Yammer Group Name Managing Change - Change Management

[Lillian Diaz]

The recent changes with Yammer Connected groups bring many benefits: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Yammer-and-Office-365-Groups-d8c239dc-a48b-47ab-b85e-6b4b81... but one behavior that will need to be managed is educating my users to avoid changing Yammer group names after creation. I tried it for one of our groups and the new Yammer group name took place about 15 min. after I saved changes. I could see the change in desktop view (within the group). However, the change was not visible on the side navigation nor on team site name nor on the mobile app. old Yammer group name reverted back the next day. Correct me if I'm wrong this should be expected due to DL/O365 connection. So aside from discouraging people to loosely make name changes (like in the past) my question - what is the best practice for changing Yammer group names? Has anyone tested changing Yammer group names after backfill? How are you managing this change?

[#2]

Thanks, Lillian for the great question. Eager to learn from peoples' experiences here.

[#3]

Also eager to hear the answer.  Related question.  User deleted a Yammer Group.  After 24 hours, the name of the Yammer group still shows in use, preventing us form creating a new Yammer group with the same name.  Is that expected behavior?  Can we not reclaim names from deleted Yammer groups?

[#4]

Hi Christopher,

From what I understand, for deleted Yammer groups, this is expected behavior due to the connected O365 resources. I think I read somewhere it takes about 30 days. Not entirely sure, I'll try to dig the original conversation. 

[#5]

Thanks Larry, I opened a ticket with MS for guidance. So far what I know (and what they said) is that because Yammer connected groups touch on everything (SP, exchange etc.) it's not as easy as it used to be and will require the GA to help make changes. I'll make sure to report back what I learned...stay tuned!

[#6]

Just updating this thread for anyone having this issue or question. I found out that for some reason there was an exception when the backfill occurred in our network on 5/31. Since the group was never really "connected" the Yammer group name change kept reverting back to old name and change did not reflect on O365 group side. Also, the Yammer admins did not carry over as O365 Group owners. Further, since the O365 group owner has to make the change there was no way of making name change to stick. Another red flag to let you know there is a problem, is to look for a difference in membership numbers between Yammer legacy group and O365 group members. These have to match.
That said, MS is still working with us to help correct the problem so the ticket is still open. If you have a legacy group that hasn't synced based on the two indicators I mentioned above you might want to open a ticket with MS.

[#7]

So i am having the issue of a Yammer group name not changing. This is for quite a high profile group so keen to get it fixed asap. Do you know if there is any workaround to get this sorted - just concerned that a microsoft support ticket might take days to be received and actioned...(plus I need to raise a ticket with our tech desk for them to raise one with Microsoft, so add on the internal process time).

[#8]

Hi Joanna,

I'm not aware of a workaround (would love to learn if there is one). If the group is high priority (high impact) I would advice you open a ticket and escalate it to urgent to hopefully get faster support. Assuming the issue is still the same exception I'm guessing it might be faster for you since the team might be more familiar now (when I faced this it was just surfacing as an issue). Sorry I can't help further!

[#9]

Lilian,

Did Microsoft ever resolve this one for you? I've just been notified of the same issue with one of our (high-profile) groups, and will be raising a support ticket shortly.

Thanks for any feedback or updates you had from Microsoft.

Cheers,

Ivo

[#10]

Hi @Deleted,

Sorry for the late response. Yes, MS did help us resolve the issue. At the time of this post the issue was due to an exception that occurred when the integration between Yammer and O365 Groups took place.

I don't know if there is a more efficient way to do this besides having the O365 Global Admin making the one time change. If a Yammer group owner wants to make the change MS advised changes should take place on the O365 Group side first. So we go to the Yammer Group SP site (or document library): 

1. Site Information > Change Name.
2. Site Assets > Change OneNote Name
3. Yammer Group Settings > Change Name

FYI, the learning for me was to educate users to take some time to THINK about what they want to name their group to help mitigate these scenarios ;-).

[#11]

Thanks, Lilian.

Ours was also an exception from the integration between Yammer and O365 groups.

We found that the Yammer group admin who was making the changes in Yammer was not listed as owner in O365, hence changes were being overwritten.

Steps to resolve:

1. Added the Yammer group admin as owner in O365. This stopped the changes from reverting back. However, this did not synchronise the group name and privacy settings back to O365.

2. Add myself as group admin. This was reflected in the O365 group

3. Made a minor change to the group name in Yammer. This started reflecting in O365

4. Change the Yammer group name back to what we want it to be. This was fully synchronized in O365, including group privacy settings

I'm thinking that I could have skipped step 1. Once I made the changes which got the group to synchronize, I think that the missing group admin would also have synched. But that will be a test if I run into this again :)