As part of its rebranding of Yammer to Viva Engage last week, Microsoft added the Viva Engage Core service plan to user accounts. Which is nice, unless a tenant had blocked Yammer. The new service plan means that accounts can now use Yammer In many cases, it won’t matter too much that users can now access Yammer, but in other instances it will. In any case, we should tidy up by removing the Viva Engage Core service plan from any account that already blocks Yammer. Some PowerShell does the trick, but it would have been nice if Microsoft had thought things through a little more.
Microsoft announced that they will rebrand Yammer as Viva Engage. The decision isn’t surprising given the relative lack of success the Yammer brand has had within Microsoft 365 since its acquisition in 2012. The hope is that the now-renamed Yammer can forge ahead and be more successful under the Viva brand. Time will tell.
Yammer stories are an extension of the previously announced storyline feature. A story is a short photo or video snippet to update other people about an event, happening, or other news. You can create stories through the Yammer apps or Viva Engage in Teams. Creating stories is easy and the interaction is smooth. The question for an enterprise is how best to use this new capability,
Viva Engage Storyline is a new way of posting information to Yammer. Instead of posting to communities, people can post to their personal storyline, with the aim of fostering better communication and creating their personal brand. Storyline works in both the Viva Engage app in Teams and the traditional Yammer browser UI. It’s a nice way to post stuff when you don’t have a good home for the information, but I do have a nagging doubt that storyline is just another way to share information inside Microsoft 365, which is exactly what’s needed.
Some recent announcements have shown Yammer’s new direction. The Communities app is now Viva Engage and Teams Meeting Q&A app is powered by Yammer. That’s all good because it negates some of the tension between Teams and Yammer in terms of positioning within Microsoft 365. The messages that make up Q&A in Teams meetings are captured for compliance purposes, and that’s also a good thing.
A new Yammer administrator role is available in Azure AD. Assignees of the new role become Yammer verified admins and can make changes to both native and non-native Yammer networks. It’s nice to see the new role appearing in Azure AD and no doubt it will be useful to Microsoft 365 tenants that use Yammer, but why did it take so long to happen?
Outlook desktop couldn’t display actionable messages generated by Teams and Yammer properly while OWA and Outlook mobile could. It’s a small issue in the context of Microsoft 365, but it irritated me. I fixed the problem but don’t know how except that the Actionable Messages Debugger for Outlook might have been involved. Another day in the life of a Microsoft 365 tenant administrator…
If their developers allow, Microsoft 365 tenants can customize the properties of Teams apps to add their own icons, text, and links. In this article, we show how by customizing the Yammer Communities app to add a most remarkable photo taken at an Ignite event, a snazzier title (that no one can see), and some modified text. Is this enough to make the exercise worthwhile? that all depends on how you feel about corporate branding!
Yammer compliance records are generated by the Microsoft 365 substrate and consumed by features such as communications compliance policies and eDiscovery. In this post, we consider where Yammer compliance records are stored and what they contain and how to use PowerShell to figure out the activity levels of Yammer communities.
Yammer networks configured in Microsoft 365 mode now support Azure B2B collaboration guest users. Which is nice, if it worked. But it doesn’t for me. Guest access worked for me during the testing phase but now that the feature has reached general availability, it won’t – using the same accounts. It’s odd. Yammer’s implementation of Azure B2B Collaboration has some other quirks too, all of which mean that it’s not very usable.
Yammer now boasts inclusive reactions, the ability to select a person-appropriate skin tone for thanks and like reactions. The feature is only available in the new Yammer UI. Being able to select a skin tone for reactions is not a new idea and now that Yammer has it, Teams can’t be far behind.
Microsoft 365 Groups are used by applications like Teams and Yammer. The PowerShell Get-UnifiedGroup cmdlet finds groups, but can it find the groups enabled for Teams and Yammer? Here’s some idle musing on the topic which might or might not interest you.
Office 365 Tenants need to stop people using Internet Explorer. On November 30, Teams stops support for IE11; nine months later, the rest of the Microsoft 365 apps cease support. According to Microsoft, the only browser in town is the new Edge (which has an IE mode), but most will keep on using Chrome, Firefox, Brave, or Safari as they do today.
Microsoft has extended the temporary increase in the limit for Live Events participants from 10,000 to 20,000 until June 30, 2021. The extended limit reflects the popularity of online events during the Covid-19 pandemic. After this point, you’ll need a Teams advanced communications license to organize a live event for more than 10,000 participants.
Microsoft has released the Communities app for Teams. The app integrates Yammer into Teams as a pinned app or in a channel tab. The pinned app mode is most functional, even if the channel mode includes a Share to Channel option. Overall, it’s a nice integration, which begs the question as to when the same might be done for OWA?
Yammer networks can be in any of three modes. The most modern is Native mode for Microsoft 365, which is where Yammer can use many Office 365 features. Although I am not a Yammer expert by any stretch of the imagination, I decided to move my tenant’s Yammer network into a brave new world. Here’s what happened.
If you receive a notification about Yammer conversations in OWA, you might notice that you can now do all sorts of new things to interact with Yammer while remaining in OWA. It’s part of Microsoft’s effort to make Yammer more relevant and accessible to people who prefer to communicate through email. And the nice thing is that the approach works well.
Microsoft says that the migration of Yammer storage for new files in SharePoint will restart in June and finish worldwide by the end of July. That’s great, but the migration of existing files is a manual process that can only be described as tiresome and error-prone. But it adds to the allure of Yammer and increases its prestige in the ranks of Office 365 apps. Or maybe not.
New data about the number of Slack and Workplace usage gives the chance to compare how Microsoft is doing with Teams. And the answer is that things seem to be going well, largely because Teams is growing off the huge Office 365 base. With 155 million users (the last figure) and 3 million more added monthly, Teams has a lot more to go after in the Office 365 installed base.
Office 365 changes all the time, which is good because it keeps the Office 365 for IT Pros writing team busy and happy. Discussions this week included Microsoft’s response to a Dutch DPIA, the effect large Teams have on Yammer, how Exchange Online validated a fix to a security problem, and graphics to help understand the components of the Microsoft 365 E3 and E5 plans.
After being accused of bias against Yammer, I thought about whether this is true. But it’s not bias – it is frustration that Yammer remains so detached from the rest of Office 365 six and a half years after Microsoft bought the technology.
Encrypted email is becoming more common within Office 365. Things usually flow smoothly when sending protected messages to email recipients, but other Office 365 recipient types like Teams and Yammer might not be able to handle protected email.
The “Yammer Vision” session at last week’s Ignite conference was interesting. At least, I thought it was because it showed signs of a new willingness and direction to make Yammer a better citizen of the Office 365 ecosystem. Time will tell whether the grand plans succeed.
