This post has been republished via RSS; it originally appeared at: New blog articles in Microsoft Tech Community.
Yammer connects people across departments and across the organization, enabling you to build communities, share knowledge and engage employees. At Microsoft Ignite, we announced an entirely redesigned Yammer experience, with new capabilities and integrations that drive employee engagement throughout Microsoft 365. Now, the new Yammer is available to organizations in public preview. Here’s a quick look at what’s new and how to get access to the new Yammer.
What’s new
Yammer powers leadership engagement, corporate communications and knowledge sharing in Microsoft 365. Here are some of the new capabilities we’re introducing to make communities and conversations more impactful:
Build communities with Microsoft 365
- To better convey the purpose of Yammer, groups are now called communities
- Pin your favorite communities to the navigation for quick access.
- Add cover photos to your communities
- Report conversations to better moderate your communities.
Reach your audience across the organization
- Bring Yammer communities and conversations into Outlook, Microsoft Teams, and SharePoint
- Customize the All Company community cover photo and avatar
- Brand Yammer with your company logo on the Feed
Empower anyone to be a communicator
- Set questions, polls, and praise as announcements
- Keep employees up to date with conversations that show up across Microsoft 365
- Pin important posts to the top of your communities
- Respond to Yammer conversations directly from Outlook on the web
- Close conversations that have come to a conclusion
- New editor experience provides new sharing options
- Easily share files with the enhanced file picker that now includes recently used files
- Polls, praise, and questions have new designs to stand out in the feed and drive engagement
Improved live events and video experience
- Find and watch past, current, and upcoming live events on the Events page in each community
- Produce live events using your webcam and screen sharing
- Host live events in the All Company community
- Create compelling video content with new video capture capabilities in the Yammer mobile app. Now you can quickly capture, edit, share and have vibrant conversations about those videos.
Discover and share across your network
- Enhanced AI-powered feed shows you relevant conversations, people and topics you follow
- Filter conversations to find unanswered questions and open conversations
- Yammer’s suite bar now includes search and notifications, reflecting the experience across all Microsoft 365 apps.
- User profiles are now unified with Azure AD profiles using profile cards to surface profile information throughout Yammer.
There are even more new features and integrations coming to Yammer as we approach general availability, such as suggested communities, bookmarks, and additional admin and user controls. We will update this article as we launch new features and post on the Admin Message Center whenever we have any major announcements.
Enable the preview within your organization
Microsoft 365 Global Admins can configure access to the new Yammer preview through the Yammer admin portal. Admins can enable the preview toggle in the suite header and choose the default experience for their network: classic Yammer the new Yammer. Learn more about enabling the new Yammer preview for your organization.
Once enabled by an admin, users will access the new Yammer or switch back to classic using the toggle in the navigation bar.
Who can access the new experience?
Once enabled by a Microsoft 365 Global Admin, people in your organization will be able to view the toggle to opt-in to the new experience. This will be available for canonical (home) networks only. You will still see the classic Yammer experience in external networks. If your organization wants to remove all access to the new Yammer during the preview phase, you will need to contact Microsoft support.
Other ways to access the new Yammer
The new Yammer is available worldwide on mobile, for iOS and Android. The new Yammer app for Teams lets you stay connected to company communications, live events and communities inside the hub for teamwork. And in Outlook on the web, you can now engage with Yammer conversations directly from your Outlook inbox. Soon, we’ll be bringing inbox integration to Outlook desktop and mobile apps, and we’ll bring the new Yammer experience to SharePoint, with an updated web part.
How should I submit feature requests and feedback?
Feature requests and feedback on the product during preview should be submitted through the in-product feedback dialog boxes. Feedback can also be provided with peers through the new Yammer preview community on the Microsoft Tech Community.
FAQ
Q: When will the new Yammer come out of preview and be generally available?
A: We are continuing to test and improve the new Yammer to ensure it delivers the experience our customers expect. We are currently targeting worldwide availability in July.
Q: Can we opt out of the preview at any time?
A: You can remove the preview toggle for your entire network through the new Yammer preview setting in the Yammer admin portal. Any users who have selected the new Yammer experience will remain in that experience until they choose to go back to the classic experience. For more information about the available options, see opt-in settings.
Q: Do SLAs apply to the new Yammer preview?
A: The Service Level Agreement for Microsoft Online Services does not apply to this preview.
Q: How do I open a support case?
A: Please see the help page in the for general information. Your organization may have specific guidance for opening support cases, so you may need to talk with your IT team.
Q: Is the new experience available for customers that have Yammer networks with data stored in the EU geo?
A: Yes!
Q: We have Yammer embedded in various places in our Intranet (i.e. Yammer tab in Microsoft Teams, Yammer web part for SharePoint, Yammer embed). How will those be impacted by the new Yammer?
A: Initially there will not be any change to these experiences. Eventually, these experiences will have the same design as the new Yammer.
Q: What about guest users in external groups?
A: Users will see the new Yammer or the classic Yammer experience depending on the state of their home network. If your network hosts an external group, people within your network that are opted-in to the new experience in their home network will see that group in the new Yammer experience. Any guest users within the external group will see the classic Yammer experience if their network is not yet enabled for the new experience.
Q: What about external networks?
A: Users can continue to access external networks using the Network Switcher icon available on the integrated tool bar at the top of every page. On switching, users will see these external networks in the classic experience.
Q: Are all languages supported in the new Yammer?
A: All languages available in classic Yammer are available in the public preview.
Q: Can users get to the new Yammer preview without administrator changes?
A: Your Microsoft 365 admin controls whether users see the toggle to switch to the new Yammer experience. But users will always be able to access web.yammer.com while the new Yammer is in the public preview phase. If your organization wants to remove all access to the new Yammer during the preview phase, you will need to contact Microsoft support. More details on this can be found here.
Q: I don’t want to enable the next experience for my production Yammer network yet. How can I test out the new toggle?
A: You can try out the opt-in toggles in your test tenant. If you don’t have a test environment, create a new trial tenant for testing and enable the toggle there.
-Murali Sitaram
Murali is the General Manager for Yammer and Microsoft 365 Groups