Event banner
Event details
One question I hope is addressed in the AMA—when can Microsoft add the functionality in Yammer/Engage to allow users to make a post that can appear in and is live synced between multiple community feeds? There are many use cases where this would be beneficial. For example, in a professional service firm that has communities devoted to different consulting practice areas along with communities devoted to particular industry sectors, users often have questions that touch on topics covered by several communities and thus want to reach members of all these communities. Having to manually share a post made in one community to other relevant communities is administratively burdensome, and the bigger problem is that this action creates several different disparate threads for the same question, none of which are synced. This is a huge limitation of the Yammer app in organizations wanting to use it for knowledge sharing.
- Count me as one customer who would not want that feature, as I would assume it would be wildly abused.
- Kevin- Before switching to SharePoint Online (and Yammer) in 2022, we used a competitor enterprise social platform on an on-premise SharePoint setup for 9 years that had the ability to post to multiple communities. We never had any "abuse" problems and even if we did, our community feeds are heavily monitored by moderators. We are a 1000+ person consulting firm. We have communities for each consulting service we provide, each industry sector we serve, and each geography (state/country). Nearly ALL technical and regulatory questions cut-across more than one of these dimensions. But with Yammer, consultants can only post questions in one community which gives their question less visibility to those community members in all segments who could help. Manually sharing posts is administratively cumbersome and further creates problems of multiple unsynced threads on the same question. Our user base complains persistently about not having this feature (which we previously had for 9 years).
- espnguyen
Microsoft
Thanks for the feedback, Paul. I think you're asking about whether we will ever have the ability to have a post appear in multiple communities and have replies mirrored across those communities. This is something we've considered over time and haven't worked on this for a number of reasons that I can't get into details on. That said, this is a scenario that we've gotten feedback on for quite sometime and it is something that we're re-opening our investigations into. No commitments on this but we're thinking about how this could work. I'll just say that if this were easy, we would've done it already 😝- Thanks for the update Steve. I highly encourage Microsoft to put effort to getting this feature added. This is one of the biggest frustrations we have as a professional service firm using Yammer as a core part of our knowledge management system. We migrated from a product called Aurea Social (formerly Newsgater) in 2022 when we moved from an on premise SharePoint 2013 setup to SharePoint online (Aurea Social only works on premise). Newsgater had this feature in their enterprise social app back in 2012 and it was one of the reasons we chose them over Yammer back then.
