"But Now I Have Two Sites!" A Tip for After the Yammer Backfill

[Chris Slemp]

The attached demo was inspired by @Geoffrey Bronner's question over on this thread about the recent announcement that existing Yammer groups would be "backfilled" with their own SharePoint sites, OneNotes, and Planner boards--becoming Office 365-Connected groups.

If you've already created sites you're using with Yammer groups and have manually linked them in the past, there's a pretty simple, if manual, way to easily move all the files to the new sites that O365 will soon be creating for your groups. Here's my quick demo:

We'd love to help your org adopt all of Office 365! Schedule a free initial consult here http://bit.ly/2pvh2I7 

[#2]

Hi @Chris Slemp, thanks for that, good summary of the most common scenario. I'm just not enjoying the prospect of doing that 50+ times!

A few thoughts.

First, it should be noted integration done manually before connected groups also involves use of Yammer embed on the SharePoint sites so the relationship runs in both directions and is not merely a pinned link in Yammer and I think that's a pretty common thing.

Second, while your suggestion is valid it runs into challenges if a site is using more than just a document library or a notebook. For example we have...

• sites built from organizational templates with branding etc.
• sites in collections designed for external sharing which is disabled by default when they are created for a Yammer group (or Teams).
• sites that are using other out of the box templates like an enterprise wiki
• sites with enhancements like LiveTiles which cannot work in modern connected sites (yet?)

So site owners have to consider what they may be giving up if they migrate content to a new connected site.

I get that there is no real connection between pre-existing groups and sites so clearly Microsoft can't do much about that but it seems more practical to give Yammer group owners the option to either prevent creation of all the new resources or a post-creation way to hide that navigational section in the Yammer sidebar and ignore them.

FYI @Joanna Lovett

[#3]

This is really only a crowdsourced solution. I'd never suggest this to an IT shop, but as an end-user workaround. And yep, it's for hopefully the 80% use case where SharePoint is mostly a file share. If they have much more to their site, then it's more than a team site and they likely wouldn't be getting what they want from the connected "group site" anyway.

[#4]

@Deleted or @Amy Dolzine - what are your plans for any of these groups that you've manually linked to sites?