M365 Changelog: (Updated) Exclude sites and files from topic discovery based on applied sensitivity labels

MC334268 – Updated May 03, 2022: Microsoft has updated the rollout timeline below. Thank you for your patience.

This release will enable you to select sensitivity labels that exclude SharePoint sites and files from topic discovery. Once this new configuration is saved, sites and files with the selected labels will no longer be included as part of the discovered list of files for an AI-suggested topic. Any description or alternate names extracted from those files will also be removed from the AI-suggested topic.

Note: If you are not using Microsoft Viva Topics and sensitivity labels, you can safely disregard this message.

This message is associated with Microsoft 365 Roadmap ID 82047 and 82048.

When this will happen:

Microsoft will begin rolling out in mid-May (previously late April) and expects to complete by late May (previously mid-May).

How this will affect your organization:

Once this setting is applied, topics that once contained files with selected labels will now be excluded.

• If there is a suggested topic that contained only files with the selected label, you may see that this topic no longer appears. 

What you need to do to prepare:

You should be prepared to see changes in the count of suggested topics.