this shift affects your workforce is incredibly difficult due to major SharePoint analytics limits. To successfully navigate this transition, you need to monitor the discovery drop by tracking specific metrics like click-through rates on manual inline links, changes in page views, and the immediate spikes in search usage on your standard SharePoint pages. Without these insights, your team remains blind to whether employees are finding necessary company updates or simply giving up their search.
| Discovery Pathway | With Viva Topics | Post-Retirement Alternatives | Key Analytics Focus |
|---|---|---|---|
| In-context hover | Highlight links on SharePoint pages surfaced cards automatically | Manual wiki links or inline definitions in text | Click-through rate on manual inline links |
| Search query discovery | Search results card highlighted curated resources | Standard search results without curation cards | Search failure rates and top search queries |
| Expert connection | Cards displayed experts linked to the topic | Manual lookups or directory navigation | Profile visits and directory search terms |
Find and fix knowledge gaps in your intranet
To prevent your intranet from turning into a series of isolated data silos, you must proactively identify and bridge knowledge gaps. When you analyze search behavior, look closely at search failure rates, which represent the percentage of queries that return zero results. A sudden spike in search failures for previously mapped topics indicates that employees are struggling to locate resources. By identifying the exact keywords they search for, you can adapt your content strategy and build target landing pages or FAQ articles. Tracking these navigation paths helps you verify whether employees are finding relevant information. Ultimately, if you want to measure employee engagement and keep discovery frictionless, you must transition from basic view counts to deep, behavioral search analytics.
This is where our platform, Communication Insights, can support your team. As an all-in-one cross-channel analytics platform, Communication Insights gives you a single, unified view across SharePoint, Viva Engage, Microsoft Teams, and your internal newsletters, making it easy to track employee behavior across your entire digital workplace. We at Tryane focus on providing a cross-channel SaaS platform that aggregates communications data across multiple M365 channels to give you a unified view of your audience’s digital journey. Our platform is built for the enterprise, meaning it is SOC 2 Type 2 certified, GDPR compliant by design, and EU-hosted by default with US data residency on demand. Additionally, it deploys in a couple of hours with SSO via Azure AD or Entra ID and direct channel connections. With Tryane’s executive-ready dashboards, you can monitor search success and navigation trends, allowing you to stop sending critical messages into a black box and start making data-driven decisions.
Track the right metrics on your transitioned SharePoint topic pages
Since Microsoft retired Viva Topics in February 2025, organizations are transitioning their knowledge bases directly onto modern SharePoint pages[1]. This shift forces internal communications leaders to reconsider how they measure the discovery of critical resources. When you move knowledge cards and topics into the standard intranet flow, relying on high-level numbers like page views is no longer sufficient to show real employee engagement. To prove strategic value, you must understand whether your employees are genuinely reading the pages they visit.
Move past basic page views
Simple page hits fail to tell you if an employee actually digested a topic page or just closed the tab immediately. In fact, many digital workplace managers find that SharePoint native analytics caps history at 6 months. This restriction makes it impossible to perform year-on-year comparisons of content performance. Instead of focusing on raw, aggregated clicks, we recommend tracking metrics that reflect deep reading behavior, such as scroll depth and active on-screen time. This gives you concrete evidence of which topics capture attention and which ones are abandoned instantly.
Monitor active reading time and scroll depth
| Metric | SharePoint Native Ability | Advanced Analytics Ability |
|---|---|---|
| Page Views | Tracks overall hits without context on employee reading duration | Differentiates quick bounces from real reading time |
| Scroll Depth | Provides no details on how far down the page employees read | Tracks exact scroll milestones to see where readers lose interest |
| Historical Data | Caps history at 6 months, preventing seasonal comparisons | Provides unlimited historical data to track trends year-over-year |
| Audience Segmentation | No native option to filter page engagement by department | Enables division-by-division analysis of who reads topic pages |
Segment page engagement by audience
To make your internal communication more efficient, you must see which specific departments or regions are engaging with your topic pages. Native tools treat your entire organization as one single, undifferentiated group, leaving you in the dark about whether a critical safety update actually reached frontline workers or software engineers. With Analytics for SharePoint, you can segment page engagement by department, country, or custom metadata using an Active Directory import. Connecting your people data to SharePoint engagement metrics is how you transition from sending messages into a black box to identifying exactly who reads your updates. To help you choose the best measurement approach, we provide a detailed SharePoint analytics comparison that highlights how to close these native gaps.
Furthermore, many teams try to overcome native reporting gaps by building custom Power BI dashboards. While Power BI integration is on our product roadmap, we advise caution: the Microsoft Graph reporting API is not always reliable, occasionally displaying odd KPI values or missing whole days of data, as explained in our guide to SharePoint Power BI dashboards. Because of these discrepancies, communication teams running Power BI frequently see different KPI values in their custom reports than in native SharePoint on the same data. By using Tryane, you avoid these data inconsistencies and access executive-ready dashboards in a secure, SOC 2 Type 2 certified environment that complies with GDPR requirements by design and deploys in just a couple of hours.
Integrate topic analytics with your cross-channel measurement strategy
On February 22, 2025, Microsoft Viva Topics will officially retire, signaling a major shift in how organizations manage internal knowledge discovery[2]. When Viva Topics was active, knowledge cards surfaced definitions directly in the flow of work across SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, and Outlook. With its retirement, your strategy for tracking content discovery must evolve. Organizations are now transitioning to decentralized knowledge management using SharePoint pages, Microsoft Search, and Viva Engage public topics. However, if you measure these knowledge pages and social topics in a silo, you miss the bigger picture. True employee engagement does not happen on a single page: it spans your entire digital workplace. To understand how information spreads, you must tie your intranet metrics directly to social discussions, chat channels, and newsletters.
Connect intranet pages with Teams, social channels, and newsletters
An effective internal communications campaign uses multiple touchpoints to drive employees to key knowledge assets. For instance, when you publish an update on a critical company topic, you might announce it in an email newsletter, pin a post in Microsoft Teams, and spark a debate on Viva Engage. If you only look at basic page views on the destination page, you will fail to understand what actually drove that traffic. Relying solely on SharePoint native analytics prevents you from seeing the referral paths and cross-channel journeys of your employees. To fix this, you need to connect your intranet metrics with newsletter click rates, Teams channel interactions, and social engagement. By tracking these connections, you can see exactly which channel is most effective at pulling your workforce out of their daily routine and into your central knowledge hubs.
Track Viva Engage public topics as the conversational hub
While SharePoint acts as your formal repository of knowledge, Viva Engage provides the social fabric where employees ask questions, share feedback, and build communities around specific topics. Since Viva Topics has been retired, tracking Viva Engage public topics has become even more vital to understand what your employees care about. However, the limits of Viva Engage native dashboards make it difficult to perform long-term trends analysis or cross-channel correlation. To understand how social conversations influence knowledge adoption, you must track topic mentions, sentiment, and active contributors. With Viva Engage native analytics, you cannot easily align these social signals with your formal communication campaigns. Using a specialized solution like Analytics for Viva Engage allows you to monitor how social topics bubble up, how community engagement correlates with intranet reads, and how peer-to-peer conversations drive content discovery.
Build a single pane of glass with Communication Insights
To successfully transition from the retired Viva Topics environment, you must stop relying on disjointed dashboards. Many organizations attempt to solve this by building custom dashboards using Power BI. However, the Microsoft Graph reporting API is not always reliable, occasionally displaying odd KPI values or missing days of data. In fact, internal communication teams running Power BI over SharePoint frequently see different KPI values in Power BI than in native SharePoint on the same data. Rather than wasting time troubleshooting these discrepancies, you can build a single pane of glass with our all-in-one platform, Communication Insights. By combining Analytics for SharePoint and Analytics for Viva Engage, Communication Insights breaks down your data silos and aggregates your communication channels into one central dashboard. It deploys in a couple of hours with SSO via Azure AD, is SOC 2 Type 2 certified, and GDPR compliant by design. Our platform is EU-hosted by default, with US data residency available on demand. This cross-channel view empowers you to optimize your digital workplace and make data-driven decisions.
Navigate the limitations of native Microsoft 365 and Power BI reporting
When you manage internal communications across a large digital workplace, tracking how employees discover and engage with knowledge is critical. Many leaders assume that building custom dashboards on top of Microsoft 365 is the most logical route. It seems straightforward to pull data from SharePoint and Viva Engage to show how Viva Topics knowledge cards or topic pages are driving content discovery. However, building custom Power BI reports over these systems reveals a hard truth: the Microsoft Graph reporting API is not always reliable. Internal communications teams frequently encounter occasional odd KPI values and occasional days of missing data. This leads to a common frustration where your custom reports show entirely different KPI values than the SharePoint native analytics interface on the exact same dataset.
The operational reality of Microsoft Graph API limitations
The core of the issue lies in how Microsoft packages and delivers its reporting data. The Microsoft Graph reports API has built-in data latency, often lagging by 24 to 48 hours before activity is fully consolidated[3]. For communications professionals who need to measure real-time campaign performance or the immediate impact of a new topic page launch, this delay makes agile decision-making impossible. Furthermore, unexpected API sync dropouts mean that days of data can simply go missing without warning. This makes it incredibly difficult to present reliable long-term engagement trends to executive leadership, especially when compared to the fixed 180-day retention cap found in native Viva Engage analytics and SharePoint’s built-in analytics.
- Inconsistent KPI metrics: Running custom Power BI reports over SharePoint frequently results in different numbers for page views and unique viewers than what is shown on the native page itself.
- API data dropouts: Occasional days of missing data from the Microsoft Graph reporting API skew weekly and monthly engagement averages.
- Severe reporting latency: Data updates can lag by up to 48 hours, preventing real-time evaluation of urgent corporate communications.
- Strict history limitations: Native Microsoft reporting platforms cap your data history at 6 months, which prevents year-over-year progress comparisons.
Why custom BI builds drain valuable IT resources
Attempting to solve these API inconsistencies internally creates a massive technical burden. Your IT department must dedicate specialized developers to write custom queries, build secure data warehouses to bypass the 6-month native storage cap, and continuously maintain the integration. Every time Microsoft updates its Graph API schema or changes the reporting endpoints, your custom dashboard breaks. Instead of focusing on communication strategy and audience engagement, internal communications teams find themselves stuck in endless feedback loops with IT, waiting for dashboard fixes that fail to deliver a consistent, unified view of employee activity.
| Measurement Capability | Custom Power BI Build | Communication Insights |
|---|---|---|
| Cross-Channel Single View | Requires manual API consolidation and custom pipeline building for each separate channel. | Out-of-the-box centralized dashboard across SharePoint, Viva Engage, Teams, and newsletters. |
| Data Retention History | Requires setting up and paying for custom external storage to save data past 6 months. | Unlimited historical data retention, allowing for seamless year-over-year trend analysis. |
| Implementation and Setup | Takes months of developer effort to build, test, and troubleshoot connections. | Deploys in a couple of hours with SSO via Azure AD or Entra ID and channel connections. |
| Data Accuracy and Sync | Prone to Graph API reporting bugs, data latency, and mismatched KPI values. | Enterprise-grade reliability with pre-built data cleaning and verified metrics. |
We at Tryane believe that communication leaders should spend their time crafting stories and shaping culture, not troubleshooting API integrations. While a direct Power BI integration is on our product roadmap to provide even greater custom flexibility, our Communication Insights platform provides its own fully featured dashboards with executive-ready templates today. It is SOC 2 Type 2 certified and GDPR compliant by design, hosted in the EU by default with data residency in the United States available on demand. With a deployment time of just a couple of hours using secure SSO via Azure AD or Entra ID, you can instantly access a single cross-channel view. This allows you to combine your SharePoint, Viva Engage, Microsoft Teams, and newsletter metrics in one place, complete with advanced audience segmentation via Active Directory or HR file imports, without the technical headaches of custom builds.
Streamline your communication analytics with Tryane
With Microsoft officially retiring Viva Topics on February 22, 2025[4], internal communications leaders have a unique opportunity to evaluate how knowledge surfaces and content discovery fit into their broader measurement strategy. Our team product Communication Insights serves as an all-in-one cross-channel analytics platform, connecting all internal communication channels including SharePoint intranet, Viva Connections, and Viva Engage. Whether you are tracking topic pages with Analytics for SharePoint or monitoring conversations with Analytics for Viva Engage, Tryane helps you transition seamlessly post-Viva Topics. While Microsoft native analytics native dashboards provide basic telemetry, they leave communications leaders with siloed views and restricted timelines.
Deploy rapidly with enterprise-grade security and flexible hosting
Transitioning to a new measurement platform can feel daunting, but we designed our onboarding to be frictionless. Tryane deploys in a couple of hours, utilizing single sign-on (SSO) via Azure AD or Entra ID plus a secure channel connection. Your IT teams can rest easy knowing that Tryane is SOC 2 Type 2 certified and GDPR / RGPD compliant by design. We host data in the European Union by default, with secure data residency in the United States available on demand to align perfectly with your internal security standards.
Break the limitations of custom builds and native silos
Many communication teams attempt to build custom SharePoint Analytics with Power BI reports using Microsoft Graph APIs. However, this is often highly unreliable because the Microsoft Graph reporting API is known for occasional odd KPI values and occasional days of missing data. This leads to frustrating inconsistencies where internal communications teams see different KPI values in Power BI than in native SharePoint on the exact same data. While direct Power BI integration is on our roadmap, Tryane bypasses these headaches today by providing our own dedicated dashboards with executive-ready templates, simplifying your executive reporting workflows.
| Analytics Capability | Microsoft Native Tools | Tryane Communication Insights |
|---|---|---|
| Data History Limits | Capped at a strict 6 months | Unlimited engagement history |
| Cross-Channel Unified View | Siloed per application (SharePoint, Teams, Engage) | Single cross-channel view in one centralized place |
| Audience Segmentation | Highly restricted and complex to run | Segment audiences via Active Directory or direct HR file imports |
| Setup and Deployment | Weeks of custom API configuration and maintenance | Frictionless setup in a couple of hours via secure SSO |
By bringing all these elements together, you can finally move away from disjointed spreadsheets and make data-driven decisions that elevate your digital workplace. If you are comparing your options, exploring internal communication analytics tools will help you select a platform that secures your communication history, breaks down information silos, and highlights the real value of your internal campaigns.
Frequently asked questions
When is Viva Topics being retired by Microsoft?
Microsoft is officially retiring Viva Topics on February 22, 2025. After this date, users will no longer see AI-generated inline highlights, hover cards, or automated topic suggestions in apps like Outlook or SharePoint. Any manual topics inserted by users will still link to the published SharePoint pages, but the automatic AI experiences will stop.
What will happen to my published Viva Topics pages after retirement?
After February 22, 2025, published topic pages will be converted into standard SharePoint pages. They will remain in the Site Pages library of your Topic Center and can be edited and updated manually by administrators or authors. Confirmed or suggested topics that were not published will disappear.
How does the retirement of Viva Topics affect content discovery?
Without the automatic hover cards and inline highlights, content discovery will rely heavily on Microsoft Search and SharePoint navigation. Because of this, monitoring employee search patterns and page engagement becomes essential to avoid the loss of key company knowledge, which already contributes to knowledge workers losing 3.1 weeks of productivity annually.
Can I still track topics and conversations in Viva Engage?
Yes, Viva Engage will return to a simplified public topics model. Public topics and topic pills will continue to exist in Engage threads, linking users to pages with all conversations tagged with that topic. However, you will no longer see AI-suggested Viva Topics or hover cards on these pills.
Why do my Power BI reports show different metrics than SharePoint native analytics?
This discrepancy occurs because the Microsoft Graph API can be unreliable, occasionally delivering odd KPI values or missing days of data. IC teams using Power BI over SharePoint frequently see different metrics than those displayed on native SharePoint pages, making custom reporting difficult to maintain.
How does Tryane help with SharePoint intranet and Viva Engage analytics?
Tryane provides Communication Insights, a secure cross-channel platform that integrates with SharePoint, Viva Engage, Teams, and newsletters. It bypasses custom Power BI build issues, deploying in hours with SOC 2 Type 2 security and offering unlimited history compared to the native M365 six-month cap.
Sources
Further reading
• Measuring cross-channel internal communications
• Audience segmentation for internal communications
• The five internal communication KPIs that show your IC is working
• Measuring frontline worker communications