Coming up, we'll take a look at updates to Yammer for enterprise social.
For enhance security and compliance and greater team productivity
to new integrated experiences with Office 365
including Office video and Delve.
And, we even take a look at new admin controls for analytics,
merging networks and managing users.
Microsoft Mechanics
I'm joined today by Angus Florance from the Yammer team.
Welcome.
So if you're new to Yammer, it provides a private enterprise social network for your organization.
Now you might be thinking, it's been a few months before you heard anything from the Yammer team
but, there's been a lot going on that's new here right?
Absolutely, so since we have become part of the Office 365 family
adoption of Yammer is growing faster than ever.
We've spent a lot of time recently
really integrating Yammer into the back end of Office 365.
to really try and leverage some of those security and compliance pictures
and make it an enterprise-grade tool.
And I know that we're actually running all of those Yammer services in the same data centers
that we run Office 365 and Azure.
That's right, so Yammer now meets the same security and compliance standards
as the rest of the Office 365 suite.
But, what this also means is directionally
we can now integrate Yammer into where we think
it makes the most sense to have conversations across your organization.
So the most recent example of that is with Skype meeting broadcast.
Where you can attach a Yammer group and have a real time conversation
while someone's broadcasting a meeting live.
On the flip side of that, if you maybe have one or two people working on an individual file or word doc
That's something that you would manage via Skype for business messaging.
So beyond this one thing that's pretty exciting is that
we've turned Yammer on by default in Office 365 tenant.
That's right so Yammer now works like any other work load inside Office 365.
Because we have a single identity
we can log into Yammer.com, it will recognize my Office 365 identity
and pass me through.
So this is on edge browser.
So because you're signed in with an Azure AD account on this computer
it lets you log straight in.
And, because I have that single account
I can seamlessly switch between the different workloads
without having to log in and out like we used to.
So this is really great in terms of the deeper integration with Azure AD
and, really the backbone of Office 365 and Azure.
But beyond that, what are some of the new experiences that we built in Yammer?
We've really been focusing hard on improving the way people have conversations in Yammer.
But, also really focusing on helping people get work done inside the tool.
And with that we've done some work around have groups work and really trying to
improve the group experience in Yammer.
So, if we come into a group.
You'll see here that now all groups have their own color custom header and logo.
And this is again consistent across whether it's a mobile app
or website to give that real sense of purpose and clarity
so people know what they're trying to do inside the script.
This looks new here, the unread conversations with the counter next to it.
Yeah so again it's important when you think about trying to get work done.
You want to make sure you only see unread messages
you don't want to troll through stuff that's been there for a long time.
So when you first land in a group
we're only going to show you unread conversations since the last time you were in here.
And as I scroll through you'll notice that counter drops down
as I read through these messages and I can like and reply and share these.
When I get to the bottom of the group and I've read all these messages
It then prompts me to go to my next group that has unread messages inside.
Something else I've seen recently with the Yammer is notification
popping up as I make updates or other people make updates in the feeds that I'm part of.
Absolutely, so let's let's show that now.
So if you're in a Yammer group and you post a message
and I just happen to be in Yammer at the same time.
I'll get a little notification in my navigation bar with your profile picture.
The unread group count will go up and then I can click on that message
and go in and edit it.
Very cool so that's on the PC and in the browser
but we've also done a bunch in terms of the mobile experiences
so can you give us a look at that?
We've added a lot of features to our iOS and Android apps
to really try and get them up to par with their web.
They should be standalone applications
We've also incorporated a lot of the same features around groups
So you can see here when I open up the app
I'm sharing my most recent groups
and again any unread messages within those groups.
So I can click on a group with unread messages.
Again you get the standard group header and logo.
And I can scroll through this and like or reply to messages as I need to.
So very cool piece of group experience.
But I know even in the inbox you've made some changes there as well, right?
Yeah so the Yammer inbox is really where we keep all your priority messages across the network.
So every conversation that you've been a part of
no matter what group it's in, it will live inside your inbox.
So we can improve that experience both on mobile and the web.
So when you come in, again you're only greeted with your unread messages across your inbox.
So you can come through and see which ones are most important.
If you wanted to mark one as read, you can swipe to the left.
If you no longer want to follow a conversation
you can swipe to the right and that will drop it out of your inbox.
Or if obviously you want to view them all
you can click on that and say all messages.
And again we've mirrored this experience in the web app as well.
Very cool, so I can stay productive on the go whether I'm on my phone or my PC.
But, beyond this you've done a bunch of work around external collaboration, right?
Absolutely, so when we think about team's collaborating
we know today that teammates can be outside your organization
whether their customers, partners, suppliers.
And so very recently we launched this concept of a Yammer external group.
And they work in a very similar way to existing Yammer groups
except, when you create the group
you make it external and then you can add people's external to the organization email address
and they'll get invited to that group to work on.
So if I come in to an existing group, you'll see here
we've actually separated out
external groups and internal groups so people know that they're in a different context.
And when you're inside the group itself
you'll see things like the companies in the group header,
the companies that are part of the group,
but also when you click on that you can see the people by a company who is also participating in that group.
Other things we've done is highlight through the threat itself.
So a globe will show you that there's external people present inside the conversation.
And, when I click reply
I can actually warn that there's other people outside of your network
who are going to see this.
And if I want to see who that is, I can click on that
and it will give me a list of people who will see this message.
Very cool, that's a ton of really knew great improvements in Yammer
This get's even more powerful
with the integration of Yammer conversations across Office 365.
Yeah, so what are the key integration points?
One of the first we wanted to do is around files.
Because we know when people want to get work done,
they don't just talk about work
they obviously use Word, Powerpoint, Excel.
Those type of files.
So, what we've done is leverage the strength of Office 365 in their office web apps.
So when you open one of those types of files in Yammer
It actually runs that file directly within the Yammer interface.
This is really cool because actually it's using Office online here.
So I can do things like co-author, check version history,
edit the file right from within Yammer.
Exactly, so we can click edit file here and you and I can co-author that document.
But one of the real advantages because this file is in Yammer
we also get all the social features that come with it as well.
And so we get things like being able to share the file.
You can follow it so you always get notified of updates.
We can mark files as official, so they're locked and read only so no one else can edit that file.
I can obviously see version history and other people that are following the file.
But what's most important in Yammer is being able to get the context of these contents.
So you can see at the bottom of the file
I can see any conversation that attached to that across the network
So a lot of great integration.
But I know what we've done even more than just these things.
So what else is new?
Absolutely so what we've also done is take conversations out of Yammer
and embedded across different parts of the suite. Okay.
So things like Delve.
If I'm in Delve and i'm scrolling through and looking at different parts of content
if I find a file in here that I think could be valuable to other people inside my organization
maybe they haven't seen it yet.
I can click on the Yammer icon here
and then start a conversation back in my Yammer network, referencing this file.
And it's a very similar experience to what we can also do in Office 365 video.
Where again if i'm watching a video as part of training or onboarding
or again there's just something in there that I think people would benefit from seeing.
As I'm watching that video
I can come down and click on the Yammer comments
and again share this video into my Yammer network and really help make that content go viral.
So, even more awesome integration but what else is coming?
So there's two big integration coming over the next few months.
The first one is Yammer is going to integrate into Office 365 groups.
And what that basically means is every single Yammer group that you're a part of
will also get things like a shared calendar inside Outlook that you can create events with that team.
Or maybe when you upload a file into Yammer
it's actually going to get stored in the group SharePoint document library.
So you'll get all the advantages of having the files inside Sharepoint.
The second one we're doing is around Skype for business integration.
So what that will mean is if it's four or five of us having a conversation
inside of a Yammer group and we want to maybe elevate that conversation to real time.
We can click a button and that will either open up a video
or just a real-time chat that we can use in skype for business.
So awesome user experiences, but let's switch gears for a minute.
Something near and dear to me, IT.
So what's new from an IT pro perspective?
Yes we've been doing a lot of work in the IT admin area.
Really trying to leverage a lot of the existing capabilities inside Office 365
And then applying them to Yammer depending on the situation.
Ok, so an example of one of those that we've done is being able to migrate networks.
Let's say for example, your company has added an extra Yammer network
via a merger acquisition or maybe have opened a new branch.
So with this new network migration tool
if those domains live inside Office 365
you can now automatically merge these two together into a single Yammer Network for your company.
So, there we have a UK domain and a US domain.
Absolutely, yeah.
So it even goes further than that right we can also do things like control
who is using Yammer and using some of the external and licensing controls, right?
Yeah, so earlier this year we added the ability to enforce Office 365 identity.
So that means if I'm a user of Yama, but also use Office 365.
As an IT pro I can force people to use my Office 365 identity.
And that gives you access to things like single sign-on,
multi-factor authentication all that good stuff as well.
Ok, how does that work?
So, you can come in and you simply just check this box.
The other thing that this actually does which is quite unique is
Previously when Yammer was connected to an Office 365 tenant
it was just on for everybody and you couldn't control it at a per user level.
So, now once we enforce Office 365 identity
we can now control this via licensing as well.
So, if I check this box that says, block users with a Yammer LIcense
and save that.
If I then go back into the Office 365 admin portal
and say for example, Alex here.
I can come down and turn Yammer off for him at a user level
And so there, that will make Yammer disappear from the launcher menu.
I won't be able to login via Yammer.com anymore.
Awesome so lots of updates and a lot of lot of things that we can do on the IT pro side
as well as the user side.
But can we do some other things in terms of seeing who's using Yammer?
Yeah, so early this year the Office 365 team launched the reporting dashboard
and as part of that Yammer was included.
And so you can see here when you launch the dashboard you get all your different workloads.
One of these is Yammer.
So again, from a high level you can see
who's posted, how many people are posted, how many people have read and liked messages on your network.
We can then drill into that and get that a per user level.
So by user, how many messages have they posted, read, and liked.
The next thing we want to launch with this is group level analytics.
So that's really around for each group in Yammer
how many members are there, how many messages have been posted
how many likes that type of thing.
Great for tracking usage.
So beyond this, if I'm an end user or maybe an IT pro
how do I start using Yammer right now?
If you're an Office 365 user today
it should be already on and you can get in there straight away.
If your IT pro and want to help launch camera across your network
we have lots and lots of resources on the fast track portal
that will help you get started and more inside your company.
So really a great set of updates.
Thanks for giving the tour today.
Of course keep watching Microsoft Mechanics for all the latest tech updates.
Thanks everyone for watching and goodbye for now.
Microsoft Mechanics
www.microsoft.com/mechanics