Yammer

Year of Yammer Keeps on Rolling Seven months after Microsoft declared the “Year of Yammer,” a public preview of a much-hyped (at Ignite 2019) new user interface is available to Office 365 tenants. General availability of the new Yammer is expected in July 2020. The new interface is already available in the Yammer mobile app…

This month, the news is mostly around the Office clients and the Power Platform. I guess those teams decided to work harder than the rest or it could be that teams like the SharePoint group are busy delivering on a lot of new features they had already teased.

Office 365 has experienced great success since its launch in June 2011, but it’s also had its share of failures as well. This article considers the most important technical advances in Office 365 and the most important parts of the ecosystem as well as some places where things didn’t go quite so well as either Microsoft or tenants would have liked.

The Brave Browser offers the prospect of speed and security. But how well does it work with the Office 365 browser apps? As it happens, pretty well, with some exceptions. Here’s what I discovered when I test-drove Brave with OWA, Teams, SharePoint Online, Yammer, Planner, and Stream.

Microsoft is notoriously careful at giving out usage numbers for different Office 365 workloads.We know what the overall count is and now we have numbers for SharePoint Online and Teams. Some glances into a handy crystal ball and some inspired guesswork allows us to calculate likely numbers for Exchange Online, Yammer, and Planner and paint a more comprehensive picture of what’s happening inside Office 365.

Microsoft has declared some undefined period, perhaps starting at the Ignite conference, to be the “Year of Yammer.” Cynics might say “What! Yet again?” as Microsoft tries to position its enterprise networking app within Office 365 collaboration as it certainly feels like we have been down this path before. On the upside, this attempt seems to focus on what Yammer is good at instead of mimicking other apps. Time will tell.

Microsoft made a ton of Office 365-related announcements at their Ignite conference in Orlando. Here’s a summary of the key news for SharePoint, Exchange, Stream, Teams, Yammer, and Outlook. More information will emerge during the week, so stay tuned for more coverage as news emerges.

Microsoft is rebuilding Yammer with an updated interface and new features but you can’t get your hands on it for a few more weeks.

Microsoft says that new Yammer networks can have their messages stored in the European Union instead of the U.S. That sounds good, until you understand the downside that Yammer loses a lot of its external collaboration capabilities. Given this, it’s likely that some existing EU-based Office 365 tenants who use Yammer will be happy to have their messages stay in the U.S.

Microsoft has announced a couple of new features that will add more functionality to SharePoint, Yammer, and Streams