Yammer empowers every person in your company with an open space to connect, share and work out loud. With 70 percent annual growth in active groups, there’s greater momentum in Yammer than ever before. Yammer and SharePoint have always been natural complements, because together they deliver powerful connections and discoveries of people, content and information. Today, during the SharePoint Virtual Summit, we unveiled several new capabilities that make it easier to connect and engage through Yammer, whoever and wherever you are in the organization.
Spark conversations on your intranet by bringing Yammer and SharePoint together
Productive conversations can arise from anywhere you do your work. Last year, we enabled a more seamless document sharing capability across the Office 365 suite, including SharePoint, while collaborating in Yammer. You can now enrich your new SharePoint communication sites with a conversational layer by using the existing Yammer embed capability, triggering contextually relevant discussions and increasing the virality of your content.
Over the coming year, we will enhance the integration between Yammer and SharePoint by further improving the way SharePoint content appears in Yammer and making conversations from Yammer render more naturally within SharePoint on the web, desktop and mobile.
Share, view and discuss videos from Office 365 Video and Microsoft Stream
Companies are increasingly looking to use video as an effective way to reach employees and drive engagement across the organization. Now, you can share and play videos from Office 365 Video and Microsoft Stream directly within your Yammer conversations. Yammer already offers high quality, in-line viewing of video uploads or external websites like YouTube and Vimeo. These new integrations with Office 365 Video and Microsoft Stream make it seamless to embed internal videos in Yammer conversations and include security controls and infrastructure to keep valuable information secure.
To share a video from Office 365 Video or Microsoft Stream, copy the URL of the video and paste it into your Yammer conversation either as a reply or post. Yammer recognizes that the URL is a video, adds a playable thumbnail and allows people in the group to watch the video in the context of Yammer. They will also see the number of views and likes. Those who don’t have access to a specific video will be shown a message that the video is private or the user is not authorized.
Whether you are running a monthly Q&A session, sharing an executive message, broadcasting product updates or releasing a campaign, your employees can now share, watch and discuss videos right within Yammer and see tallies of views and likes.
Discuss relevant information from third-party apps and services using Connectors in Yammer
You can now use Office 365 Connectors to bring relevant content and updates from over 90 popular third-party apps and services directly into your current Yammer conversations. Connectors allow you to configure automatic posts to groups from a wide variety of tools, such as news and social media sources like Bing News and Twitter, developer tools including GitHub and PagerDuty, and project management tools like Trello and Asana.
Anyone in the group can add or delete a connector in Yammer, as long as the group is connected to the Office 365 Groups service. Simply click Add or Remove Apps under Group Actions (on the right of your group’s feed) and then follow the instructions on how to add the connector. To learn more about Connectors in Yammer, please visit the support article.
Connectors bring relevant third-party information right to your group. For example, you can set up a connector to deliver a weekly digest of social media posts or articles regarding a specific hashtag or search term. For groups managing the customer experience, you can set up a connector with your organization’s customer support system to escalate important tickets and drive group problem solving.
Keep group membership up to date by enabling dynamic groups in Yammer
Starting today, you can more easily manage groups in Yammer using dynamic group membership. Dynamic groups are Office 365 groups with membership defined as a rule, rather than as a static list of members, in Azure Active Directory. Whether you’re looking to group people based on role, geography, department or any other attribute, once created, these groups update automatically as people join, leave or move within your organization. So you can rest assured that you are including the right people from across the company to engage and collaborate in your Yammer conversations.
To create a group with dynamic membership in Yammer, an Office 365 administrator will need to sign in to the Azure portal, select the Yammer group to configure and set up the membership rules for that group.
Group members are added and removed based on membership rules set in the Azure portal.
This new capability works well for organizations where people often change teams, roles and geographies. For quickly growing companies seeking to bring new hires into group conversations relevant to them, dynamic membership helps to ensure these employees have all the right permissions to find applicable content and make meaningful connections from day one.
For companies looking for a reliable and secure way to engage with the frontline, a group with dynamic membership can be created based on a specific role or location. Group managers can then announce major updates, sending a notification to employees’ mobile apps. Conversely, workers on the frontline can share input and escalate issues knowing they’re connected to the right people back in the central office.
Connect wherever you do your best work with new Yammer apps for iPad, Windows and Mac
Staying connected requires tools that have the versatility to fit your work style. Whether you are highly mobile, moving from meeting to meeting, on the ground talking to customers or jumping from app to app on your desktop, your cross-company conversations should be accessible, highly engaging and easy to navigate. We are pleased to share new Yammer apps for iPad, Windows and Mac.
The Yammer iPad app has been re-launched with a richer navigation and group experience, as well as universal search capabilities.
With great feedback and usage of our current Desktop Notifier, we will also be delivering a more full-featured desktop app for Windows and Mac within the next couple months. The new app will enable automatic sign-in and will have a similar look and feel as the current browser experience. Organizations will also be able to broadly deploy the desktop app through central management.
Learn more and join us for our Ask Microsoft Anything (AMA)
The features and capabilities announced today represent the next steps in Yammer’s journey of empowering people to connect and engage across their organization. With several exciting announcements, we invite you to watch our latest Microsoft Mechanics video:
Also, join us next Tuesday, May 23, 2017 at 9 a.m. PDT for a special Ask Microsoft Anything (AMA) in the Microsoft Tech Community. Our product and engineering teams will be available to answer questions you have about new features in Yammer. Add the event to your calendar and join us in the Yammer AMA group next week. To keep up with Yammer releases and connect with our product teams on an ongoing basis, please join the Yammer Service Updates External Group.
New Yammer features help users more easily connect and collaborate
New capabilities for Yammer announced on Tuesday will make it easier for employees to connect and engage across organizations.
The changes, announced during Microsoft’s SharePoint Virtual Summit, include the ability to enrich new SharePoint communication sites, coming this summer, with a conversational layer by bringing Yammer and SharePoint together. The integration will be further enhanced over the coming months with additional improvements.
Users can now share and play videos from Office 365 Video and Microsoft Stream directly within their Yammer conversations. They can also use Office 365 Connectors to bring relevant content and updates from more than 90 popular third-party apps and services into Yammer conversations.
Yammer groups can now be more easily managed through dynamic group membership that updates automatically as people join, leave or move within organizations. And since staying connected requires versatile tools, Microsoft announced new Yammer apps for iPad, Windows and Mac.
Watch the video to learn more:
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Yammer adds mobile application management capabilities through Intune
People are increasingly using apps for work on their personal mobile devices. This is especially true of “deskless” workers—employees who spend most of their work day away from a desk—in industries like retail, manufacturing, healthcare, airlines and consulting. In the case of Yammer’s customers, an employee might use the Yammer mobile app to help customers in-store or share customer feedback with colleagues. In other scenarios, employees might access Yammer when they are in transit or working remotely.
This trend of using personal mobile devices for work presents a challenge for IT departments that want to ensure the security of company data, especially those concerned about unintentional data leaks.
Today, we’re excited to announce an update to the Yammer apps for iOS and Android that allows IT administrators to protect their corporate data using mobile application management (MAM) controls in Microsoft Intune. Using Intune, organizations can provide their employees with access to corporate apps, data and resources on their personal mobile devices while protecting their corporate data with a rich set of mobile device management, mobile application management and PC management capabilities delivered from the cloud. Read the Intune blog post for more details.
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(Left) Message on the iOS app informs users that their IT department has enabled MAM. (Right) Prompt on the Android app asks users to set a PIN to access the app in future.
Administrators can now apply different policies for the Yammer apps. These policies include requiring a PIN or corporate credentials to access the apps, limiting data sharing between apps and remotely wiping out data on the apps. For a complete list of supported policies, please review the Manage Yammer with Microsoft Intune support article.
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IT departments can use the Intune admin console to set policies for iOS and Android apps.
All of these policies are available for use on both mobile device management (MDM) enrolled devices and on unmanaged devices through Intune’s MAM without enrollment capabilities. MAM without enrollment is a great option for BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) scenarios, where you want to keep corporate data safe without managing a user’s device. To enforce MAM policies, users should be authenticated to Yammer by Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) accounts through Office 365 sign-in.
The updated app will be available in the Google Play and iOS App stores today.
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Yammer updates—from new user experiences to new IT controls
The Yammer team is continually delivering new capabilities for users and admins as well as deeper integration with Office 365. Today, we take a detailed hands-on look at updates to Yammer for enterprise social—from enhanced security and compliance to greater team productivity. Angus Florance, from the Yammer team, joins me to demonstrate new integrated experiences, including Office 365 Video and Delve. And for admins, we’ll show you new controls for merging networks, managing users and tracking usage.
If you’ve been using Yammer, you would have noticed constantly improving integration with Office 365. It not only shares common sign-in backed by Azure Active Directory and ability to get to Yammer experiences via the Office 365 app launcher, but Yammer also meets the same compliance standards as other Office 365 services.
Along with the work to update and integrate Yammer’s underpinnings, the team has also been advancing user experiences; it’s easier now to navigate conversations and move between unread messages across groups. Real-time notifications, which help you stay on top of activities and mobile experiences are now more robust. On the show, Angus highlights these points in a comprehensive demonstration then shows how external collaboration has been developed with clear indications of internal and external members—such as integrating Office experiences like co-authoring, and sharing content in Delve or Office 365 Video with your Yammer groups.
If you are an Office 365 administrator, there are now more controls. The previous global switch to either enable or disable Yammer is now more granular. You can enforce Office 365 sign-on and control access to Yammer services by user. There are also new controls to merge Yammer networks and new reports to track usage.
Today, June 8th, is National Best Friend's Day! Best friends help keep us sane with lots of laughter, endless conversation, and even a shoulder to cry on when we need one. Being far away from your best friend can be tough on any friendship. But, as we've all heard, distance makes the heart grow fonder. This year, use Yammer to easily contact your best friend on the national holiday to celebrate their awesomeness.
Yammer is easily accessible from Office 365. Every Office 365 users with a Yammer license is able to use the service from the Office 365 app launcher. If both you and your BFF have Office 365, just click on the portal grid and select Yammer to let the reuniting of friendship begin.
Don't work in the same company? No problem. Recently, Yammer added external groups to allow you to communicate with people outside of your own company. Just click on External Groups on the left hand column to add users.
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Use the chat feature to instantly message your friend to say, "I miss you!", or "Happy National Best Friends Day!", or attach an old picture of the two of you to let them know they're on your mind today. With Yammer, you can instantly turn any chat into a Skype call. So if typing to a computer isn't enough bonding for you, enjoy instant communication with a video call on Skype.
If you want to send over some pictures, videos, or other files, Yammer can do that. Yammer has immediate access to your OneDrive, so you can find all your documents in one place and share them with ease. Show them your new home or office or even a new outfit you want a best friend's opinion on. As your best friend, you could never share too much.
Too busy to Skype right now? Pencil them in for later. With Yammer, you can quickly schedule meetings with your Outlook calendar. Now you won't have to remind yourself to call your friends back because Outlook will give you a reminder for whenever you schedule that phone call.
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Yammer is the perfect way to keep in touch with old friends, especially on National Best Friend's Day. Don't let this holiday go unnoticed; give your bestie the attention they deserve (and maybe a little more).
Today, we are pleased to announce the new external groups feature in Yammer, enabling you to include people outside your company in a Yammer group—making it easier for extended teams to work together. The external groups capability builds on the existing ways to work with people outside your company, such as external networks and external messaging, which enables you to add people outside your organization directly to a thread in your organization’s Yammer network.
External groups allow team members with appropriate permissions from outside your organization to fully participate in projects and initiatives by providing access to all the conversations and content in the group. At the same time, we maintain the security of your network data by listing all external groups in a distinct section under the Groups menu and using clear indicators in the UI alerting users to the presence of external team members. Each external group requires group admin approval for external members to join, and a set of proactive controls via Exchange Transport Rules prevents sensitive company information from being shared. We also added functionality to our data export to help verified administrators see which files and conversations are accessible to external users.
External groups are available in your Yammer network today, so you can start working with your extended team right away! We are very excited about bringing this functionally to Yammer that helps our customers break down the silos between team members who work together from different organizations.
Get ready for Yammer, Microsoft announced today – and it’s not kidding. Microsoft said this afternoon it will begin to activate Yammer for all its eligible Office 365 business customers starting today, in what’s a major push for the enterprise social networking service. The rollout will come in waves, beginning with those customers who have a business subscription, and fewer than 150 licenses, including one for Yammer.
The second phase of the rollout on March 1st will expand Yammer to larger business customers, who have fewer than 5,000 licenses, but excluding those with education subscription.
The final phase, or Wave 3, starts on April 1, and will include those education subscriptions, as well as all remaining customers.
The end result of this push is that every Office 365 users with a Yammer license will be able to use the service from the Office 365 app launcher, as well as start Yammer conversations from within SharePoint, Office 365 Video Portal, and soon, Delve and Skype Broadcast as well.
Effectively, it’s elevating the product to become more of a fully-fledged member of Microsoft’s suite of tools aimed at businesses.
By being baked into Microsoft’s existing products and services, Yammer will become more useful than when it was a standalone product ahead of Microsoft’s 2012 acquisition. For example, Yammer will be hooked into the Office 365 Groups service in the first half of this year, which will let customers do things like turning Yammer conversations into Skype calls, schedule meetings with Outlook calendar, access files in OneDrive, create tasks in Planner, from within Yammer’s groups.
Yammer has fallen out of the limelight since Microsoft bought the company for $1.2 billionseveral years ago. Not much had been said about the service since. And it’s fair to say that many wondered if Microsoft ever intended to do much of anything with it, beyond making it available for those who wanted it.
But in recent months, Yammer has seen new competitors arise. Currently, its biggest competition is Slack, which Microsoft also recently had to acknowledge the importance of, in its own way – the company introduced Skype integration last month, that is. And Facebook has been ramping up its efforts with its business-focused Facebook for Work, which could pose a challenge to Yammer in the future when it becomes publicly available.
For now, however, Yammer still has a shot at grabbing a foothold thanks to Microsoft’s big push to its Office 365 commercial customers.
With the rollout, Yammer will be switched on by default, though Microsoft says that admins will be able to dial that back, if need be, noting that “if you are not ready to fully adopt Yammer in your organization, you can un-assign Yammer licenses for those who should not access Yammer from Office 365.”
Well, seems like it would just be easier to go live on Yammer than have to go around turning it off for people, doesn’t it?
More details on the Yammer integration is available here.
Get ready for Yammer, Microsoft announced today – and it’s not kidding. Microsoft said this afternoon it will begin to activate Yammer for all its eligible Office 365 business customers starting today, in what’s a major push for the enterprise social networking service. The rollout will come in waves, beginning with those customers who have a business subscription, and fewer than 150 licenses, including one for Yammer.
The second phase of the rollout on March 1st will expand Yammer to larger business customers, who have fewer than 5,000 licenses, but excluding those with education subscription.
The final phase, or Wave 3, starts on April 1, and will include those education subscriptions, as well as all remaining customers.
The end result of this push is that every Office 365 users with a Yammer license will be able to use the service from the Office 365 app launcher, as well as start Yammer conversations from within SharePoint, Office 365 Video Portal, and soon, Delve and Skype Broadcast as well.
Effectively, it’s elevating the product to become more of a fully-fledged member of Microsoft’s suite of tools aimed at businesses.
By being baked into Microsoft’s existing products and services, Yammer will become more useful than when it was a standalone product ahead of Microsoft’s 2012 acquisition. For example, Yammer will be hooked into the Office 365 Groups service in the first half of this year, which will let customers do things like turning Yammer conversations into Skype calls, schedule meetings with Outlook calendar, access files in OneDrive, create tasks in Planner, from within Yammer’s groups.
Yammer has fallen out of the limelight since Microsoft bought the company for $1.2 billion several years ago. Not much had been said about the service since. And it’s fair to say that many wondered if Microsoft ever intended to do much of anything with it, beyond making it available for those who wanted it.
But in recent months, Yammer has seen new competitors arise. Currently, its biggest competition is Slack, which Microsoft also recently had to acknowledge the importance of, in its own way – the company introduced Skype integration last month, that is. And Facebook has been ramping up its efforts with its business-focused Facebook for Work, which could pose a challenge to Yammer in the future when it becomes publicly available.
For now, however, Yammer still has a shot at grabbing a foothold thanks to Microsoft’s big push to its Office 365 commercial customers.
With the rollout, Yammer will be switched on by default, though Microsoft says that admins will be able to dial that back, if need be, noting that “if you are not ready to fully adopt Yammer in your organization, you can un-assign Yammer licenses for those who should not access Yammer from Office 365.”
Well, seems like it would just be easier to go live on Yammer than have to go around turning it off for people, doesn’t it?
More details on the Yammer integration is available here.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
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