This post has been republished via RSS; it originally appeared at: New blog articles in Microsoft Tech Community.
Today at Microsoft Ignite, we unveiled new Yammer capabilities that connect and engage people across the organization. Yammer continues to deliver integrated innovative experiences and integrations across the Microsoft 365 suite including Microsoft Teams, Outlook, SharePoint and now Microsoft Viva. Here’s where Yammer is headed next.
Yammer sessions at Ignite
Catch the on-demand session here:
Culture and communications: Explore Microsoft Viva Connections, SharePoint, and Yammer
Join us to share feedback and steer the future of Yammer and communities in a roundtable format with the product team on Wednesday Nov 3, 12:30-1:30 PM Eastern Daylight time
Using Communities For Successful Employee Engagement (microsoft.com)
Yammer in the Viva Connections Feed
Yammer is a foundational component of Microsoft Viva, which is now generally available. The Viva Connections feed includes conversations from across your organization including announcements from All Company and your communities, featured conversations and posts from people you follow. Learn more about Viva Connections and how Yammer works together here.
Build Community
Communities have always been the heart and soul of Yammer. And now, finding people and affinity groups is easier than ever. In the Yammer Home page, you’ll now see a Suggested Communities module that shows recommended communities.
Find suggested communities on the right side of the Home Feed
This module uses machine learning to detect signals from who you’re connected with and communities you currently engage with to suggest communities that might be right for you. We’ve also updated the community discovery experience to enhance the design and usability.
Also new to Yammer is official communities. Official communities enable a network administrator to designate communities as official within your network. This gives employees the safety and confidence that the community is a verified community for employees at your organization.
Official communities are designated with a badge
Enhancements to Communities app for Microsoft Teams.
The Communities app for Microsoft Teams helps you stay connected to what’s happening in your communities, tap into knowledge across teams and departments, and crowdsource solutions and best practices from frontline workers. We’re giving the app a fresh coat of paint, making it more at home inside Microsoft Teams. Customers with significant Yammer usage will soon get the Communities app as an integrated experience in Teams. Watch the Message Center for details. Any customer can deploy the Communities app, and pin it to the app bar, from Teams Admin Center.
Updates to the home feed
The home feed enables people to serendipitously discover valuable conversations, people and communities across the organization. Signals from Yammer and Microsoft Graph create a personalized feed of content that is relevant to you. An updated algorithm offers
Share knowledge
Yammer is an excellent platform for sharing knowledge and information at scale. Employees can share best practices and insights, and tap into to the collective knowledge of the organization . Yammer helps employees find answers to questions and crowdsource information to get their jobs done.
Upvote answers
Now, community members can upvote responses that they find useful and appropriate – to help crowdsource and democratize answers and ideas.
The responses with the highest votes rise to the to the top of the thread.
Nested replies and threaded conversations help users organize, follow, and contribute more effectively by grouping replies together. This helps preserve context around these discussions, making it easier for you to follow and engage deeper in conversation. Learn more.
Nested replies are now generally available
Yammer and Viva Topics
Viva Topics will soon incorporate Yammer topics to allow your employees to see key information about that topic within the topic cards. You can connect tacit knowledge generated by Q&A and conversations with the explicit knowledge that exists in content.
Unified topics across Microsoft 365
On Viva Topics pages, you’ll find Yammer content including related Q&As . The topic page showcases a list of frequently asked questions. Employees can ask a question about the topic and AI will route the question to experts who can answer it. This capability requires that your Yammer network is in Native Mode.
Q&A for Microsoft Teams meetings and webinars coming to public preview
We’re bringing a new experience for questions and answers in meetings with the Q&A app, which allows meeting organizers and presenters to add open or moderated Q&As to any Teams meeting. The Q&A app enables attendees to ask and reply to questions before and during a meeting. Organizers and designated presenters can mark best answers, filter responses, moderate and dismiss questions, and pin posts. Responses to questions are threaded in a conversation with the original question. Designated presenters can act as co-moderators to help screen questions.
Q&A is ideally suited for large and more structured meetings, such as leadership presentations, webinars, classroom trainings, all-hands meetings, and community events. The Q&A app is now available for public preview.
Yammer continues to be the best place to engage employees in communications that scale to tens or even hundreds of thousands of people. Through the last few years, we’ve heard stories about how Yammer enabled communicators to reach people with critical information and leaders to stay connected with employees.
Reach your audience
Over recent months, we’ve given Yammer superpowers to serve communicators as the multi-channel communications tool in Microsoft 365. When you post an announcement in Yammer, it will reach your audience—defined by your community—across Teams, Outlook, SharePoint, Microsoft Viva, and, of course, Yammer. You can even deliver critical communications directly to peoples’ inboxes with essential announcements, which deliver notifications regardless of peoples’ notification preferences. People can engage with your communication, and you can view insights to measure reach and impact, regardless of which tools your audience use.
We have a variety of tools to help you boost visibility and discovery of your post. You can pin a post to the top of a community, and feature a post to boost its visibility in feeds across Yammer and Viva Connections.
Edit attachments in a post
Coming soon, you’ll be able to edit a post to include or add attachments after the post has been published. Click the conversation options and choose “Edit” to use this feature.
Go deeper
Learn more about these features and how to use them in our Ignite session and product roundtable discussion.
Breakout session
- Culture and communications: Explore Microsoft Viva Connections, SharePoint, and Yammer
- Presenters: Dan Holme, Steve Nguyen
- Learn how Microsoft Viva Connections leverages your investments in Microsoft 365 to deliver an inclusive employee experience integrated into Microsoft Teams. This session will explore what's possible and what's new with Viva Connections, SharePoint, and Yammer and how it all comes together.
- This session is available on demand.
Product Roundtable
- Using Communities For Successful Employee Engagement (microsoft.com)
- Speakers : Lacey Rosedale, Erin Rosenthal, Sandra Martinez Vargas
- Communities can be a powerful tool in creating successful employee engagement by enabling employees and leaders to build culture, create connections, and share knowledge. We want to know how you are using communities today to promote employee engagement and what obstacles you experience. We'd like to share some new ideas we're exploring that will help you leverage communities to enhance the employee engagement experience to see how these could work for your company.
- Wednesday, November 3 at 12:30 PM - 1:30 PM EDT
Be sure to follow us on Twitter for more news, timing, and discussions! Happy #MSIgnite!
Murali Sitaram
CVP of Yammer and Microsoft 365 Groups