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- Is there a way to delete our old Yammer and start fresh with Viva Engage? When Yammer rolled out in our tenant it was not managed or connected to O365. We would like to delete these old Yammer groups and start fresh with VIVA Engage.
- MichaelHolste
Microsoft
Hey Susan, there is a Yammer API you can use to delete existing content and relaunch, but we'd recommend reaching out to Support (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/yammer-help-center-8663922d-8f76-47c2-827a-ee86e8cac00f) who can get you going on the latest & greatest (including Native Mode). - jamestyerHi Susan. When you start your transition to Native Mode, you can reach out to FastTrack for support in cleaning up your network. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/yammer/configure-your-yammer-network/overview-native-mode
- What will the GUI look like once the rebranding is completed? Will it be the current Yammer interface with the communities overview on the left side or will it be the Viva Engage interface with the communities overview in two separate menus on the right side of the feed? Personally I would definitely prefer the Yammer interface as it is a lot more efficient and user-friendly while Viva Engage makes things unnecessarily hard.
- Ravin SachdevaThanks for your feedback, Stefan. Quick answer - no, we are not changing the way you access you communities on the left navigation pane when we rebrand Yammer to Viva Engage. Same is true for primary navigation and layout, when we rebrand you can expect to see updates to the look and feel of the GUI and see some visual elements from Viva Engage brought in to Yammer.com but no changes to the way you navigate the experience or the way pages are laid out. You can read more here: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-viva-events/microsoft-viva-engage-ama/ec-p/3751166#M298
- Consistent wording for a smooth landing/transition How do we support end users with this change in name? Is there a consistent 'strapline' / paragraph that the Product team can share on here which really brings to life the value of this change and that we can all start to share from the beginning of March pls?
- New deployments If a business wants to deploy Yammer from as early as March, what is your recommendation in regards to the name, materials, training etc, e.g. go in and launch as 'Yammer' with the disclaimer the this brand name will change completely to Viva Engage by the end of 2023 or go in and launch as 'Viva Engage' from the beginning?
- espnguyenHi Bernie! 👋🏽 Soon we'll be making available rebranding toolkit that hopefully will help with the items you mention above. It will include graphics, templates and other guidance you can use to communicate this change to people in the organization. For new deployments, I would suggest centralizing on the 'Viva Engage' name but communicating that they might see 'Yammer' and that it will soon change to 'Viva Engage'.
- Hi Bernie and Steve! I've been going back and forth about how to introduce this name change as well. The reason why is because we positioned Yammer as a "partner" to our intranet on SharePoint about two years ago. Then six months later, we added Yammer to the intranet homepage right rail, which has positively impacted new communities, active communities and active users. So I'm debating how I will reposition that relationship with this name change. One tip I read in a blog about this change suggested referencing Yammer as Yammer/Viva Engage, once the change is introduced, which I plan to do.
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).
- espnguyenThanks 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.
- How is the transfer from Yammer to Viva Engage going to happen? What is the experience for organizations that aren't using Teams?
- Interested in the best way to tell the story for the non-Teams experience as well.
- espnguyenHi Emily! 👋🏽 From a mobile perspective, the Yammer app will update sometime in mid-March through the respective app stores. The update to the mobile apps will happen just as any app gets its updates. Users will be responsible for updating their own apps. For the web, we don't anticipate dramatic changes, mostly cosmetic. We'll have more that we can share as we get closer to making the web updates which will be more in the September/October timeframe.
- Please can you let us know if this will be recorded and access to the recording given via the Yammer Customer Connection group? https://web.yammer.com/main/org/microsoft.com/groups/eyJfdHlwZSI6Ikdyb3VwIiwiaWQiOiI4ODcxNDM3In0/all It is meant to start at 6am NZT not a good time for us in this region!
- Hi Mandy - we plan on posting a recap of the questions to our blog, but an AMA is a text based event held here in the community. Feel free to post questions as you think of them!
- EmilyPerina
Community Manager
Hi Mandy! This is a text-based AMA, so please feel free to add any questions you have now. And this event page will remain up after the live hour for anyone to view the questions and answers.
Are there any plans for notifications in the Viva engage application in Teams, It would be great to get notification and notis in the app in a similare way messages etc in teams. (like you have 2 missed messeges)
- Paul_BarrHi! The Viva Engage app in Teams currently has its own notifications "bell" and the Inbox icon in the top right portion of the Engage app UX. This is where people can catch up on recent activity relevant for them. We are also adding notifications for certain Engage activity into the Teams Activity "bell", so people will see a badge on that bell with an unread count when they have received a Storyline Announcement, when they have activity in an AMA event, when they are mentioned by another person, when Storyline posts made by people they follow, etc. Overtime we will grow and refine these Teams activity notifications. There are not currently plans to give the Engage App Icon in the Teams bar its own unread activity count, mostly due to limitations in that functionality being exposed to all applications. We will take this feedback into consideration as we revisit that capability. Thank you.
- Yes please!! This is the number one piece of feedback we have had from colleagues since surfacing Viva Engage in the Teams side bar....we're trying to reduce email and therefore loads of email notifications isn't what people want, unless it's an announcement it's just annoying them, they just want a notifications style nudge with a red dot on the Teams side bar to let them know there's something to go in and view in Viva Engage...just like they do with Teams Chat
emilywangHi Juliet, definitely! We are working on a more refined approach of which types of notifications should appear as an email (i.e. an important Announcement) vs. going into other channels (i.e. Teams, Viva Engage Bell), so we will continue to update our customers as we work through these changes and updates. Thanks for your patience!
- Hi! I won't be able to make it to the event, but I have this question: will there be a new version of an API (with regard to the old Yammer API) coming out that can perform CRUD operations on Yammer / Viva Engage artifacts? That would be super useful for the business / governance scenarios we have at our customers. Thank you for doing this AMA!
- espnguyenThanks for the question, Pieter. Currently, there are no planned updates to the Yammer API.
- Thank you for your reply, Steve! To follow up, is there anything foreseen in the Graph API with respect to Viva Engage?
Hi team,
Here are some questions I've gathered from recent customer interactions that you may want to expand/clarify during the session or respond below pls...in no particular order;
1. Is there an additional charge for the list of new features in order to access such functionality as Leadership Corner and Answers features? - will these remain switched off/unavailable to all non premium Viva customers pls?
2. For all existing M365 license plan holders, will everything remain the same (e.g. Yammer as we know it today) and continue at the same pricing just under a new name, Viva Engage?
3. Still so much confusion between 'Stories' and 'storyline' - what to use when, why are both needed, can you switch on one and not an other?
4. Admin roles - Previously, as a network Verified admin, this particular customer assumed that they would have access to 'everything' - e.g. setting up the admin portal, accessing private communities, assigning new admins to existing communities etc but they have advised that this is not the case anymore - is there an up to date description of what each network role entails and which is the most suitable one to be assigned in order to carry out all internal network duties across the internal network pls?
- MichaelHolste1. Yes, these new features are only available to with Viva suite licenses. 2. Yes, M365 customers will continue have access to the existing Yammer value with no price increase or licensing increases. 3. Our positioning and thinking around "stories" is shifting. We'll be focusing on storyline with media posts being a natural part of those posts but more to share soon. Users should post to their storyline when they want to share their thoughts, express themselves, amplify their work, share in a way that doesn't quite belong in a community or email. Leaders should use storyline to broadly share with their own voice. Stories is still in preview and we will make changes before GA. Admins can turn off storyline. 4. Yes, you can find all of the guidance relating to the new admin roles here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/viva/engage/eac-key-admin-roles-permissions
- Great questions...
- Hello, I won't be able to make the session due to time-zone complications, however I have a question. When running a live event in a Viva Engage in a community, who is able to create such an event? E.g. can anyone who is a member of that community create one, or do they have to have to be community admin, Yammer admin?
- espnguyenSorry to have missed you Andrew! Live Events in an Engage community can be created by the admins of that community. For more, check out this article. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/yammer/manage-yammer-groups/yammer-live-events
