Yammer

Office 365 keeps on changing, which makes it very hard to keep up with detail. The big stuff gets covered in articles but small changes might be overlooked. In this post, Tony looks at some of the changes that happened in the last week or so that you might have missed, including Teams, Planner, OneDrive, Yammer, and Exchange. And preparation for GDPR…

A recent vacation meant that I didn’t spend as much time as usual monitoring changes inside Office 365. As it happened, lots of change occurred. The large stuff (major updates for Teams and Planner) has already been covered in detail, but many other small but important changes are now active inside Office 365. And, as always, it’s the small stuff that can trip you up. Here’s what I learned after a weekend of catching up…

Microsoft has a new Information Protection guide to help Office 365 tenants prepare for GDPR. The guide is incomplete because it focuses on SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business, but it contains some good information that will help companies figure out what they need to do to prepare for the May 25, 2018 deadline. Expect more guides of this type to appear in the future.

Lots of good things happened in the world of Office 365 during 2017. More people than ever before use the service, new applications and functionality appeared, and Microsoft delivered a robust service. On the other hand, a few lows happened as well, as sometimes bad decisions and miscommunication soured the experience. But overall, 2017 was good and laid a great foundation for 2018.

Jasper Oosterveld, Microsoft MVP and Consultant, introduces the new Yammer Group Insights.

Office 365 Groups and Microsoft Teams are two of the collaboration offerings available within Office 365. Some get very vexed about the two applications. I don’t because I think the two serve different audiences and exist for different reasons.

Microsoft Workplace Analytics is not a “Fitbit for the enterprise” that you can deploy off-the-shelf to get instantly usable information. Expect to invest considerable time or spend some consulting dollars to make sense of organization dynamics, office politics, and internal friction. All the stuff that makes working in large companies so worthwhile!

Gartner’s recent SWOT analysis of Office 365 contains some interesting thoughts and observations. I do not agree with them all because I think some of their thinking is a little dated, but it is always interesting to read what Gartner is whispering into the ears of their customers.

The news that Teams won’t support external access when they planned is not a shock. But what is needed is a common external access mechanism that can work for all of the Office 365 applications. Let’s not reinvent the wheel!

Microsoft has updated Yammer so that new groups use the Office 365 Groups service to manage the identity and membership of the groups. There are far too many “groups” in that last sentence, which kind of illustrates how a surplus of groups might be building up within Office 365.