SharePoint (and Project Server) Shenanigans

A small post to go over the Yammer Roadmap session and to highlight the key parts.

New Features:

Single Sign On (Future)

A major investment coming soon is Single Sign On with the rest of Office 365.  You can already link your Active Directory accounts but currently Single Sign On is not implement.  Watch out for this feature soon.

External Messaging (Available Now)

You can now invite any external user into your Yammer conversations by simply adding their email address as part of your post (section at the bottom).

• When you do this, a small yellow dot icon is next to the name to signify that it is external
• The post button has a small globe next to it to show that it is now interacting with external users.

Once you post the message it appears in the external users yammer private message inbox (assuming they have one) and an email is sent to their inbox with the ability to sign up if they need to.

They can reply via email or via the yammer private message system.

The author of the conversation has the ability to take the external user out of the conversation at any point.  The private messages are deleted out of the users inbox and they can no longer reply.

If you wish, you can stop external messaging across your organizations Yammer tenant within Administration settings.

Compliance (Future)

Currently Microsoft is working hard to move Yammer into their own infrastructure and once it has done, compliance will be a priority.

Group Focus (Future – Coming Soon)

Improved focus on Groups within Yammer (not to be confused with Office 365 Groups)

• Navigation for creation of groups as well existing groups has moved from the Top Navigation to the Side Navigation.
• New users will be able to search for new groups as soon as they sign up, helping to improve the overall experience.

Delve Cards (Mostly available now / when Delve is in your tenant)

Watch for a different post on what Delve is… but in the meantime…

Yammer “signals” are built into the Delve boards, allowing you to start a discussion from any article or item that appears within Delve.

Next to the icon, notification counts show others discussing the item in Delve within Yammer (Please note this relies upon Single Sign On being implemented in the future)

Mobile App Improvements (Coming Soon)

• Notifications are being added to iOS and Android clients with swipe actions to take you straight into the discussion within the app
• Inline @mentions within the discussion rather than a separate list at the bottom of the discussion post
• Photo publisher within the app with annotation capability
• New mobile experience and UI will surface important content first by group (with number of items not seen).  This is designed to ensure you always see the latest content without missing a thing!

Office 365 Group Sync (Far Future)

Towards the end of the session a number of people asked about integration with Office 365 Groups.  It was mentioned that this is in the road map but not timeline could be confirmed as they are working hard at bringing Yammer into the Microsoft infrastructure.