- Microsoft recently previewed the new version of Yammer. Here is an overview of the new Yammer features.
Microsoft Director of Marketing, SharePoint, OneDrive, Yammer, and Stream Dan Holme recently announced the company launched a new version of Yammer. The new version of Yammer features a modern interface, which delivers an easier experience for the web and mobile devices. And Microsoft rebuilt Yammer with dozens of new capabilities that power leadership engagement, company-wide communication, communities, and knowledge sharing in Microsoft 365. Plus Microsoft announced new integrations for Microsoft Teams, Outlook, and SharePoint and enhanced security and compliance.
The new version of yammer features a new personalized discovery feed powered by artificial intelligence that connects you with conversations from across the organization and prioritizes the conversations that are most relevant to you. And Microsoft overhauled conversation styling and added colorful framing and iconography that differentiates questions and best answers. There are also new treatments for praise and polls also show beautifully in the feed whether you’re on a mobile app or in the browser.
You can customize the All Company feed so that it brings your organization’s unique branding and culture into the default Yammer community. There are new All Company capabilities such as cover photos and read-only conversations, which means you can use the community to land key messaging, welcome members, promote company-wide initiatives, or reinforce company values in the only community that all Yammer users belong to.
“Community is the driving force of Yammer, and to better reflect the purpose and role of Yammer within Microsoft 365, we’re renaming Yammer groups to communities and adding many new improvements and experiences, including the ability to favorite a community – pinning it to the navigation,” wrote Holme in a blog post. “A new filter helps you sort answered/unanswered questions to help you find what you’re looking for and ensure questions get a response.”
Yammer’s new community branding gives you the power to style your community your way. With this feature, you can upload a cover photo to show off your community’s identity, share a campaign, or publicize a community event.
Yammer is expanding the use of announcements so you can have the same reach with polls, questions, or praise. And it brings extra visibility to your message by setting them as announcements, which sends a notification to all community members. There is a new text editor on mobile that makes it easier to preview how your message will appear once it is posted.
“We’ve also made improvements for gifs, videos, link previews, and file attachments to make sharing beautiful content simple, including a seamless uploading experience for mobile that uploading files and videos in the background – helpful for those times when bandwidth or WiFi makes sharing large files challenging,” added Holme.
Community managers (admins) can also pin conversations to the top of the feed. This helps orient users by pinning a welcome message, sharing best practices, or extending the longevity of announcements by pinning polls, praise, and questions.
And community managers can also close conversations. You can use this to share messages as read-only, steer feedback to an alternative location, or prevent further responses to discussions.
There are new event experiences on Yammer through an event discovery page to each community so members can stay informed about what is happening. Plus users can post questions and also watch events.
Yammer also added helpful on-screen tips to highlight events that are currently in progress. And Yammer created an event landing page that defaults to question and answer for richer engagements and easy event moderation.
And Yammer also has changes that help bring consistency across Yammer and Microsoft 365, including a unified user profile and a people card pulled from Office 365 and an ability to set a customized navigation header. Plus the search bar and notification bell have been moved into the navigation bar to reflect a more universal experience.
The new version of Yammer will be rolling out all all customers in the first half of 2020. In early 2020, a private preview of the new version of Yammer will be available. You can sign up at: https://aka.ms/TheNewYammer.
