New Yammer Features: Counts, Group Types, and Move Conversations

Enterprise Social 2

Time flies and so do the updates in Office 365. You look away for a moment and countless new features are introduced by Microsoft. I would like to take a look at a couple Yammer updates I noticed in the Office 365 Message Center. I am a long time but critical fan of Yammer. The only real social service within Office 365 received a lot of criticism over the past years. Especially within the SharePoint and Office 365 community and MVP’s but is definitely stepping up its game lately. The integration with Office 365 Groups really was a step in the right direction and definitely a turning point for Yammer.

 

 

The following updates are being released the coming weeks:

  • Yammer seen counts
  • Group types
  • Move conversations

Let’s take a closer look!

Yammer Seen Counts

Hereby the official description of this new feature:

This feature will allow you to see how many people have viewed your conversations.     

  • The first post will now show the number of unique users that have seen the first message in a conversation.
  • These counts will only show if there is at least one person who has seen the conversations.
  • The creator of the conversation will not be included in the count.
  • Replies to a conversation will not be added to the count.
  • Only the original creator will be able to see the counts for their conversations.

 

This is a great new feature because people post conversations to share their knowledge, expertise, or ask a question. Every author would like to know, at least I would, how many people have read the conversation.

I have a point of critique and that’s related to the last bullet point:

“Only the original creator will be able to see the counts for their conversations.”

Why should the count view only be accessible for the author? That’s also relevant information for the viewers. This is a feature that’s been around for many years on social networks and blogs. I hope this is extended to all viewers in the near future.

Click here to learn more.

Group Types

Hereby the official description of this new feature:

Starting this week, Yammer will begin rolling out the group types in Yammer feature. This feature will have design updates that will help users better understand Yammer’s purpose and help them map their work to those core scenarios to get the maximum benefit from the product.  The group types map to the value proposition of Yammer. These group types are:

Nouns to Describe the Group’s Type and Membership

  • My Organization
  • Community
  • Project

Verbs to Describe the Primary Actions in the Group

  • Inform and Discuss
  • Connect & Learn
  • Plan and Work

Here are some of the experience changes:

Group Header

The group header will include a label that indicates the purpose of the group. This info should complement the other elements of the group header (name, image, description) to help people understand the purpose of the group.

Group Creation Screen

Groups creators will select a purpose for the group when creating the group, which will be visible to other group members in the experiment. The group creation flow will help reinforce the core purposes for Yammer by providing descriptions of the group types as well as examples.

Left Navigation Change

The left navigation will show each group’s type. For users in 8 or fewer groups, they will see their groups clustered by group type. For users in 9+ groups, an icon will indicate the group type.

This is a great feature for large Yammer networks. Allowing them to organize all the groups for its members. That said, I can already see the requests for changing the names of the categories.

Click here to learn more.

Move Conversations

Hereby the official description of this new feature:

Move conversations allows any user to move a conversation, poll, or praise to a different group to make sure the right people see it.

Awesome! This feature is right up there with the edit post feature. It is highly requested and valuable. I can definitely see a lot of people using this feature instead of deleting and reposting in the correct group.

 

 

Are you excited about these new features? Share your thoughts in the comments.