This post has been republished via RSS; it originally appeared at: Yammer Blog articles.
This month we are celebrating 10 incredible years of Yammer. Our customers continue to inspire us to build transformational experiences that empower and connect every person across an organization to maximize their impact. Today we express 10 years of gratitude for customers including:
- Infraero, who is breaking down hierarchies and silos so that everyone from leaders to Firstline Workers become more aligned and united around a shared mission
- Telstra bringing social engagement to the enterprise to modernize communications
- Air France empowering every single person in an organization with a voice to share their knowledge, best practices and ideas
- TDS inspiring greater participation and inclusion of anyone and everyone within an organization
Looking towards the next 10 years and beyond, Yammer will center around enabling organization-wide employee engagement and communications for Microsoft 365 customers. Yammer will also focus on providing a world-class community-building experience to help connect people around common interests, identities and areas of practice. We will continue to evolve Yammer to power social connection and engagement across the Office 365 suite. All of these capabilities will be built on the foundation of comprehensive trust and control offered by Microsoft 365.
Cultural change and evolution are critical for businesses in the modern workplace. A core way to enable that change is to get everyone across the organization engaged and participating, because every person influences culture. We believe that Yammer’s focus and commitment to making people a part of that movement will help organizations achieve greater outcomes. And this week, we are sharing a look into our newest innovations that help empower this change.
Connecting leaders and employees
Leaders increasingly want to align their organization around shared vision and purpose, as well as to create a two-way dialogue for authentic connection with employees.
At Microsoft, Satya and his leadership team have engaged with more than 110,000 employees worldwide using technology to communicate at scale so they can share and clarify our mission, world view, strategy and ambitions. Each month, Satya conducts a “Q&A”, where he discusses top-of-mind issues and objectives, and answers questions from employees. Earlier this year, we shared an inside look of this experience at the Employee Engagement Summit.
Leadership engagement in Microsoft 365 is a solution that features new live and on-demand events in Yammer, along with a Yammer community to foster sustained engagement and dialogue between leaders and their organization, and a digital presence powered by SharePoint where leadership can share news and perspective. Leadership engagement leverages existing capabilities of our best-of-breed applications, and adds new features and integrations to deliver a high-value scenario with a holistic solution in Microsoft 365. These capabilities empower leaders throughout an organization—not just the CEO—and internal communications teams to drive employee engagement and communications at scale.
Bringing together community content and conversations through SharePoint and Yammer
Over the years we have learned a lot from customers who have built robust communities using Microsoft technologies. For example, we see companies like WiPro using Yammer to share and acquire expertise through social learning across geographies and hierarchies every day. Social conversations help fuel peer-to-peer learning, deepening the collective knowledge of organizations.
Together, SharePoint and Yammer will deepen integrations to build capabilities that accentuate the value of these cross-organizational connections. Yammer community conversations will emphasize and build on the social nature of learning across organizations, while SharePoint will power the sharing and management of the community’s content and knowledge.
Over the next few months, new files shared in Office 365-connected Yammer groups will be stored in SharePoint by default. Yammer groups that are connected to Office 365 groups currently feature a shared SharePoint document library, Planner, OneNote and SharePoint site. Soon, new files posted to and shared in Yammer will be stored in the group’s document library. This means that files will be enhanced with SharePoint’s security and compliance capabilities - including DLP, eDiscovery, conditional access and retention policies. Files that are stored in the Office 365-connected group’s SharePoint document library will also be surfaced as results by Microsoft Search and stored in the tenant’s datacenter, providing local data residency for those files.
Starting early next year, you will be able to integrate conversations from any Yammer group, topic, user or home feed into any SharePoint page or site with the new Yammer conversations web part, which provides a fully interactive Yammer experience. This new web part complements the Yammer conversation highlights web part we released earlier this year, which highlights recent, top, or curated posts from a Yammer group.
Seamless connections between communities and teams
Yammer is optimized to facilitate participatory conversations at scale. The communities that are formed in Yammer serve as an ideal front door for teams to communicate out to and get feedback from the broader organization. The new Yammer tab in Microsoft Teams will enable people to more easily move between their broader communities in Yammer and close-knit teams in Microsoft Teams.
Rolling out early next year, the Yammer tab in Microsoft Teams will allow you to follow and share conversations in Yammer without having to leave Teams. You can continue to use Yammer as an open discussion forum to engage people across your organization, while using Teams as your hub for teamwork.
This new Yammer tab lights up scenarios such as:
- HR groups working in Teams and monitoring questions from employees in open communities related to topics like corporate benefits, policies and initiatives. You can share conversations from Yammer into a Teams channel to work together on a response.
- Product teams seeking to tap into the broader organization in Yammer to solicit feedback and questions, while iterating on product development in Teams.
- Corporate communicators running campaigns in Yammer to crowdsource ideas or socialize change, while using Teams as the hub for change plan communications and coordination efforts. A Topic feed Yammer tab enables you to create and track a hashtag, or topic, as it’s used in conversations across the organization.
- Partner management teams can work in Teams and drive the community of external partners forward in Yammer.
We’re excited to celebrate our customers and ignite the conversation around these significant innovations for Yammer this week at Microsoft Ignite 2018. They demonstrate our commitment to Yammer and to the scenarios that empower you to inform and engage employees, as well as harness collective knowledge across the organization.
Thank you for 10 years of engagement and helping us build a better Yammer.
-The Yammer team