The new Yammer experience

After announcing that the new Yammer experience was on its way in November 2019, Microsoft now made it available to all customers.

Main topics in this article

• Build communities
• Reach your audience across the organisation
• Empower anyone to be communicator
• Improved Live events and video conferencing
• Discover and share across your network
• Manage content in communities with more control
• Yammer mobile superpowers
• Microsoft Teams
• Interactive conversations in Outlook
• Security and compliance
• Coming up next

Build communities

Groups are now renamed to communities and you can pin your favourite communities and add a cover photo. You can also discover Events via the Events tab.

Reach your audience across the organisation

With the Communities App for MS Teams you can now integrate Yammer directly into the launcher on the left side of your Teams app. 

With the new web part for SharePoint you can now also add Yammer Conversations or Highlights to any site or page and create or participate in any conversation, upload images or files and perform your management actions.

Users are now able to directly engage with Yammer conversations from within Outlook.

You can add a custom cover photo, avatar and name to your "All Company" community and the styling for polls, praise and questions has been improved.

Empower anyone to be communicator

Next to sharing questions, polls and praise as announcements to notify your community members, you can also pin important posts to the top of your community.

You can apply formatting and attach gifs, share links (with automatically generated previews), share files with the enhanced file picker including recently used files.

Increase engagement with polls, praise and questions that are showcased in the conversation feed

Improved Live events and video conferencing

Next to finding and watching past, current and upcoming events in each community you can now also produce live events using your webcam and screen sharing and you can host your live events in the "All Company" community.

Discover and share across your network

The new, AI-powered discovery feed enables you to find relevant conversations, people and topics.

Conversations can be filtered to find unanswered questions, all questions or all conversations.

Use the updated suite bar to stay on top of notifications and search just as you would in other Microsoft 365 applications.

The Microsoft 365 profile cards give you contact information, organizational relationships, and easy access to shared content.

Manage content in communities with more control

The new Yammer experience enables you to set the default publisher type to be a question, you can report conversation or close conversations that have come to a conclusion.

You can also change a conversation to a question - Community managers will soon be able to convert a regular conversation into a question, if the person creating the post didn’t use the Question type when creating it. This can be helpful to draw attention to unanswered questions and also to enable additional functionality like “Mark best answer”.

Yammer mobile superpowers

The new Yammer is available on iOS and Android, with some added improvements, including:  

Dark Mode is now available for Yammer mobile. Whether you prefer light or dark, now you can pick your favorite theme on either iOS or Android. 

The new mobile video sharing helps you instantly capture, edit, apply filters, and publish compelling videos up to 3 minutes long right from your mobile device.

Microsoft Teams

The new Communities App for MS Teams (for desktop and Teams Mobile) are now generally available, helping really everyone to stay connected, receive important updates and alerts, attend live events, share feedback and ideas across teams and locations.

Interactive conversations in Outlook

You can now also directly engage with Yammer conversations from within your Outlook. See conversations, like, reply directly from the email notification.

Security and compliance

Microsoft also added additional admin controls like Native Mode to help organizations better manage their data, privacy, security, and compliance needs.

Coming up next

• Featured conversations where Yammer administrators will be able to boost the visibility of critical messages in the Home feed by featuring the conversation to drive engagement
  
• External guests in Yammer communities - add people from outside your organization to your Yammer communities using Azure B2B, which ensures admins can manage user data, privacy, and compliance. This change will also enable communities with external guests to host live events, create custom policies for file storage and community creation, support local data residency and more.