Convert O365 group with Exchange conversations to Yammer

Iron Contributor

We have created an O365 Group, and it defaulted to Exchange based conversations.  Now that the users have been exposed to the Group, they want to use Yammer as their conversation tool instead of the exchange mailbox.  Is there any way to convert an existing group from exchange to Yammer conversations?  We do not need to move the conversation content.  If you're about to tell me I need to create an entirely new O365 Group from Yammer,  I'd like to hear how to migrate content.  The group already has built a SharePoint site and uploaded a lot of documents.  

2 Replies
Unfortunately there is no clear way to move between an Outlook group or a Yammer group.
The approach would be to completely migrate out and back in again - if you don't have to keep the conversation content itself then that's a major hurdle out of the way.
Things you'll need to do:
- when deleting the existing Outlook group, purge it to ensure you can retain the SharePoint URL
- any OneNote content can be moved within OneNote itself
- moving from SharePoint to SharePoint is easiest using a 3rd party tool such as Sharegate as it will preserve permissions. However if it's just a document library with no specific sharing then it might be easy enough to download all the content and then re-upload it to the new library

Before doing any of this, have you thought about using Teams for the conversation instead of Yammer? It would mean you wouldn't have to migrate at all - just add the Team on top of the Group.
Bummer, I was worried you were going to say that. Unfortunately there are LOT of documents, but it may be worth the effort. I was just speaking with a coworker about how Teams would work here. I still have trouble identifying the best scenario for this. The O365 Group was built with a focus on using the Sharepoint Team site (some news items, Delve driven content, etc). They wanted to add the Yammer feed to the page as well (which you can't do with Teams). That isn't a deciding factor, but if the conversation was in Teams, they would have to go back and forth between Teams and the SharePoint page frequently.