After Viva Topics
Viva Topics is gone. Here is what it left behind, and what can take its place.
Microsoft retired Viva Topics on 22 February 2025 and named no direct successor. This page covers what survived in your tenant, what Microsoft offers instead, and the gap that remains: the pages nobody writes. SecondBrain 365 is an AI agent with its own company email inside your Microsoft 365 that writes them from email, meetings and chats.
What is left in your tenant
If your company used Viva Topics, this is what you will find today. Everything here comes from Microsoft's own retirement notes.
- Still thereTopic pages people had publishedThey are ordinary SharePoint pages now. You can still edit them — but nothing updates them any more.
- Still thereLinks typed in by handThey still point to the published page. Permissions have not changed either.
- ChangedThe topic centerIt is a regular SharePoint site. The topic analytics are gone.
- GoneTopics the AI suggested and nobody touchedRemoved. Only what a person had published survived.
- GoneHighlights and topic cardsThe topic highlights and hover cards in SharePoint pages, Microsoft Search, Outlook and Teams — the part people actually saw — are gone.
- GoneThe Graph connector creditsThe ones that came with Viva Topics expired in February 2025.
Sources: Microsoft, Changes coming to Viva Topics and the Topics changes FAQ.
What survived is the part people had curated by hand. What went away is the part that kept it alive: nothing tells you any more when one of those pages stops being true.
What Microsoft offers instead
Microsoft's advice is to publish and organise knowledge in SharePoint, and find it with Microsoft Search and Copilot. The closest thing to a new tool is Copilot in SharePoint — still in preview, and not presented as Viva Topics' successor.
Copilot in SharePoint — first announced as the Knowledge Agent — tags content, points out stale pages and broken links, and writes a page when you ask for one. It needs a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence. If you have those licences, it is worth a look.
Notice what it has in common with Viva Topics: both work on what is already in SharePoint. That is the gap. Most of what a team knows was said in a meeting or written in an email, and never became a page at all — which leaves the question of who writes a SharePoint knowledge base, and from what.
Viva Topics
Copilot in SharePoint- SecondBrain 365
- Works from
- What was already in your SharePoint sites
- What is already in your SharePoint sites
- Email, meetings, chats and documents — what never reached SharePoint
- Writes pages
- AI compiled topic pages; knowledge managers curated them
- When you ask it to, from a prompt
- As the work happens, following rules you write in plain language
- Keeps things tidy
- Highlighted topics across Microsoft 365
- Tags content, flags stale pages, broken links and gaps
- Links pages to each other and highlights people, clients and acronyms
- Notices when two sources disagree
- No
- Not something Microsoft describes
- Yes — and asks the team which version holds
- Status
- Retired on 22 February 2025
- Preview, with a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence
- Available — demo on request
The part neither of them does
The page survived. The facts on it didn't.
2024 — A knowledge manager curates the Contoso topic page: who owns the account, the contacts, the open projects.
2025 — Viva Topics is retired. The page stays, as an ordinary SharePoint page. Nothing updates it any more.
Today — The account changes hands in an email. The page still names the old owner, and anyone who finds it will believe it.
This only works if the agent has seen both: you shared the old page with it, and it was in copy on the email.
Sara Galli · Nov 2024 · Topic page: Contoso
Account owner: Laura Conti, EMEA sales.
Laura Conti · 8 Sep · Email to Contoso
From next month Paolo Ferri will be your contact.
SecondBrain 365Agent
Inconsistency on the Contoso account
The Contoso page says the account owner is Laura Conti. Today's email hands it to Paolo Ferri. Which one holds?
Account owner:Laura Conti
Until someone decides, the page keeps Laura Conti and the alert stays open.
A page curated in 2024 and an email sent this week. The agent asks the team which one holds — it doesn't decide.
Starting from what Viva Topics left
There is nothing to migrate, because there is nothing to move. The pages are SharePoint pages, and SharePoint is where the agent works.
- Keep the pages where they are
- Nothing is exported, copied or moved. Your permissions, retention and compliance rules keep applying, because it is all still in your tenant.
- Share the ones worth keeping
- The agent reads what it is given, like any other document. The old pages become a starting point for the knowledge base, and the thing it checks new information against.
- Put it in copy from now on
- Copy the agent on email, invite it to meetings, add it to a Teams group. What your team says from that day on turns into pages — linked to each other, with people, clients and acronyms highlighted. That is the part Viva Topics did, now fed by the conversations it never saw. The full mechanism is on how it works.
FAQ
Questions from Viva Topics admins
On 22 February 2025. Microsoft's stated reason is that it is focusing its knowledge management work on Microsoft Copilot. Both retirement pages are still online on Microsoft Learn: Changes coming to Viva Topics and the Topics changes FAQ.
The ones a person had published are still in the topic center — which is now a regular SharePoint site — as ordinary pages in its Site Pages library. You can open, edit and share them like any other page. Topics the AI had suggested and nobody had touched were removed.
Not a like-for-like one. The guidance is to publish and organise knowledge in SharePoint and to find it with Microsoft Search and Copilot. Copilot in SharePoint, currently in preview and requiring a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence, is the newest tool in that direction, but Microsoft does not describe it as Viva Topics' successor.
There is no import, because nothing needs to move: your topic pages are already SharePoint pages. You share the ones you want to keep with the agent, and it reads them like any other document. It will not bring back the topics that Microsoft removed — those are gone from your tenant.
Copilot answers from what is already written down. SecondBrain 365 is what gets it written down: it turns email, meetings and chats into SharePoint pages, keeps them consistent and tells the team when two sources disagree. The pages it writes are ordinary SharePoint content, so Copilot can answer from them too.
No. SecondBrain 365 is made by Dev4Side, a Microsoft Solutions Partner. It runs inside your own Microsoft 365 tenant — the agent is a Microsoft 365 identity and the knowledge base is a SharePoint site — so the content never leaves it.