Administrators' Right to Control Groups

[Phil Wilson]

Can you help us to understand how our administrators can carefully control the roll-out and proliferation of Yammer Groups? In the past we have had no control, whatsoever, except to create External Groups. What has us extremely concerned is that Microsoft has told us that their strategy is to let all users create Groups, at will, with no oversight by Administrators. This is a recipe for disaster after having learned the hard way for over 3 years using other top platforms. 

We look forward to hearing your thoughts!

Phil

[#2]

hello phil

i fully agree with you. Not only in yammer, also the O365Group creation via for instance MS Teams should be somehow restricted in order to not ending up with hundreds/thousands of groups.

In regards to yammer, i guess the answer to the following forum question says everything:

https://yammer.uservoice.com/forums/399627-yammer/suggestions/15626478-enable-admins-to-manage-the-c...

"we're unlikely to ever build this"

so i would not bet here :(

Question: if you would have a tool with a dashboard where you see all yammer groups and o365groups in combination of all their corresponding resources and usage (SPO site, EXO box, ....), would this somehow help you to control this a bit ?

I know, it would not help you at all to control the creation of groups but it could help you to have fullinsights of your landscape.

I would appreciate your comments :)

[#3]

Thanks Stefan, for sharing your thoughts. We, too, saw the Microsoft comment that "we're unlikely to ever build this". Our management's reaction was shock and dismay. Why would a product manager ever respond to a request or idea in this fashion. I have worked for quite a few software firms and this type of respond is simply unprofessional. If this person were to look at the market for Professionals' Networked Community (PNC) platforms, they would realize that the Critical Success Factor (CSF) for a community of interest orcommunity of practice is to carefully monitor the roll-out of new groups, especially when the population size is small. In essence, we'd like Microsoft to conduct an aggressive Quality Function Deployment (QFD) / Voice of the Customer... of the requisite needs like those that Stefan, myself and others have expressed.

Thanks for listening!

Phil

[#4]

Though you cannot control the creation of new groups, you can control the retirement of idle groups. With the API and powershell, you can schedule a powershell script to view the last date of message activity within a group and based off that, you could delete the group. If your concern was that there is a proliferation of groups inside your network. Of course, you can also send an email message to the admin of the group and let them know before....

Not sure if that helps.

[#5]

hi Victor,

i would be a bit careful in regards to check group activity.

If you refer to the new o365group activity report, then Microsoft measures ONLY activity within EXO. So this Report gives you just one piece of the activity "cake" but by far not really the full "cake"  (e.g. activity via teams, Spo site, planner.etc..).

[#6]

Though we can't restrict the creation of new groups, there are ways to provide levels of oversight and control.
1. Have a sound and sensible governance policy in place. Something so that, when new groups of concern are created, you have something to point to. "We have to delete this group because our governance policy says we have to." I am sure people in this community would be happy to share their governance policy with you if you don't have one in place yet.
2. Monitor the homepage newsfeed. Whenever a group is created, you will see a post made there, and it is then that any problems can be addressed.

I certainly understand the desire to have admin control over the creation of new groups, but I think one of the thing that makes Yammer work is its openness and transparency. I think the more users are able to do on their own, the more engaged with the platform they will be.

I also think it is a positive feature that we, as admins, need to be engaged with the platform ourselves in order to provide effective oversight.