Now that Yammer has been moved under Office 365, we have to start getting to know it a little better. What exactly is Yammer and how does it fit in with SharePoint? There’s a Yammer App that you can use within your environment, but is it easy enough to set up the App Service in SharePoint? View the Yammer 101 YamJam summary from the Experts to see what was said by various experts on the field during this Office 365 Technical Network exclusive.
In the video below, I make an introduction to the topics mentioned above and give my take on it.
Transcript of the video
Hi everyone, and welcome to Between Two Farms. In this show that we’re starting out for the first time, I want to come and see you every week and talk to you about some of the cool things I’ve seen in the SharePoint trends, but also around SharePoint like Office 365 and Yammer, and share my experiences, of course, with you as well as what’s going on with our projects here. I think it’ll be fun to check it out.
This week, I’d like to talk to you. I just came back from an awesome meeting where I had to present SharePoint in terms of collaboration as well as how good is Yammer in the enterprise. For that, we had to explain what Yammer was and how does it differ from other social networks, because often we just don’t get what it’s for.
What is Yammer?
Yammer is kind of like a Facebook for enterprise. Don’t get me wrong. I hate saying that, but essentially it allows us to have a feed and have conversations around documents or projects happening in our office and really have open based conversation, not emails one to one. Because if something’s happening around a document or say we’re having this meeting. We leave the meeting and one of the people contacts you by email afterwards. Well, there’s only a conversation between two people here.
The benefit with Yammer is that it is open to your team and everyone can participate within it. That is really the advantage that we have here. What’s really fun is the ability to have groups; people join groups, and us having conversations sharing on documents, sharing on images, making polls. There is definitely a lot to be done there. I love it.
With the meeting that we just had, to be honest, I even wanted to go back into Yammer. It’s free. You should definitely check it out.
How to collaborate with Yammer?
If you’re wondering how do I take Yammer and the conversation we’re having and integrate it with our SharePoint right because that’s where our documents are these days, that’s our document libraries, our one drive for business. Now what’s interesting is that out of the box, whether you’re on-premises or on Office 365, there is no real integration between Yammer and SharePoint, though not entirely true. On-premises, you’ll just have Yammer, which is a Cloud based service, completely independent, and you have your SharePoint. What happens now is that when you have a document you can push a link to Yammer and continue the conversations there. That’s okay, but it’s just a hyperlink.
The Yammer app as a group feed
What’s really going to be fun is to bring these feeds, a group feed, a Yammer feed where people are having conversations on a particular group, and take that and bring it into your team sites where you’re collaborating, working on tasks, working on documents. This is where I discovered something called the Yammer app. In SharePoint 2013, you may have seen something called the App Store, and you may have already explored or may not.
For me, it was kind of a new experience, to be honest. I’ve seen it many times, but I’ve never actually set it up myself in my environment. What I found interesting is I spent a couple of hours trying to get that working, setting up just the app service on your environment. Let me tell you, even with the TechNet articles, with all of the blogs available out there, there is something that really, really bugged me.
Once you’ve got it set up everything works fine, but for the apps to work in your environment be careful when you set up all of those steps with the outer shell to make the app service work. Because you may have – and this is how I learned it – to delete the default IIS website on your server. Because of things happening with IIS and the host header sent, the apps actually live in a separate domain which is where a lot of the problems with the CSS and the JavaScripts that belong to SharePoint that Yammer or any app actually needs to properly load can’t properly get them, because it thinks that it’s going to the default IIS website.
In short, guys, if you’re going to set up the app service to get the Yammer app or any other app, be careful when you’re following the step by step process, because you may have to delete the default IIS website if you’re using host headers in your web applications. I learned that the hard way. However, once I got it working I was able to add the Yammer app and explore tons of other apps in the App Store. I’m really starting to enjoy it. Check it out.
Yammer Group and SharePoint Team Site now integrated
Now, if you’re still wondering hey, what is Yammer, is it worth it to bring it into my environment with my SharePoint, because of course with Office 365, it’s kind of already integrated. What you can do is in the future every time you’re going to create a Yammer group it’s even going to create a SharePoint team site, sort of a custom template behind it, so that when people add documents, it’s going to go into that site. Honestly, some cool things are happening. What I do invite you to do is to go check it out.
Further Reading: how to adopt Teams when you’re already using SharePoint
The future of Yammer
This week on Tuesday, we’re going to have a Yam Jam on the Office 365 technical network. (Due to time, please read the Yam Jam resume here). The link is in here in this blog post. Check it out and join us. Ask your questions. There are going to be experts that have been implementing this on the field, and they’ll be happy to share the best practices, what’s failed, what’s been very successful, and of course answer your questions as well.
Again, thank you for joining us on our first edition of SharePoint Between Two Farms, and I’ll see you next week.
