Microsoft Announces Yammer Integration with Office 365 Groups
Yammer allows its users to connect with other employees & collaborate on a task by sharing ideas & ways to work on it. In Yammer, the users get an opportunity to gather at an open space online to collaborate on ideas related to best practices, create communities based on the interests and start new initiatives
On 2nd March 2017, Microsoft has announced the Yammer integration with Office 365 Groups. It is a membership service for a group that provides a single identity to teams in Office 365. After this integration, when a user will create a new group in Yammer then it will automatically get connected/ synced to Office 365 Groups, giving the group a Planner for task management, OneNote notebook, a SharePoint Online team site & a document library to upload/ share all the documents. Now, the members of a group can readily access the shared resources directly from Yammer.
This integration between Yammer and Office 365 Groups affects customers who have one Yammer network associated with their Office 365 domain and have enforced O365 identity in their networks. The full rollout of Office 365 Groups and Yammer integration is going to take place in phases, existing non-connected Yammer groups with Office 365 Groups and also to remaining Office 365 tenants.
It is also expected that there might be integration with Outlook Calendar along with more enhancements to the integration of Yammer with SharePoint Online and Planner.
Now, the Office 365 administrators will soon be able to use query-based group membership in Yammer-based on Azure AD attributes like role, manager & location.This will make sure that the groups dynamically include the right members.
Question-Answer & Feedback Session
The Microsoft team is seeking user feedback & inviting its users to join them on 7th March 2017 from 9:00 to 10:00 Pacific Standard Time or 17:00 to 18:00 Greenwich Mean Time for Ask Microsoft Anything session, which will be hosted by Microsoft technical team. The event will be live online event which will give the users an opportunity to connect with the development & engineering teams who will be available to listen to your feedback & answer all of your questions.
Frequently Asked Questions
The following are the frequently asked queries by the users on Yammer integration with Office 365 Groups.
Q. Will the existing Yammer groups be changed into Office 365–connected Yammer groups?
A. For now, only new Yammer groups that meet the requirements for initial rollout will be converted to Office 365-connected Yammer groups. Whereas, in the coming month, we will be working on converting existing non-connected Yammer groups as well.
Q. Will the Yammer groups that we create be Office 365-connected if I disable Office 365 Groups creation for my tenant?
A. No. If the Office 365 Groups creation is disabled then the groups that you create in Yammer will not be Office 365-connected groups.
Q. If I post a message to a Yammer group which is Office 365-connected the will the message appear in the same group in Outlook as well?
A. No. The messages won’t appear on both. They will either appear in a group in Outlook or a connected Yammer group. It depends on which communication medium your group used while creating the message. The users who send a message from Outlook to an Office 365-connected Yammer group will receive “Success” email confirming that their message has been posted. Also, any replies to that message will follow basic Yammer notification via email.
Q. How can I know that our tenant is eligible for this integration or not?
A. You should have only one Yammer network associated with your O365 tenant along with Office 365 identity enforced in order to meet the initial rollout requirements of Yammer integration with Office 365 Groups.
User Feedbacks So Far
We have collected some of the user feedbacks on this rollout. They are as follows:
"Excellent move by Microsoft! It has been 20+ years since email has been around in its existing form and its high time now to modernize & be more collaborative!!"
"I have been waiting for this for a while now! This is awesome! Looking forward to how actually this rollout works out!! Looking forward to more like this!"
"The fact that the conversations will either appear in Outlook group or Yammer group is a horrible setback. I think this should be taken care of!"
Conclusion
So far, this rollout seems to be promising to the users of Office 365. The experts predict that this feature will prove to be another achievement by Microsoft in providing a great experience to its users.