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Overview: On February 23, 2016 Microsoft and Yammer product team hosted an action-packed YamJam to answer questions and listen to feedback. Below is a summary of what was discussed. We hope you join us live next time!Resources Enterprise Social Service Update Network Group Office 365 Roadmap Yammer User VoiceTopicsGeneral Yammer GroupsOffice 365 Groups and YammerUser ExperienceMobileOffice 365 IntegrationSharePoint and Yammer AnalyticsYammer RoadmapGeneralQ: What are the plans for improving Yammer Embed? A: We don't have any specific plans to share yet, but this is useful as we look at the Yammer platform. Q: Why are we not going to see rich text in posts so folks like developer groups can have stack overflow style posts with code showing? Right now, the only thing that translates are URL links.?A: We do plan to add a bit more rich text to Yammer posts. There's a balance between the simplicity of Yammer posts and what that does for posting and reading versus the power and flexibility of email style rich text. At a minimum, I expect us to test ideas like bullets and numbering. Perhaps bold and italics. Not sure about embedding code though. We'll know more when we get started on this later this year (hopefully).Q: Any chance it will ever be possible to allow SOME third-party apps without allowing them all?A: Ever? I think so. We want to invest more in integrations and make it much easier to connect apps to a group. When we do that, I expect we'll add more control around it, but it's far too early to say what specifically.Q: Are there any plans to incorporate Yammer into Exchange Online?A: We'll have some level of integration once Yammer hooks into the Office 365 Groups service, in that you will get an Outlook group calendar with every Yammer group. Beyond that, we don't currently have plans to integrate Yammer and Outlook conversations. We think these two modalities provide different experiences that meet different needs; for example, email has a ton of rich functionality that Yammer conversations don't. Conversely, Yammer conversations are designed to be lightweight and engaging to encourage participation. They're also designed to prevent the forking of threads. Merging the two would cause us to lose what's valuable about each.Q: One of the things I deal with is document management. I can store files in Sharepoint, OneDrive, and Yammer. Is there consideration to not allow documents in Yammer only hyperlinks to O365 documents in an Internal Yammer Network?A: The longer-term plan is for greater integration between Yammer and OneDrive for business, which would mean that groups in Yammer automatically have OneDrive file storage. In the short term, there is no plans to 'not allow documents in Yammer'. But long term the plan is to start using OneDrive for storing Yammer docs. Also, we are working on integrating Yammer groups with Office 365 Groups, which will give users a more seamless document management experience (more details will be available as we get closer to this.)Q: One question regarding Yammer's competition: if a customer is looking for a social tool (e.g. no Office 365 bought yet or planned). They are evaluating Yammer beside others: what are your best arguments going for Yammer against the big competitors? A: Yammer is the world’s leading tool for social collaboration, used at over 500,000 companies including 85% of the Fortune 500. Because Yammer is part of Office 365 platform, all Yammer customers (regardless of whether or not they also purchase Office 365) benefit from things like integration with Office Online and best-in-class control, compliance, privacy, and security. Companies want an enterprise tool that helps employees get more done, while users want a tool that’s easy to use. Yammer provides the best of both worlds, which is why industry-leading companies such as British Airways, AON, Goodyear, and Booz Allen Hamilton choose Yammer to help their teams connect and collaborate across the globe. Q: What about gamification, which is successfully impacting engagement in different employee-related initiatives and projects - what are your plans in that area? Are there plans to implement things like recognition through earning badges, points, leader boards, ranks, based on certain activity on Yammer, certain user achievements in terms of collaboration/contributions. A: No plans for gamification at the moment, but that's not to say that we'll never go down that path. We used to expose leader boards in the product, and we didn't get much traction from that.Q: With the new rollout/integration of Yammer in Office 365, we now have Yammer licensing options for our users. We are a K12 organization with 280,000+ students that we do want to have access to Yammer at this time. It appears that Yammer is an "on by default" license and thus we are going to have to work on some scripts to turn this off. This is a major pain point for us and I wish that consideration would be given on how decisions like this would affect a large tenant.A: We realize the change management challenges for large organization like yours, and large organizations got a larger time frame to plan (2 months). We also have PowerShell script examples to un-assign Yammer licenses in bulk - more details here: ?(look at the 'manage licenses using PowerShell' section). Also, we recently released the functionality to 'block users without licenses'. Hope that helps.Q: When will there be an API to provision external users to a public Yammer network programmatically?A: There's definitely support for that idea on our product team; perhaps will do an API, or maybe we'll do something with a URL.Q: We've been trying to work out a more organized communication methodology between customers and the product team / support. I thought that the Yammer Site Status Page () was a way for everyone to stay on the same page when incidents occurred, only to find out this week that this is not necessarily the case. Could you please tell us the threshold criteria you apply for an incident to be reflected on the Yammer Site Status page?A: There are a lot of factors taken into account on what makes it into the status or not: things like SLA impacting, number of users affected, functionality limited or affected, etc. If you think about it, it is a hard balance, because posting every single little thing here would make this site useless as a source. That being said, we continue to tweak how we think about this and I took your feedback back then to figure out if this is a case where we should have.Q: Does anyone have tips on the best way to share content between Video and Yammer?A: Post a link from Office 365 Video into Yammer. They have a nice feature in Office 365 Video that allows you to both post and see the conversations in Yammer right alongside the video. That way you can also leverage the view statistics (which are currently in first release.)Q: Are there any plans to change Yammer's branding? E.g. merge it to the Office 365 experience with another name/no-name/workload. Change the logos, etc.?A: This has been said many times but Microsoft and Office 365 are committed to the Yammer platform and brand.Q: Will Yammer conversations ever be integrated into the desktop Skype for Business application??A: We are definitely looking into how to integrate with Skype for Business for chat, video and other real-time collaboration.Q: I heard something about New Group admin assistance...walking them through filling out key information - is that a real thing?A: We are certainly thinking about how to improve the experience of creating new groups, but there is no detailed plan for this yet.Q: Our corporate comms team has expressed concern with lack of branding in Yammer. We're trying to establish as seamless a look and feel when switching between SharePoint Online and Yammer but the random color of the headers and the menu not even matching Office 365 branding is a bit frustrating. Any update on when we might have more control over that or if it will start defaulting to theme colors in in Office 365 unless we override?A: We are currently piloting the ability for group admins to change the color of the header. If you are the admin of any groups here on the Office 365 Network, you should already be able to see it on here. We expect broader roll-out within the next week or so. In addition, we are also looking into further branding options, such as for the "All Company" group. In terms of the ability to further brand the overall Office 365 suite, however, the Yammer team will have to align with the plans of the overall Office 365 development.Q: Can the product team please assure me that we will never see marketing content (including for third-party Yammer apps) in our enterprise home user feeds? I can live with advertising mobile access to Yammer (though some other networks may not) but actual revenue-targeted marketing to us in our own platform for doing work would likely be a deal-breaker.A: I can confirm that there won't be 'revenue-targeted' or paid marketing content in feeds. That feed is a good way to expose Yammer features (like the mobile apps) that newer users may not be aware of, but the aim is to improve people's Yammer experience, nothing else.Q: Is there an alternative for YammerNow planned?A: You can still use the Yammer mobile apps to send private messages, but that experience is more like long-form posts than quick chat messages. If you're an Office 365 customer, we'd recommend the Skype for Business mobile apps as a direct replacement.Q: We are moving toward the enterprise Office 365 with Yammer, however we already have hundreds of employees participating in social groups using freemium Yammer since couple of years.?Can we migrate their content seamlessly to Enterprise Yammer? Few details that influence this: The login to freemium Yammer is with official 'email address', whereas the login to Office 365 will be our company 'Portal ID' and AD password. Email address will be a supporting attribute in AD. So, is there a way to link user's identity of email address in freemium Yammer, to the enterprise account for the user in Office 365? A: The existing freemium network will get promoted to be your Enterprise network: just make sure the domain of the network is registered in Office 365. For identities, make sure the AAD email attributes include the email addresses these users used in Yammer and their identities will also be connected once it gets activated. Lots of details on Yammer and Office 365 integrations and management can be found here: Q: We currently have different teams that roll into totally different parts of our organization supporting Office 365 workloads (example Skype and Exchange in one org and SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, Yammer in another), and it's posing some challenges. With all the integration across the products, is there a recommended RACI to best support the Office 365 suite?A: Yes, the various products in Office 365 are relatively deep in the features/functions they offer, and coordinating the rollout is challenging. Have you checked out FastTrack - that is the portal that helps companies onboard to Office 365, and have several best-practice documents and other tools?. Specifically they look ACROSS workloads to help customers adopt Office 365.Q: Will it be possible to setup Yammer in the adequate language based on AD properties or browser language settings or other criteria?A: If your Yammer network is connected to an Office 365 tenant then Yammer will respect the tenant's language setting. We're currently thinking about better detection of language (based on things like browser settings, as you say) but we've nothing definite to share yet. If you were a user authenticating through Office 365 on a Japanese tenant, when you accessed Yammer, your language setting would be Japanese. It wouldn't apply to someone from outside the tenant who joins an external network. The setting is at the user level.Q: Could you shed more light on the plans for OneDrive and Skype to replace file and instant messaging workloads? A: The next step in the journey is connecting Yammer Groups to Office 365 Groups. Work on that is in progress, but it'll take some time. That work is a pre-cursor to getting our files into OneDrive. So no clear roadmap yet, but we're making progress in that direction.Yammer Groups Q: Has there been any progress in introducing the opportunity to move a post to another group (rather than share) and also edit a post?A: It's something we are looking to do in the future, but no dates at this stage.?Q: I have seen a pop-up dialog when creating a group for which purpose this group is meant. Could you give us more information about what you are planning to do with this functionality and what happens when choosing different answers??A: The screen you are mentioning is an experiment / research project to collect more information in this respect, as well as to establish any impact on activity in the group. It is the first step toward more user guidance in group creation, so that we can further increase the usefulness of groups for various purposes. We do not have the full results for this test nor firmly established next steps.Q: How does Yammer view Groups on the Office 365 Network (e.g. Yammer & Enterprise Social, Yammer Bugs)? How do you want them to integrate with your formal support channels? From your perspective, do you find them helpful? If so, how (or why not)?A: Sometimes we find an issue that's common among multiple customers, and can act on it quickly (several reasons for this - may be a side effect of something we shipped recently for example). In this case, we can fix the root cause before a lot of other customers hit it. But as I mentioned, posts in the community network are not a replacement to formal support channels.Q: Is there any talk of having "verified" groups, kind of like on Twitter? We have hundreds of groups, and a lot of repeats, and we would love a way to indicate a specific group as the OFFICIAL group for that topic?A: Great idea. I'll pass it along to the PM heading up our Teams on Web initiative.Q: Large Networks have governance and ruling on Yammer Groups, but a couple of things are missing such as the ability to categorize Yammer Groups (a metadata), a default or built-in indicator within the Yammer Group Directory highlighting the fact no new message were posted within a group since X days, the ability to enforce some naming rules or naming convention. Do you have some plan on such topics?A: Thanks for the suggestion. We are experimenting with some ideas around prompting users for the intent of the group to help them participate in those groups better. As we get closer to Yammer groups integrating with Office 365 Groups, we can share more details. Q: At the beginning of this month, Microsoft blogged that "Yammer will hook into the Office 365 Groups service in the first half of 2016". What will the Yammer Group creation and Yammer group management experience look like when this integration takes place?A: Design is still being sorted out, but, as of right now, for Yammer users, it will look very similar as it looks today. We want minimal disruption for Yammer users. It also enables management of groups via Azure AD which is something that was not available before. Easier management or deletion, yes. Creation control, less likely since it collides very heavily with Yammer's vision of self-organization, but we are still tweaking things up.Q: Our users are creating groups in Yammer that are duplicates of other groups. Are there plans to have an approval process in front of group creation?A: No approval process for group creation.?Q: What's going on with the external groups functionality that was supposed to be available late last year?A: We're getting close ... Targeting April for full launch. Because most of the use cases involve adding people who have never used Yammer before, we want to ensure that the experience for them is really easy.Office 365 Groups and YammerQ: What’s the situation with Office 365 Groups and Yammer. Is the plan to integrate Yammer or will the groups have their own independent messaging system?A: We are in the process of integrating Yammer with Office 365 groups to enable shared membership across Yammer and other Office 365 services which will enable to see better integrated experiences across Yammer and other services. Outlook groups will also be an alternative closer to email. We are closely working with Outlook Groups to design the experience (we are part of the same organization, share the same goal). Most of these things are still being designed and figured out, and we'll share more details as we get closer to sharing the story out.User Experience Q: How is work progressing on improvements to notifications??A: We’re making great progress on our first project (wherein we try to improve the signal to noise ratio for the copy of message notification -- the one that sends an email for every message that bubbles in your inbox), the revamped Daily Digest is doing very well in its experiment, and we just kicked off another project revamping some of our daily emails. All in all, good progress from my perspective. Upcoming: we are starting to think about a better discovery email (sent on a weekly cadence), and I've specced a project where we will stop sending duplicative emails for events that trigger a push notification -- just waiting for staffing on the last one. We've also started working on ways to leverage the Office 365 notifications pane to let people know of important messages in Yammer. Also, we're planning to give users the ability to have more granular controls over group notifications.Q: When will we have the ability to edit posts?A: We are currently researching the product and other details around this and then will see when we can staff it. But we do know that it'll take at least 3 months to build, so while we're committed to building it, we're a ways out from seeing it in production.Q: Are they any thoughts about restricting access or giving the option to remove All Company / All Network?A: Users don't always know where to direct their idea/question/comments. That's one of the big benefits of Yammer, is that it creates a space for that expression. We don't want to take that away. That said, we are doing work to help users understand Yammer better on onboarding. To get them into the right groups and understand how to use Yammer. We want to reduce the problems around All Company without taking away the benefit.Q: I would love the ability to have an anonymous account the network admins could use to post network reminders, best practices, and such. In the absence of that, maybe the ability to "post as the network admin" so people recognize you're not just sharing your personal opinion.A: Anonymous posting is a very interesting idea and it could help us serve some interesting use-cases, but there are lots of concerns (around abuse and other things) that mean we aren't actively exploring it right now. MobileQ: Are you planning to redesign your mobile apps to be as simple as slack experience? A: We're making good progress on addressing feature gaps in our mobile apps. For example, we've recently added the ability to delete and share posts on mobile. Expect to see more progress going forward and do let us know which features you particularly miss on mobile! Q: Is there an update on when the new mobile app features will be released? A: We conducted a test of a major change to the android app late last year that did not go as well as we wanted. We're taking the learnings from that and trying new iterations. Part of that is breaking up the original test into smaller components to see which change are positive. There are about 3 (smaller) mobile tests in progress right now. So assuming some of these tests win, you should start to see changes in mobile starting anytime. And expect to see us continue to iterate for many months. At the same time, new functionality is constantly being released. Things like iOS search. But I'm separating out those feature improvements from the changes to improve the teams’ oriented workflow.Office 365 Integration Q: When integrating Yammer with the Office 365 Suite, and making Yammer an offering to all Office 365 customers, will you also replace the SharePoint Newsfeed in Teamsites with Yammer?A: As you know, you can add the Yammer embed to Teamsites today. Going forward, Office 365 Groups are the key team collaboration experience in the suite, and Yammer is working closely to integrate/enrich our experience with Office 365 Groups.Q: Where are we on the integration of Office 365 and Yammer regarding the user profile?A: The direction we are going towards is the unification of profiles! We are in the process of delivering the first step towards this, which will synchronize property changes from Office 365/AAD into Yammer. As part of this, we are also expanding the list of properties to include things like phone numbers, location and other properties DSync used to work with. This will get us a long way there, but more work is needed to continue to unify the profiles that we are discussing and will be figuring out later on.SharePoint and YammerQ: SharePoint and Yammer; if we exclude the "group" story, is there a plan to fully replace SharePoint Newsfeed within a SharePoint Site/Team site by a Yammer Feeds (not limited to embed) but with a cross group management between SharePoint Site & Yammer?A: We don't have a plan for a full replacement at the moment, so embed will continue to be way to go and will require the steps needed today, but we are in the process integrating Yammer with Office 365 Groups, which will enable shared membership across services like SharePoint and Yammer and will enable us to consider these more integrated experiences later on.Q: When will we be able to have Yammer content show up in the SharePoint Online Search Center?A: Yammer will increase the number of signals it sends into Office Graph so that other services like SharePoint can surface them. Today, you can surface some Yammer content in Delve which is powered by SharePoint. The content today is pretty limited, but our goal is to share Yammer conversations and more to Office Graph. Q: At the last YamJam there was an open question if there are plans to use the SharePoint term store for Yammer or somehow sync/merge them. Any plans?A: No current plans to integrate with the SharePoint term store.AnalyticsQ: Where are the mythical new analytic dashboards?A: At this stage we are planning on adding the Yammer data to the new Office 365 Dashboards in early March. I believe there is an announcement due this week form the Office 365 team.Q: I have records management on my plate for Yammer. Is this something on the road map for the future of Yammer?A: Improved audit logging is coming to Yammer soon. More to share in the near future.Q: I'd like to push for Yammer having its own sufficient analytics dashboards, down to the group admin level...without having to use 3rd party apps. Isn't there something in the works? Had heard about Office 365 dashboards including Yammer data. Is that ready?A: Yes, we're integrating with the Office 365 dashboards and plan to provide user and group level metrics.Q: What's happening with the native analytics in Yammer? They were supposed to be phased out in November 2015 and replaced with analytics in Office 365, but there hasn't been much traction on that from a roadmap perspective. Any updates? Will we be seeing Yammer analytics in Delve like we'll be able to see Exchange, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, Skype for Business, etc.? A: Yammer will be integrating into the Office 365 Dashboard next month. Announcement is due out very soon - this week I hope.?Yammer Roadmap Q: I'm really interested in learning more about the timescales of the Yammer roadmap.A: Yammer follows the same time frame of the Office 365 roadmap, which is roughly 3 months. In some cases, we will share things that are further out if we have already started work on the project. These tend to be big things like integration with the Office 365 Groups service, for example. Keep an eye on this page:? ................
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