Last November, we announced a new vision for Yammer – an entirely reimagined and redesigned experience that powers community, engagement, and knowledge across Microsoft 365. In the time since, the way we work and the way we connect has changed dramatically. While we adapt to this change, the release of the new Yammer provides organizations new ways to connect and engage their employees, align on what’s important, and drive outcomes.
While the new Yammer only just launched in July this year, we've been hard at work to build new features and capabilities to meet the needs of our leaders, communicators, community managers, and Firstline Workers, so they can work together to share ideas, connect, and find the next breakthrough idea.
Here’s our list of what’s new for Yammer at Microsoft Ignite 2020.
New for engagement
New live events experience – A more immersive attendee experience showcases the video with conversations alongside, so you can post, reply and ask questions without missing a thing.
Moderated conversations in live events – Producers of a live event in Yammer can moderate comments, questions and answers posted in a live event page before they are published and visible to everyone in the event.
Reactions – Express your feelings on the conversations you care most about. In addition to likes, you can now express love, laughter, celebration, thank you, and sadness, with even more inclusive reactions coming soon. Learn more.
Yammer conversation search in SharePoint and Office.com
Microsoft Search helps you find information, answers and experts across the organization. And now, Yammer conversations are included in Microsoft Search results, so you can find the discussions, people, and answers you're looking for, all in one place.
New for communicators and community managers
Delegate posting (Post on behalf of) – This highly requested feature, enables designated communicators to post on behalf of leadership, allowing for key company messages and announcements to be clearly communicated on behalf of the organization.
Priority Announcements – Admins can boost the visibility of important announcements by sending notifications to the inboxes of all community members.
Featured Conversations – Improve visibility and engagement and add emphasis and longevity to news and campaigns by setting a conversation as featured in All Company or any other community. Featuring a conversation also increases its prominence in the Yammer discovery feed, for people outside the community.
Mute Conversations and mute community content
Hide conversations and content from specific community in the discovery feed. Soon, admins and users will be able to tune the AI powering Yammer’s feed with the option to mute unwanted conversations and community content.
Send SharePoint news to Yammer
Expand the reach and the conversation of your news posts. You can now send articles from SharePoint directly into Yammer communities and include questions, polls, praise, and rich text.
Communities App in Teams
Notifications in Teams’ activity feed – Get notified of your Yammer announcements and mentions in the Communities app for Microsoft Teams on desktop, web and mobile.
Search in Teams – Search for Yammer conversations while in the Communities app.
Yammer desktop experiences
Many organizations have found using desktop Yammer to be a great way to get employees to engage with Yammer. In the future there's going to be two great ways to get a Yammer experience on your desktop.
Communities app in Teams
The community app in Teams which is available now can be deployed centrally. It provides the complete Yammer experience embedded right in Teams. This app will also provide desktop toast notifications for any at mentions or announcements in your company.
Progressive Web Apps (PWA)
We're working to enable the Yammer web experience to be a progressive web app, so you can install the Yammer web app on your desktop from a modern browser, like Microsoft Edge. The Yammer PWA can then be launched like any other app, in a dedicated window, and will provide desktop notifications, even if you don’t have the app open.
New Insights
At Yammer, we want to empower people with the insights and analytics they need to amplify the creation of communities and connections. Coming soon, admins and community members will have dashboards available to help them measure activity and understand how their communities are engaging.
Community insights
Manage and moderate content faster with Yammer community insights. Key metrics help admins and users see activity, measure engagement, and find valuable insights.
Conversation insights - See which conversations perform best. New insights into impressions, total views, click-through rate, and a break down of reactions.
Live event insights – Improve your live events viewership. Monitor attendance, which segments had the greatest viewership, and see where those views are coming from, all geared to help you optimize your current and future events.
Q&A insights – Display trend of questions, answers, and best answers count. Use the answer ratio to understand progress toward answering questions.
Learn more about the insights coming to Yammer in this video:
New for admins
New leadership connection site template – Create a compelling experience for connecting leaders and employees with a built-in template that you can apply to any site—for example, the site backing your leadership connection community. The template brings together conversation, news, and resources, and showcases upcoming events. With wiki-like simplicity, you can customize the baseline experience reflect your organization’s brand, and the needs and voice of your leadership.
Guest access – Add guests from outside your organization to your communities using AzureB2B, a secure, compliant external collaboration framework. Whether calling in experts, vendors, or customers, new guest access makes life easier for administrators to manage guests. Learn more and sign up for the preview here.
Create in-place retention policies for Yammer – Easily configure policies to retain and delete content as you do for Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, and Exchange.
Embed – Bring the new Yammer experience to your web page using the updated embed experience to display a single user, community, or topic feed. Once available, this will upgrade your existing embed web part without any action needed. Learn more about what’s possible and how to sign up for our embed preview on our Developer site.
New for knowledge
Upvote answers – This feature will allow people to upvote responses that they find useful and appropriate – to help crowdsource and democratize solutions and ideas. The top voted answers will rise to the top of the thread.
Convert questions – Have a conversation that really should be posted as a question? Community admins can now convert the discussion to Q&A, enabling users to reply and mark best answers and take advantage of filtering.
New Topics experiences
Topic previews and descriptions – See topic previews while adding a topic to help understand and select the appropriate term. You can add a custom description while creating a new topic in Yammer.
Popular topics – Stay on top of community discussions with a list of trending topics that includes a count of how many times the topic has been used. Select a topic to filter the conversations in the community to those tagged with the topic.
New topic pages with filters in Yammer
Explore all of the discussions across network relating to a topic with new topics pages that include the topic description, a list of who is following the topic, and a complete, filterable collection of the discussions so you can stay on top of the topics you care about.
Project Cortex topics in Yammer – Project Cortex uses AI to understand the work that’s happening across teams and systems, and automatically organizes information and activity around topics. Project Cortex then delivers knowledge about topics in the apps you use every day, including Yammer. You will be able to hover over a topic in a Yammer conversation and see details about the topic, including a definition, experts, related Q&A, and resources; and you can click through to the topic page.
Yammer conversations in Project Cortex – Project Cortex topic pages are like a Wikipedia page for the enterprise, curating information and expertise about a topic. Topic pages feature conversations tagged with the topic in Yammer, along with resources, experts and activity from across Microsoft 365 and connected external systems.
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Go deeper
Learn more about these features and how to use them in our Ignite roadmap session and digital breakout session.
Roadmap: Engage employees with the new Yammer: Communities, Communications, Knowledge Sharing – Session 1101
The new Yammer is here. See how Yammer has been completely redesigned to power leadership engagement, company-wide communication, and knowledge sharing. This session will cover what's new and what's next for Yammer.
Employee Engagement and Communities in Microsoft 365 (Repeats 3x) – Session DBO
Learn how Microsoft 365 powers employee engagement using Yammer, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, and Stream to empower leaders to connect with their organizations, align people to common goals, and to drive cultural transformation. Dive into the latest innovations including live events, new Yammer experiences and integrations, and the intelligent intranet and see how it all comes together.
And for more detailed solutions, check out the full list of Yammer sessions and opportunities to connect with the product team at Ignite 2020. Many of these capabilities will be rolling out over the coming weeks, so keep an eye on our blog and social to stay up to date with news and updates.
Murali Sitaram
VP of Yammer and Microsoft 365 Groups
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