M365 Changelog: Yammer Cross-geo external collaboration support on External Networks for the EU

MC312490 – Updated January 11, 2022: Microsoft has updated this post with a link to additional content.

With this release, members from Yammer networks located in the European Union will be able to be invited to Yammer External Networks hosted by a Yammer network located in the United States.

Note: For the subset of users of EU networks who had previously been active members of external networks, using an organization’s old network in the US geo, are reinvited to the external networks, their old profile will be marked as “deleted” without deleting any of the user’s content in those external networks.

This message is associated with Microsoft 365 Roadmap ID: 88837

When will this happen?

Microsoft will begin rolling this out in mid-February and expect to complete rollout late March.

How will this affect your organization?

This new capability will enable users from networks in the EU geo to participate in external networks hosted in the US geo.

• Previously, users in the EU geo did not have the option to join networks hosted in the US geo. With this change, they will be able to do so
• A subset of EU users that may have previously participated in the External Network, that used basic networks before an EU-based Microsoft 365 tenant was setup, will need to be reinvited from their EU geo and accept the invite to re-join the External Network. These users’ old profile will be marked as “deleted” without deleting any of their content in those external networks.

What do you need to do to prepare?

If your organization uses a Yammer network hosted in the EU geo, ensure that you plan for this change and communicate to users about how they should use external networks. You can use the “Require admin approval for members to join other companies’ external groups or external networks” setting and set it to ON to be able to first review and allow/not allow the participation of members in your EU Yammer network in external networks hosted in the US.

If your organization hosts external networks, you can invite members from the EU. For the scenario described for the subset of users mentioned above, if you prefer to opt out of marking old profiles as “deleted”, please reach out to yammerextnetworkscrossgeo@service.microsoft.com by February 11, 2022. Opting out will oblige External Network admins to manually mark these users as deleted before reinviting them.Blog