Using Microsoft Yammer

In Microsoft 365, click the app launcher in the upper-left corner and select Microsoft Yammer, as shown in Figure 6-1.

Once you click the application, you will be presented with the Microsoft Yammer interface. The interface contains a few critical areas, shown in Figure 6-2.

On launch, you will be presented with a Home Feed screen. This screen will display any updates that occurred in the communities you are a part of. You will also see a listing of communities that you are a part of as well as the option to start a discussion.

Walking Through Yammer

Yammer looks intimidating upon logging in, but once you’re familiar with its interface, it is quite simple. The first area I will discuss is around groups. Communities in Yammer are not the same as Microsoft 365 groups. Yammer groups do not contain an inbox or a SharePoint site or some of the other Microsoft 365 Groups functions you explored in Chapter 4. Yammer communities are like a team in Microsoft Teams; but, as discussed, Yammer communities are meant for the enterprise, where Teams is more suited toward smaller groups of people.

Creating a Yammer Community

In the lower-left corner of the Yammer application, you will see the current communities in Yammer as well as the ability to create or discover communities. Your first objective is to create a community. To begin the process, click “+ Create a Community,” which opens a modal window titled “Create a New Community.” See Figure 6-3.

The first thing you will notice is that you have the ability to create two types of communities: an internal community or an external community. Internal communities allow your colleagues to communicate and belong to a community; an external community allows external members to join.

Both communities share a few common fields. The first is “Name,” and it is used to identify and title the Yammer community. The second field is “Description,” and this field gives you the ability to describe the community. The third option is “Members,” where you would add members. The fourth option is “Internal or External.”

If you select Internal, your choices for “Who can view conversations and post messages” are the following:

• Public: Anyone in this network can view conversations and post. This setting allows anyone to join the Yammer community and participate in it. With Yammer, once you have access to the community, you can perform a majority of the actions.

• Private: Only community members can view conversations and post. With this setting, you must be sure to add members to the community. You also have the option to allow the community to be visible to all colleagues even though they cannot join the community unless specified.

If External is selected, you will be presented with the same choices as the preceding.

Once you have populated the required fields, click “Create.” Yammer will create the group behind the scenes; after a few moments, you will be presented with your group, as shown in Figure 6-4.

Basics of a Yammer Community

A Yammer community allows you to view “Conversations,” “About,” and “Files” and “Events.” You also have the ability to search within the Yammer community. These options are located below the title of the community, as shown in Figure 6-5. I will discuss each one as many of the options have shifted around within the new Yammer interface. The first edition of this book was focused on the classic Yammer interface.

Conversations: These types of communication (discussions, questions, praise, and polls) are used to facilitate dialog within the group. We will discuss the different types further in this chapter.

About: Since the inception of Yammer within Microsoft 365, the classic interface filled the screen with options and configurations for the user. In the new Yammer interface, a lot of those settings had been moved to the “About” of a community:

• Community Insights: This will show data statistics of how many active users have visited the community in the last 28 days and the total number of conversations posted within 28 days. Clicking “See More” will take you to more in-depth statistics about your community.

• Members: Will show the members of the community as well as allow you to add more members.

• Community Info: Will display the information about the community.

• Related Communities: Manually add other communities that are related to the current community.

Files: Allows the members of the community to upload or create new files (Figure 6-6). Once these files are part of the community, users can view, edit, delete, or download them. There is also the ability to make the item official, so no changes are allowed.

Events: These are not calendar events or similar to the calendar of a Microsoft 365 group. This is specifically for live events, which are out of scope for this book. More information can be found on the Microsoft Support site.

• Info: Gives the community owner the ability to add more information about the community. The owner can add rules on postings or files. To add info about a Yammer community, click the link and then the Edit link to provide information. Be sure to save your changes after.

• Pinned: You can “pin” links that are relevant to the community in an easily accessible location. Links can also be posted. See Figure 6-7 for more details.

Posting to a Yammer Community

The second area that I will discuss is the ability to start a discussion, question, praise, or poll, as shown in Figure 6-8, in a Yammer community.

There are four types of posts that can be made in a Yammer group. Each of these posts has a unique purpose, and you will explore them in the following in further detail:

• Discussion: A conversation post to a Yammer community is the simplest of all posts. Type your message in the text box; and if you want, you can also add a gif or a file from Yammer or SharePoint or upload directly from your computer. You also have the ability to notify people of the update by specifying their name in the “Add people” text box. See Figure 6-9 for more details.

• Poll: A poll is akin to a single-question survey (Figure 6-10). For now, you can only post a single question. No other data types are available. It’s similar to an update post because you can also attach a file or notify a person.

The poll isn’t as robust as Microsoft Forms, which is discussed in Chapter 10. In this scenario, a Microsoft form can be created, and the link to the form can be pasted into an update post.

• Praise: Built upon the update post, but gives you the ability to give your post a little more detail, as shown in Figure 6-11.

A praise post contains two parts: “Who do you want to praise?” and “Share what they’ve done.” You also have the same ability as the previous post types to notify people or add files.

• Question: The final post type is a question, as shown in Figure 6-12.

Interacting with Yammer Posts

Similar to Microsoft Teams, which was discussed in Chapter 5, Yammer is also a chat-based collaboration tool. Every post (conversation, question, praise, and poll) can be liked, commented on, or shared as shown in Figure 6-13.

To like any of the posts, select the Like icon located under the post. Clicking the icon will change the icon name from Like to Unlike. If you choose to unlike a post at a later date, click the Unlike icon. Commenting on a post is a similar action to liking a post. Click the Comment icon, and a text box will appear underneath the original post. Type your message and choose to notify others, add a file, or post text.

The Share icon allows you to share a post with another community or within a private message or to copy the link as shown in Figure 6-14.

Within the “Share to Community” modal window, select a community from the “Select a community to post to” link. You can add context to sharing a post by adding your comments, uploading a file, and notifying specific people. In order to share the conversation directly in a private message, select the “Share to Private Message” option. This option requires you to add specific participants because you are sending a private message. You also have the ability to add a gif or upload a file. When you are satisfied with your selections, click “Share” in the lower-right corner to post to a group or send a private message.

If you are the creator of the post, you will also see the vertical ellipsis in the upper-right corner of the post. Clicking the ellipsis allows you to edit your post and correct context or spelling. All edited posts are labeled as edited. You can’t edit a poll post.

The ellipsis menu of a post, shown in Figure 6-15, displays the other actions one can take on their post.

Inbox

The inbox, located in the upper-left corner, allows you to send private messages as well as receive notifications. To create a private message, select “New Private Message” in the upper-right corner of the inbox.

The familiar dialog of posts is shown (Figure 6-16), and you are able to craft your message and add people to send it to.

Sending a message to another colleague(s) is similar to posting an update; the difference is you need to select the colleagues to send the message to. Once you select the colleague(s), type your message, attach any items if needed, and click “Post.”

An interesting feature with private messaging on the Yammer platform is that a conversation can be moved to a private or public community if deemed appropriate. To move a private message to a group, select “Move” from the available options within a private message, as depicted in Figure 6-17.

Once the message is moved, it cannot be undone. Also be aware if your message contains sensitive or confidential information; it will be visible to all members of the group.

Yammer Mobile App

Microsoft released a mobile version of Microsoft Yammer, as it did for almost every one of its core products (SharePoint, Planner, OneDrive, Teams, etc.). The mobile application is supported on both Android and Apple platforms and is available from the respective app stores.

To install your specific version, download the mobile app from the correct app store. Once the app is downloaded and installed on your mobile device, open it, and specify your Microsoft 365 credentials. Once Microsoft 365 authenticates you, you will be presented with a very similar interface to the web version. Figure 6-18 shows the mobile feed view and the associated icons available.

On the Yammer mobile app, you will see a list of your communities; you also have the ability to add and discover more groups. Along the bottom of the application, you can navigate to the Feed, Inbox, and Notifications.

The functionality of the Yammer mobile application is well thought out and compliments the web version of Yammer. As depicted in Figure 6-19, viewing a community allows a colleague to view the feed of updates and be able to post an update, announcement, or praise.

To post to a Yammer group, click the “Create Post” icon in the upper-right corner when viewing a community. Similar to the web version of Yammer, you can add a photo, take a photo, or upload a file via the interface. To change to a different posting type, select the icon in the lower-right corner of the new post text box displayed in Figure 6-20.

Business Retrospective

I want to touch base on a past experience concerning Yammer and a business problem that the executives wanted to solve. The company was dinged by their employees on the yearly employee survey for not being transparent with information, so the company wanted to create a culture of employee empowerment. After a discussion with them, they agreed to green-light Yammer as a PoC (Proof of Concept). Part of winning them over was to show that Yammer had the features needed to solve the issues and increase employee engagement.

Part of the success of the project was to ensure that the executives would be responsible and willing to post updates and engage with employees. I would love to tell you that once we configured Yammer in the enterprise, created a public community, and had the executives begin posting short updates about what the company was going through, user adoption shot through the roof and employees felt they were informed.

That didn’t happen, and it would appear on the surface that we failed. However, we noticed something odd: we engaged at the wrong level in the organization. Having executive buy-in was needed, but employees felt they couldn’t relate or shouldn’t respond to upper management.

Because of this, we started to engage other managers, and Yammer became a more widely used platform. A year later, the yearly employee satisfaction survey showed that they were moving toward their goals of disseminating information and engaging employees.

Summary

A common thread throughout this book is that Microsoft has shifted from providing a single application to solve the many collaboration challenges we face to building applications that allow us to choose the best ones for our needs.

Yammer is similar in many ways to Microsoft Teams but is geared toward connecting colleagues at the enterprise level and not on the project or team level. The key to Yammer is to create communities, public or private, and to ensure that all users have access to the Yammer network. For this to happen, users can be imported directly from Microsoft 365 with the aid of a Yammer administrator.

The key to working with Yammer is to ensure that posts are made, whether they are updates, polls, praises, or announcements, and that those posts are replied to. This is important because without any content or current updates, users won’t see the value in contributing to or using Yammer.

In this chapter, I covered the basics of Yammer including communities, users, interacting with posts, and the Yammer mobile application. In the next chapter, I will discuss another cornerstone of Microsoft 365, the Office 2019 suite including Outlook, Word, Excel, OneNote, and PowerPoint.