External Networks and Communities

[Colin Klenner]

My organization is new to Yammer, we have one Internal Network. We have a considerable number of people who we work with external to the organization of a regular basis. Because of security concerns we will not be adding these people to Internal Communities. Therefore we would like to create External Networks but none of the documentation I have discovered clarifies the following questions:

• How many external networks are allowed for our organization?
• Do External users have access to the whole external network or just Communities in that Network?
• Can external users belong to more than one Network?
• Are private Communities allowed in External Networks?
• Are Communities in Private Networks able to be published as news feeds on SharePoint web sites? (Internal is allowed)
• Are Communities in Private Networks able to be accessed as a tab in a Team channel? (Internal is allowed)
• Do external users have to have Microsoft credentials / email address?

Thank you in advance for any answers you can give me.

[#2 · Accepted solution]

@Colin Klenner 

• How many external networks are allowed for our organization? - Unlimited as far as I know. 
• Do External users have access to the whole external network or just Communities in that Network? - The whole network. 
• Can external users belong to more than one Network? Yes. 
• Are private Communities allowed in External Networks? Yes
• Are Communities in Private Networks able to be published as news feeds on SharePoint web sites? (Internal is allowed) Yes, although you might have to use embed as opposed to the Yammer conversations Webpart. 
• Are Communities in Private Networks able to be accessed as a tab in a Team channel? (Internal is allowed) - Good question. Not using the default Yammer app, but you could again use embed and then add a web page to the channel. 
• Do external users have to have Microsoft credentials / email address? No. 

Here is some more info in Yammer Embed. We just announced at Ignite we are going to be updating the look and feel of it to align with the new Yammer soon. But you won't need to do anything so can just start using it now and it will get updated automatically. 

https://developer.yammer.com/docs/embed

[#3]

@Angus Florance Please allow me to jump on to this great question and add one of my own, hopefully it will be seen as being in context of the original question.

We have some users who have been invited as guests in Yammer at another organization. Currently we have our Yammer org set up in native mode and only a few users actually have a license, as we're not currently interested in rolling it out internally.

But only those users who do have a Yammer license with us, are able to access the Yammer network at our partner. This seems to be counter to the last question. If a guest user is not required to have a Microsoft (organizational) account, why then are they required to have a Yammer license, when they do have such an account? Maybe there's something I'm missing?

[#4]

@Angus Florance Thank you, this has been a great help to me.

[#5]

@Allan With Sørensen 

"But only those users who do have a Yammer license with us, are able to access the Yammer network at our partner. This seems to be counter to the last question. If a guest user is not required to have a Microsoft (organizational) account, why then are they required to have a Yammer license, when they do have such an account? Maybe there's something I'm missing?"

My understanding is that the control you have (as a Yammer Administrator) is to only allow people with a Yammer licence access to Yammer is connected to the user accounts in your tenancy so that will also be the case if accessing an external network using their tenancy user account.  It's not the point of stopping them from having access full stop, it's a control to let the admin or business determine whether they should be accessing Yammer at all using their tenancy account. There could be a number of reasons for this.