“The reports of Yammer’s death are greatly exaggerated”
- Ignite Attendee
Shortly after Microsoft purchased Yammer in the summer of 2012, it was all that the Office division could talk about. Yammer was to replace the conversation feed in SharePoint, the entire development team would adopt the quick shipping Yammer style, and we SharePoint MVPs were told that we were all Yammer MVPs. The conversation feed did in fact replace SharePoint’s in Office 365, and hooks were added to allow it to work with on-premises SharePoint. The SharePoint team moved to a quick shipping cloud first approach, but some time around 2014, the name Yammer was used less and less. At the 2015 Microsoft Ignite conference Yammer had a presence, but it was very muted compared to previous events. At the same time, a new conversations technology appeared in Office 365 Groups that was based on Exchange.
This trend led to a great deal of speculation that Yammer was on the wane. When Microsoft goes silent on a product, it normally means the end of it (Active X, Silverlight, SharePoint Designer, Silverlight). There are notable exceptions to this (SSRS), but it’s normally the case. However, at the same time they continued to make significant investments in it, and most of these investments were architectural (move data centres, Integration with Azure Active Directory). This has sent a very mixed message to the market – why would they continue to invest (heavily) in a dead product? It was almost as if they weren’t sure what to do with it, and were hedging their bets.
The Ignite 2016 conference has removed the mixed part of this messaging. Yammer is quite clearly the social strategy for Microsoft in Office 365. One needs only to look at the attention that Yammer received at the conference. At Ignite 2015, on the show floor, Yammer had a small pedestal with a single screen. It’s significantly larger at Ignite 2016.
There were a number of freebies being handed out. I haven’t seen a new Yammer T-shirt in years, and they were being handed out by the dozens. That itself is telling, but I found the iconography to be particularly interesting.
MVP Amy Dolzine
The renewed investment extended to the social events as well. The Yammer team hosted an event .
These investments are a clear sign, but what really matters is the product itself, and this is where the rubber hits the road. Yammer is becoming more and more tightly integrated with the Office 365 suite all of the time. A lot of architectural work has been done to facilitate this. In fact, next year, Microsoft will be dropping the standalone version of Yammer, and the Enterprise license along with it, making it first class component of Office 365. One look no further that the embedded Yammer conversation views:
In context Yammer conversations embedded in a SharePoint Publishing page
The above shows threaded discussions happening within the context of the content, in this case, a SharePoint publishing page. This is accomplished through the use of the new Yammer web part, which is built with the new SharePoint Framework, and delivered in Modern SharePoint pages. This feature is not available yet, but is coming very soon. The above image is not a mock -up. In fact, if you look at a list of modern web parts in a test environment today, there are only a couple that represent integration points – two of them stand out – Power BI, and Yammer.
Yammer is now an integral part of Office 365 Groups – another topic that was well represented at Ignite. I could attempt to articulate how this works, and why it matters, but this has already been done by Naomi Moneypenny here. There is also a Microsoft blog post discussing it available here. In a nutshell, Yammer will leverage all of the other Groups capabilities including SharePoint for document storage and OneNote for Notes capture, replacing its own native storage systems. Office 365 Groups will use Yammer for threaded discussions.
The approach to Yammer is different than the one we’ve become accustomed to. Yammer is to become an integral part of Office 365 Groups, providing the social component to the excellent content experience of Groups. Yammer becomes a part of a greater whole which, in my opinion is all to the good. Yammer has often been presented and used as a standalone solution. I’ve often felt that the threaded conversations in Yammer work well, but trying to use it for content management or event management is frustrating at best. Integration points between it and Office 365 have been poor to non-existent. The Yammer Add-in for SharePoint was recently removed from the store. Yammer groups have been different than Office 365 Groups leading to a disjointed experience. This is true no longer – now there are only Groups. The same group backing a SharePoint Team site backs Yammer’s social content. Yammer will also share OneDrive, OneNote and calendars, unifying all of the non-social content.
Yammer doesn’t appear to be going anywhere anytime soon.
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