At Microsoft, we recognize the need to easily and securely collaborate with people outside of your business. Organizations need to engage with vendors, partners, customers, consultants and other stakeholders while adhering to privacy and security policies and protocols that keep your business running smoothly. In December, we announced a preview for Azure AD business-to-business (B2B) guest support in Yammer and today, we are excited to announce that Guest Access in Yammer powered by Azure B2B is now generally available.
What is Azure Active Directory B2B?
Azure B2B collaboration enables you to share your company's applications and services with guest users from any other organization, while maintaining control over your own corporate data. Work safely and securely with external partners, large or small, even if they don't have Azure AD or an IT department.
How can you enable the Azure AD B2B guest functionality in your Yammer network?
If your Yammer network is provisioned after December 15th, 2020 then Azure AD B2B guest functionality is already enabled by default for you. Community admins in your Yammer network can add guests to their communities. Note: Yammer network should be aligned to Native Mode to enable Azure AD B2B guest functionality.
The functionality is now available to all existing Yammer networks but disabled by default. Yammer network admins can enable guest access on their networks from Yammer admin center > Security Settings > External messaging settings.
Azure AD B2B guest support in Yammer brings the following capabilities:
- Robust policies for guest invitations and providing access give administrators full control over who can invite guests, which organizations guests can be invited from, and which communities they can be invited to.
- Simplification of guest modes in Yammer with community level guests. A guest can be added to any specific Yammer community based on the admin policy instead of the entire network.
- Easy and compliant external collaboration (within Europe networks) for Yammer networks with data based in the EU geo.
- Parity between participation in Yammer communities across all Yammer experiences (web, mobile (Android / iOS).
- Guests access to community resources like files stored in SharePoint.
- Ability to review guest membership and block unauthorized guest access through Azure AD access reviews and track the guest lifecycle through Azure AD audit logs.
Learn more about Guest Access in Yammer here. We’re continuing to invest in features and capabilities that foster engagement and deliver value to businesses. Stay tuned for updates soon.
Nagaraj Venkatesh
Nagaraj is a PM on the Yammer engineering team
Resources:
Business-to-business (B2B) Guest support in Yammer Preview - Customer Terms and FAQ - Yammer
Microsoft 365 guest sharing settings reference | Microsoft Docs