Content and communities: Showcase both in your social intranet
Whether your goal is organization wide engagement or an introduction to a community of interest, adding the power of conversation into your intranet site makes it easy to showcase questions, comments and discussions. Today we're delighted to announce that the new Yammer web part for SharePoint has moved from targeted release to being generally available, providing an interactive experience on your sites, pages and news.
The new web part is a first step into tighter integration in communities, particularly in scenarios where you want broad engagement across your organization. For example, in the leadership connection scenario, where a leader in the organization wants to have a deeper connection with employees but needs to do that at scale. In this case, you have both an intranet site that has rich content assets, documents, news, articles, videos from Stream, highlighted content that is dynamic, even PowerBI dashboards. Check out the latest web parts you can easily add to make your content really shine. In addition, you now add conversations from rich, vibrant community in Yammer.
Showcase your community
If you'd like to add conversations to your site pages, or news you can easily do that. To get started, you'll need the name of your group in Yammer where the conversations live. The conversations are not being duplicated, just being shown inside your site. The conversation feed needs to be tied to a group, because people can post directly from SharePoint into your group.
When you edit the page in SharePoint, you can add the Yammer web part from the gallery, and you have three different ways to display conversations from a group.
Top conversations - displays vibrant, popular conversations with active replies and likes - think of this as a way to engage people into your community and draw them in
Latest conversations - shows the latest in a group - great for keeping up to date
Conversations you choose - curate particular conversations that are most pertinent, for example if this is a welcome page, you might choose questions that are from beginners, or in a news article you might choose to start a conversation just on that topic.
You can change between these options at any time on any of your pages including news, by simply editing the web part. For example, in our leadership connection scenario, you might change to focus on specific stories that have been shared in Yammer or show only the most popular conversations when running a campaign to get employees engaged and communicating.
You'll always get a great conversation experience on the go, with great experience in the SharePoint mobile app or browser.
In this short video we walk through, step by step, how to create a communications site or news page in SharePoint and explore the various ways to add Yammer conversations to it.
The web part only supports group feeds at this time from Yammer. That's because it supports posting directly from your SharePoint web page, and the new post must have a 'home' to go to - in this case a group. If you need to show a topic or home feed, you can use the classic option in the new web part, which supports those options.
The new card format which allows flexibility in layout on your site, for example in horizontal rows or columns, doesn't yet allow us to show images which are attached to Yammer conversations. This is because its hard to deliver a great experience for images, when the card changes shape depending on the page layout. You can see that there are images attached to a post, and when you click through on the post, you'll see the conversation in Yammer.
We know you'd like even more functionality, so encourage you to voice your opinion in Uservoice, and please know that this is a first but important step to better community experiences in Office 365, so we'd always like your opinion on what you'd like to have in the future. Every post in Uservoice is read by a member of Yammer product team, and we are always listening.
Happy conversations!
Naomi.
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