Connect your hybrid workforce with Yammer + OneDrive

 

Microsoft’s 2021 Work Trend Index report shows that over the last year, organizations have learned some powerful lessons about the nature of remote work—most pointedly, that it is likely here to stay. With many organizations planning to implement hybrid work—some mix of office and remote work—almost 50 percent of the workforce is planning to move because they can now work from anywhere. This creates some new challenges for employers, and one of those is how to help your employees build stronger online connections and communities to keep them productive and engaged at work.

In this new world of hybrid work, Yammer along with OneDrive offers employees way to come together socially to share what’s going on in their lives both inside and outside work.

 

Bring together diverse groups and build communities in Yammer

 

Yammer is a best-in-class, secure, and private enterprise social network that empowers employees to be more productive and successful by enabling them to collaborate easily, make decisions faster, and self-organize to take on any business challenge. Where Microsoft Teams is the perfect option for groups working together to deliver specific projects or services, Yammer works best for broader groups of people and open discussion. Organizational or department leaders often use Yammer to share company news, but Yammer can also be valuable for bringing people together to form communities with a common objective or interest—say, a global marketing team at a professional services firm sharing messaging best practices, or two public sector agencies (like a city council and social services) building community outreach programs. Yammer is also great for bringing together inclusive, diverse communities to help improve employee engagement and connectedness.

 

 

And files are a core component to the success of this community experience because files and rich media help drive participation in Yammer. The synergy Yammer shares with both OneDrive and SharePoint enables your employees to have more focused discussions and boost engagement.

With the new file picker experience, employees working in Yammer will soon be able to easily upload files stored in their OneDrive or SharePoint  through a familiar interface, for sharing and collaborating with colleagues all across the organization.

 

Easily upload OneDrive files into Yammer discussions

 

Uploading files from OneDrive or SharePoint to your Yammer community is simple.  Let’s say your Sales Best Practices team is working together to create an updated guide on sales success factors for the global sales team. The project  lead has been collecting examples from around the company of best practices she thinks are good examples for all sales teams to follow. She wants to share the document so other team members can add their own examples and leave comments. She selects the Sales Best Practices community inside Yammer to start the discussion. To add related file she clicks the paperclip icon and then browses cloud location. Yammer also surfaces file suggestions based on one’s recent usage. By default, the Pick files window displays her OneDrive folders and files, including the shortcuts to shared folders she’s added using the Add to OneDrive feature, so she can easily navigate to the document and then click Select to upload it.

 

 

The files experience in Yammer is consistent with OneDrive driving easy and seamless adoption. Also, due to the deep integration between OneDrive and Office, other community members can also select from a variety of tools to annotate, highlight, and comment on content. They can use @mentions to flag comments and tasks for other reviewers, and they can also track version history and restore previous file versions as needed. And because all edits are synced and stored in the cloud, they can start editing a document on one device and finish it on another.

 

 

Select files from Shared libraries, too

 

The sales lead, along with her teammates, has also been contributing to a list of sales collateral references compiled by her team for other groups across the organization to use during sales conferences. Her boss has asked her to share this list with the broader global sales  community on Yammer to get their feedback. She follows the same steps she took to upload her best practices examples document, only this time, in the Pick files window she navigates to the Shared libraries list in the left pane. There, she selects her team’s SharePoint library and navigates to the collateral  to share it with the community.

 

 

Securely share and manage files, even in Yammer

 

A hybrid work environment can heighten worries about exposure of sensitive company or client information for IT. Any secure sharing policies IT has set for OneDrive or SharePoint are automatically adopted by Yammer. IT can also use Microsoft Information Protection to create policies for automatic classification of sensitive data, so if someone creates and shares a document that contains sensitive client data in Yammer, that document will automatically be classified by the system and encrypted for additional protection. This takes the burden of worrying about security off workers and helps to prevent data loss. Additionally, IT can enable Azure Active Directory Business-Business (Azure AD B2B) guest access so that people inside the organization can securely collaborate and share information with vendors, suppliers, or consultants from outside the organization.

IT can also keep an eye on how teams across the organization work with shared content, adding an extra layer of security and control. Through detailed audit logs and reports available in the Microsoft 365 Security and Compliance Center, IT can trace OneDrive and SharePoint activity at the folder, file, and user levels, so they can see at a glance if any unauthorized users have tried to access sensitive company or client information. Every user action, including changes and modifications made to files and folders, is recorded for a full audit trail. In addition, even remotely, IT has the device visibility and control that’s especially important for thwarting breaches and ransomware attacks.

 

Learn more and stay engaged..

 

Stay updated with Yammer news and announcements by following the Yammer blog  and visit the Yammer documentation learn more about features and functionalities.

Check out our latest episode of Sync Up- a OneDrive podcast to hear the experts discuss Yammer and how OneDrive supports tech engagement among your employees.

 

 

We continue to evolve OneDrive as a place to access, share, and collaborate on all your files in Office 365, keeping them protected and readily accessible on all your devices, anywhere.

 

You can stay up-to-date on all things via the OneDrive Blog and the OneDrive release notes.

Check out the new and updated OneDrive documentation.

Take advantage of end-user training resources on our Office support center.

 

Thank you again for your support of OneDrive. We look forward to your continued feedback on UserVoice and hope to connect with you at Ignite or another upcoming Microsoft or community-led event.

 

Thanks for your time reading all about OneDrive,

 

Ankita Kirti

OneDrive | Microsoft