Microsoft Yammer: Guiding Principles

Before we delve deeper into what else Microsoft Yammer has to offer, it’s important that we understand the main principles that guide the move towards a newer version—as well as the key areas of focus and emphasis. There are three concepts that guide the recreation of Yammer: communities, knowledge, and engagement. A lot of the changes are guided in the quest to strengthen these three principles.

It’s no surprise, of course, that these three are currently dominant in the enterprise. What Microsoft Yammer aims to empower is the development of communities within companies that drive culture and proactive action among colleagues. Within these communities, the platform aims to promote easy knowledge sharing internally. Ultimately, all of these elements create a deeper sense of employee engagement and a richer employee experience.

On a more practical level, these principles are also reflected in the cross-platform compatibility that Microsoft Yammer now strives for—not just with different Office 365 programs and applications, but also access points . As of this writing, much of the changes can be seen in the web versions of applications—such as with Outlook—but the design team has already said that a roll-out towards mobile and desktop applications is currently in the works.

They have also recently released a standalone Teams integration called Communities, which lets users have a fully interactive Yammer experience natively interact with Yammer directly from the popular collaboration platform.

Social Media With a Twist of Enterprise

Its own designers have billed it as an “enterprise social tool for community sharing” which is essentially social media for businesses. The closest comparison to an already familiar platform would be Workplace from Facebook. With the overhaul of the platform first being announced towards the end of last year, the similarities to Workplace from Facebook are striking. Just as a key component of Workplace from Facebook’s success is its familiarity, Yammer is treading the same path to good effect with a fresh focus on user experience.

For one thing, interacting with posts and announcements throws up options for rich text formatting. This allows users to put emphasis on responses however they see fit with options for bold, italic, and underlines. GIFs are easy to share with an embedded carousel to choose from. Perhaps the strongest feature is a dropdown highlighting your recent work on Word, Excel and even PowerPoint which you can readily share to any relevant thread or post.

All of these are presented in what Microsoft Yammer calls “social cards”. It’s a subtle but integral design choice that ties directly to the aim of cross-platform compatibility.  Each post is an entity unto itself. When shared via Teams and even Outlook, they look and act exactly as they would were they viewed in Yammer. It’s a critical feature that enables users who are more deeply embedded and involved with other Office 365 programs to enjoy full functionality as though they were viewing it directly on Yammer.

Enhanced Features for an Enhanced Experience

The features mentioned above are found within competitor software, but there is also a whole stack of new features unique to this new version of Microsoft Yammer itself. First among these is the Office 365 People Card. These are the equivalent of profiles in other social media and are tied directly to users added into your organisation Active Directory. These are useful for situating a person as they show where they sit in the hierarchy, who they collaborate with, events that you share with that person, and even messages and files shared between the two of you.

Another great innovation resulted from listening to their customer’s requests. The new Yammer now features AI curation when it comes to content in the feed. What it does is to filter and prioritise the content you see based on what is relevant to your job role, your position, and your interests so that they’re top of the screen. This adds a layer of relevance to what you get before you each time you check Yammer. This also applies to what is delivered to your Outlook inbox should you enable such notifications.

Other improvements sourced from users include improvements to the community section. For one, there’s the ability to post a cover photo to a community page. This can be used to better brand and can even be used to keep key announcements front and centre. Conversations too can be pinned within communities for above the fold attention — especially useful with key discussions. Within these conversations, users have the same rich options to customize responses as they do with social cards.

Microsoft Yammer in a Crisis

In times of crisis communications take centre stage in maintaining order amid the fear and uncertainty that can easily spread. Microsoft Yammer has acknowledged the critical role it plays and has incorporated crisis thinking into its reinvigoration of the platform. Empowerment is the name of the game and the platform allows for key information sharing at scale.

The ‘communities’ within Microsoft Yammer form an effective and safe gathering place for the fielding and answering of key questions and answers before, during, and after a crisis — regardless of where your employees and your HR/Comms personnel are located. The relative ease-of-use and simplicity of the platform make it easy to monitor, and the built-in AI makes focusing on common, critical issues so much easier—including mobile accessibility.

When Hurricane Irma ravaged the United States in 2017, Johnson & Johnson utilized Microsoft Yammer among other platforms. In particular, Yammer was used to create a community to facilitate communications with affected employees — even those employees that opened their homes to displaced members of the public. Key documents and files were also easily shared to employees and stakeholders. Yammer was also used by their senior leadership to talk directly to their employees and take charge of the situation.

Johnson & Johnson’s Employee Home Share initiative was a success – in part – because of Microsoft Yammer, and the team was quick to point out the simplicity of utilizing the system as a cornerstone of success. It allowed the creation of a centralized, global, and wholly online safe haven for their people. The company came out of the crisis relatively unscathed and much stronger for it. A culture of caring and mutual support emerged from the crisis revolving around the platform.

Outlook Integration Explored

Based on their own internal research, Microsoft has found that Outlook is still its most widely used service. After all, email remains relevant to employees and employers the world over. At present, in its web version, Microsoft has empowered Outlook users with a Microsoft Yammer integration that can be best described as near-native. Posts and announcements, as we already mentioned, appear exactly as they would if they were viewed in Yammer.

How you interact with the post is completely the same as what you get in the Yammer application also. For example, viewing images on a post throws up a pop-out gallery that you can scroll through. When checking on who liked or interacted with an announcement, a slider pops up from the right listing the information. You can like, respond, and even mark ‘best’ answers for reference. Polls created in Microsoft Yammer and shared to Outlook can be acted upon and monitored in real-time.

On top of that, you can easily shift to the classic, standard email view should you want to share an announcement or poll to anyone else in the ecosystem. One great feature that works in the background is that analytics work regardless of whether engagement was through Microsoft Yammer or Outlook. This makes it easy and accurate to track key data points that guide communications planning. Again, it’s on the web version for now, but they’re looking to roll it out to the mobile and desktop versions of Outlook come April to June of this year.

Microsoft Yammer Leverages the Power of Video

A study by the Academy to Innovate HR (AIHR) has found that employees are more likely to recall and retain over 95% of any particular message when it comes at them in video format. That same study has found that a whopping 93% of internal communication experts consider video to be a key tool in their arsenal. On the other side of the coin, 59% of those in senior leadership prefer watching video content over reading it in text format.

A Study in Effectiveness

It’s really a clear trend, especially on social media, with many companies and even news outlets pushing out video content for their key releases over any other — both internally and externally. One great example of this is the Alzheimer’s Society. They pushed out a new five-year plan via the launch of their own internal TV channel. This channel featured a film that expertly explained the key policy changes on top of explaining why the changes mattered. It was very successful among their 2,500 employees as well as their 9,000 volunteers.

The Video Advantage Applied

For Microsoft Yammer and its design team, their goals in improving video capabilities within the platform include building trust and authenticity in their leaders, meaningful information dissemination, and full employee engagement towards the company vision. Towards those ends, they focused their work on optimizing their work-flow through every event cycle’s natural touchpoints. All this through a platform that supports everything from professional on-site productions, semi-professional broadcasts from anywhere, and even ad-hoc mobile videos as would be the case with some executive blogs.

Professional videos are those that result in high-quality output as is the case with explainer videos, roundtable discussions, town halls and the like. Semi-professional options include coverage in the field — as would be the case in product launches or new office openings. Finally, ad-hoc can be as simple as the CEO sharing his thoughts and opinions casually and on-the-go. While each has value on its own—they can come together in a natural flow to push a full-fledged campaign.

An Example in Action

Say you wanted to run an outreach program where employees reach out to local kids to help teach them how to read. A professional video can be created to get the whole company aligned with the ideals of the program. You could even go for a live event set up for launch. At the organizational level—with the use of semi-professional setups like webinars or even local live videos—you can then reinforce the message or go deeper with tutorials on the most effective techniques for teaching reading.

Ad hoc videos can then be those on the ground—employee-made videos showing them and their experiences with the kids that they teach. Or even videos where they share their experiences and emotions as they undergo a program. There really is no need to have each tier mutually exclusive. They, in fact, work best in support of one another. That’s just one example. The central idea behind videos on Microsoft Yammer is to create meaningful connections that facilitate shared knowledge.

Towards that end, Yammer can be used to host webinars that are crafted and launched in Microsoft Teams. It’s currently set for internal users only, which makes it a powerful tool for internal comms efforts. A great thing about webinars set up through Teams and funnelled through Microsoft Yammer is that it enables for deeper engagement via company-wide chat and comments. All of the video content is stored in Microsoft Stream for easy access. Note the mobile videos are still stored in SharePoint for the moment — something that their team is looking to fix in the future.

Microsoft Yammer Compliance and Security

A final point worth looking at with the rollout of the new Microsoft Yammer are its compliance and security measures. A lot of these new integrations are to run parallel to Office 365’s existing Security and Compliance Centres. These improvements centre around Native Mode. This includes the assignment to one Tenant to one Yammer set up. It also implies that users are mapped in Azure’s Active Directory, that all groups created are connected to a single Office 365 Group, and that — eventually — all Yammer files will be stored in SharePoint.

Another important aspect worth touching on is smarter eDiscovery. Integration with Microsoft Yammer means that you can not only search by user and view their full Office 365 profile, but all their messages through Yammer are now visible alongside any others that they have sent via other platforms. These messages can be filtered based on key parameters like author, recipient, and even community. This makes it far easier to search for content as needed.

Lastly, minimum and maximum data retention parameters will also feature in the newest iteration of Microsoft Yammer. Users will have two options when getting rid of content. Archive mode will put things away into long-term storage. Delete mode will completely erase content after 30 days’ time. Also, it is important to note that deleting any groups will then result in the deletion of messages therein. All this allows finer control over the lifecycle of your content.

A New Microsoft Yammer for the Future

All of these changes represent not just the future of Microsoft Yammer, but also Microsoft’s commitment to integrating features that its user base has long clamoured for. It’s a promising move for a platform that seeks to fulfil a popular comms niche in today’s world from within Office 365’s already impressive Enterprise Suite.

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Microsoft Yammer and Fluent Design

The new Microsoft Yammer and its design are all informed by what Microsoft calls its Fluent Design System. Philosophically, ‘Fluent’ refers to the idea that technology and its use should have a natural, intuitive flow from one platform or device to the next. It’s really a reflection on how we consume technology nowadays—we often start work on our laptops and personal computers then shift to our tablets and mobile devices as we move about.

It’s a fitting design paradigm choice for Microsoft which used to be plagued by terrible cross-platform integration. Now, in more practical terms, ‘Fluent’ design is about anticipating use cases of its products and ensuring the overall user experience is crafted to meet many needs, contexts, and uses with little fuss and confusion. It’s certainly a long way from the days when Apple took potshots at the company for being the opposite of Fluent in its user experience.

What Fluent Means for Microsoft Yammer

A look at many other Office 365 programs will give you a glimpse into the future for what this could mean for Microsoft Yammer. There’s been a clear shift toward single colours—apart from white, that is—and an overall cleaner look. It’s certainly the first impression that you have when you visit the new Yammer. Fluent design influences are apparent in the much more organized look. Everything that you could possibly need is on display.

For one, there’s the much clearer company branding that includes your company logo and business name. There’s a prominent search bar as well as all the basic application controls and settings on the top. All these make it much easier to get to anything that you would like to change and customise in terms of your overall experience using the program. You even have easy access to your Office 365 profile card—changes to which will apply across the entire network.

Fluent Design Prioritises Engagement

When you move to the social cards themselves, you’ll find that Fluent design has ensured that engagement is a clear priority. Images and media content are prominent and eye-catching, but the real gem is in the comment section. Much like many other social media, there are the requisite reaction, comment, and share options. Conversations are tiered to keep threads in order. It’s clear, however, that Yammer intends to take advantage of a strong Office 365 integration.

There’s a dedicated button that allows you to share documents and files from everywhere in your company’s Office 365 network—from SharePoint to Word, Excel, PowerPoint and more. From an employee standpoint, this makes collaboration significantly easier. From a comms standpoint, it will allow you to share content relevant to an employee post for clarity and support—without having to needlessly trawl through your own files.

AI and Guided Discovery in Fluent Design

AI is a big deal nowadays and features in everything from bots to even assisted search, and its presence can be strongly felt in the new Fluent design version of Yammer. For one thing, your discovery feed itself is curated to show you what matters to you. Depending on your job role, your prior search queries, and other little bits of detail that is sourced from your interaction with Office 365’s other applications, the AI learns what’s important and pushes it front and centre.

This is also applied to your search experience in general where you can easily find what matters to you at the moment. Perhaps the best applications of this machine learning have to do with the aforementioned ability to attach files. AI guides this behaviour and suggests the files that are most relevant to a particular post or conversation. It’s an easy way to have all activities flow more naturally for users in your company.

Fluent Design Guides Building Communities

One great update with Yammer is the focus on stronger community support. The communities within Yammer allowed one to create spaces to build camaraderie, cooperation, and collaboration. All three are reinforced by the ability to better brand internally within communities. Cover photos can be handily replaced with team or departmental logos or even guidelines and infographics that communities want to bring to the fore.

The expansiveness of Fluent Design can be seen in the ease by which communities can be managed via smartphone. The interface has been simplified for ease-of-use. Simpler, some have argued, than Workplace from Facebook’s interface which has become cluttered of late as more features are added into the mix. Posting is an easy and fluid experience as is, again, attaching relevant files from anywhere in your Office 365 network into a post.

One area of mobile where Fluent Design really shines is in video capture. Tools are in place to make the process of capturing, editing, and publishing a breeze. This is perfect for highly mobile comms or remote setups where high production value videos might not be easy to undertake. There are many great internal comms opportunities to be had with this improvement: from direct CEO comms to their employees to even on-site community updates.

A Smoother Fluent Design Native Experience

Those who are most invested in Office 365’s full suite of enterprise products are the ones most likely to enjoy the benefits of Fluent Design. Outlook is one particular platform where Yammer shines in its new iteration. The Native mode integration makes each inbox a mini-Yammer. You interact with posts shared to you in much the same way that you would were you to view them in Yammer. While limited to the web version of Outlook for now, it has been verified that the desktop and mobile versions are soon to follow.

It’s pretty much the same story when it comes to the conversations web part of SharePoint. Again, you can add file attachments from your work network, set up robust question and answer sessions, and share rich text content. All of this with the same level of coherence with the original Yammer platform. It breathes new life into a platform many often consider ‘yet another’ that they have to contend with—presenting a truly vibrant platform for communications.

The Power of Integration

If Microsoft and its adoption of Fluent Design across its platform prove anything, it’s that investing in a fully integrated suite of enterprise solutions is a worthwhile one. With Microsoft Yammer, you leverage the power of social media to enhance your communications across your company and its communities. There are a lot of exciting design changes being pushed out and more down the line to be explored. It shows that Microsoft is starting to listen to what its customers want the most.

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Office 365 at a Glance

One of the best things about Office 365 is that a lot of the software is available under standard licenses. This lets users explore and experiment ahead of committing time and resources to fully embracing tools and associated ways of working. Exploration is a great way to test the waters and is recommended as you might uncover a particular bit of functionality that helps when it comes to communication, collaboration, and integration. Here is all you need to know about the very best Office 365 products out there.

Yammer

Yammer is social media for companies and their employees – also known as an Enterprise Social Network (ESN). Built around communities, its layout mimics the usability features of social media platforms we use outside the workplace, and users are free to share anything from short messages, rich media content and more. While predominantly for employees within a company, Yammer also allows you to open up select parts of your ESN to select partners, customers, and other stakeholders. It also comes with its own built-in messaging platform for wider conversations.

By leveraging a phenomenon that’s already popular globally, Yammer offers opportunities for increased collaboration across your entire company base. 2020 has seen a new version released with additional exciting features, making it the perfect platform for letting communications spread beyond just the team level. Many companies have used the platform to communicate both company-wide and to groups of employees by using the improved broadcast functionality. Yammer also benefits from built-in surveying and feedback tools, making it a strong pick in every companies communication arsenal.

Teams

If you’ve ever used Skype, Microsoft Teams operates in pretty much the same vein. You have your video call and conferencing capabilities that are supported by chat functionality and the ability to create as many unique chat groups as necessary to your needs. You also have the ability to tag people as needed, as well as share screens quickly should it be required. Where Teams differs from Skype – and even the enterprise version Skype for Business – is in the depth of its enterprise functionality.

For one thing, you can easily add in certain external applications into a Teams chat as needed. You can add YouTube or Stream (see below) to make it easy to search for relevant video content to share. It’s much easier to schedule meetings within Teams as you can do this from a chat, a group, or even any number of scheduling applications that can be integrated within Teams. Lastly, there’s seamless integration with all other enterprise applications that makes it easier to share files—via SharePoint, for instance.

SharePoint

Many people find SharePoint a little bit confusing. After all, it’s billed as an enterprise intranet and functions as such with the ability to create an employee-facing page for news and updates. At its core, however, SharePoint is a collaborative file-sharing platform. If you’re familiar with Google Drive, it’s the enterprise equivalent where employees and teams can share all manner of files and content with each other. These can be easily organized into folders and are protected by a range of security options that can limit access as well as meet security policies.

There are many useful applications of SharePoint that go beyond just file aggregation and sharing. For example, content can be prepared, laid out, and scheduled to be published on your websites. Search functionality is also beefed up to make it easier for employees to search for anything they need based off a more comprehensive list of parameters. Lastly, SharePoint allows for simplification of data presentation by adjusting what is presented based on your employees’ job roles or needs.

Power BI

The chances are that companies that owe their success to the successful aggregation, analysis, and application of data benefit greatly from the use of Power BI. This cloud-based business intelligence tool lets companies consolidate data from multiple sources into singular, organized sets. These data sets can then be utilized for visualization and analysis. The subsequent output—be it reports, dashboards, and apps can then be easily shared within an organization for utilization in business decisions.

The range of visualizations offered by Power BI covers many different use cases—allowing relevant data to be communicated in the simplest, most understandable means available. Just as wide-spanning are the data sources that Power BI can draw from which ranges from simple text/CSV files and Excel sheets all the way up to SQL servers, MySQL databases, and beyond. You also have a range of options to present your data—from vibrant dashboards to printable/shareable reports.

Stream

Viewers retain 95% of a message when they watch it in a video compared to 10% when reading it in text, which may explain why Microsoft Stream is such a popular part of Office 365. Microsoft Stream allows you to leverage all the advantages of video for the benefit of your employees. Users can share recordings of company broadcasts, training sessions, recordings of meetings, presentations, and other video content with one another or with the company as a whole. Like YouTube, comments allow for reaction and the platform makes it easy to refer to specific time points within a video for highlighting and discussion. Autogenerated captions are also another popular feature with English, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish languages available.

Security is one of the biggest appeals of the platform. You can restrict access to videos as the situation warrants, making it appealing should you need to share sensitive video content with specific audiences. Equally advantageous are how the content can be organized, with it being easy to create channels and groups as needed. With full integration with other 365 applications, it’s just as easy to share video content with your employees and their departments and teams via other Office 365 tools including Yammer, Teams and even PowerPoint.

PowerApps

The basic premise behind PowerApps is allowing teams within companies to create functional, usable apps in the shortest span of time available. Power company TransAlta, for example, used the platform to build an internal resource planning app to be used by their teams for internal decision making. Its main appeal lies in its ease-of-use. Even those without backgrounds in coding and IT can use the relatively simple interface to push out a functioning app in a short timeframe.

That being said, PowerApps opens itself up to further refinement and development by developers to improve and enhance its functionality. As with all Microsoft applications, PowerApps can easily integrate with other Office 365 products to expand their utility and function—it can even connect to popular applications beyond the 365 Suite like Gmail, Wunderlist, Slack, Drive, and many others. For companies that want to utilize the mobility of apps for their day-to-day without being straddled by long development times, it’s the perfect solution.

Flow

Automation, as it relates to business process management, is gaining a lot of traction within workplaces as they become busier and busier. Flow is another cloud-based platform that lets you automate workflows within your business to save you time and effort. For example, you can use it to automate data collection and its organization from your feedback channels. The only thing you need to do is to activate the Flow and collect the end results after.

The strength of the platform lies in its built-in templates that cover most use cases you can think of from saving email attachments into a specific folder in SharePoint to triggering text notifications on your smartphone when emails from specific people come in. With integrations to a wide range of popular applications inside and outside of Microsoft’s suite of enterprise products, the possibilities are endless.  This allows you to automate tasks that might otherwise be monotonous and repetitive.

OneDrive for Business

Microsoft OneDrive is the company’s cloud storage platform. It’s the equivalent of Google Drive and functions in essentially the same manner with a similarly simple drag-and-drop interface, sharing capabilities, and organization options. It can be easily integrated on any desktop to act essentially like the My Documents folder. Word, Excel, and PowerPoint all have OneDrive integration built-in and often offers to save work from those platforms into the cloud as a default.

For those wondering, it does function exactly like SharePoint does minus a few of the more robust collaboration tools offered by that platform. If you’re deeply invested in Microsoft’s productivity products, OneDrive is a great choice because documents, spreadsheets, and presentations are accessible to everyone via the platform. OneDrive is offered as a part of many Office 365 packages—with a ‘For Business’ version in the enterprise option—and is often sufficient should you not want to upgrade to SharePoint for sole sharing of files (not intranet).

Sway

Billed as a ‘digital storytelling application’, Sway is designed to enable the creation of reports, updates, and presentations. It differs from PowerPoint—which has a similar remit—in that it is optimized for the presentation of content to individuals. This is best reflected in its mobile-friendly design sensibilities. Presentations can be optimized for smaller screens as well as for touch navigation, making it ideal for quick sales presentations at points-of-sale or even trade show presentations.

One strength of this 365 product is that it’s relatively easy to cook up a beautiful, engaging piece of content without a design background. Sway has a number of eye-catching templates to choose from that are intuitive when it comes to customization. It even features accessibility options to aid those with pre-existing conditions like dyslexia and other adaptive functions for those who might find viewing content on a smaller screen challenging. All of these combine to make it a powerful tool for mobile executives and sales teams.

Outlook

Microsoft Outlook has gone through many changes since its earliest days as solely a desktop email client. While it still functions to this end, it has undergone modernization in terms of looks and has even gone online into the cloud. Outlook is almost always installed on personal computers upon purchase—making for a relatively quick setup. Throw in its mobile application on both Android and iOS platforms, and it’s really become very ubiquitous.

The biggest advantage of Outlook is its integration with all of Microsoft’s other enterprise products. This allows seamless sharing of files through OneDrive or SharePoint, setting up and coordination of meetings on Teams, collaboration on Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, and even native interaction with Yammer content. If your business heavily leans on Microsoft’s enterprise suite, Outlook rounds out the package as a dependable, integrated email platform.

Office 365 Round-Up

For every business need, there’s sure to be a Office 365 enterprise solution out there. The Redwood based firm has leveraged decades of experience in the field to come out with innovative programs and platforms to enable better communication, collaboration, and sharing.

And it is only to get better with more applications using their new user experience, meaning that the user gets a native too experience regardless of what tool they are using e.g. being able to interact with Yammer content in Outlook and Teams without leaving the application.

While the sheer amount of choices can be intimidating, the key is to carefully study and get a deep understanding of what each has to offer. Doing so will allow you to zero in on the right mix of products to meet your company’s specific needs.

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