Why Yammer is still relevant

A little while ago I did a presentation at a user group on “Why Yammer is still relevant”. I’ve recorded that presentation and made it available to all, so take a look and let me know what you think. The slide for the session are also available for download.

The crux of my process is that Yammer is the best way to drive Office 365 adoption. Why? Because:

– Yammer is really targeted to do one thing well (public conversations)

– It requires no infrastructure to implement as it is a cloud only solution

– It has a free entry level version

– It is mobile ready

– It integrates well to other Office 365 services

The secret to implementing such a huge product like Office 365 is not to overwhelm users with an ‘everything at once’ approach. See my ‘rule of three’ for more thoughts on that.

Likewise, if you underwhelm users with just email, they will yawn and ask with they are bothering to pay for Office 365.

You need to find a good starting point for on boarding people into the new way of working with Office 365. This means you need to give them something that doesn’t take a whole lot of training to understand, yet provides some major productivity benefits. To me, Yammer fits that bill in spades.

That doesn’t means that you can’t use Microsoft Teams down the line but Microsoft Teams, with its links to files and stuff, can be too much initially for users to get their heads around, especially if they are coming from a world of files and folders. Yammer by contrast is simple and ‘works’ in a similar way to many social networks they already probably use (a la Facebook). That means less training, and importantly, less resistance thanks to pre-existing understanding.

The big productivity payoff is simply visibility of shared information. Such visibility means that information can now be shared with everyone in the business. This means users can find what they want themselves by simply searching for it.

Yammer also speaks to the two most important demographics I have outlined previously when it comes to driving Office 365 adoption, your innovators and laggards. Yammer allows you innovators to dive right and start posting information and showing people how much they know. For laggards, Yammer allows them to sit back and watch what everyone is doing before become comfortable enough to contribute.

Like all Office 365 services, to have a successful adoption you need to have a plan. My suggestions for overall adoption, as I have outlined, is to start with Yammer. To kick this adoption process off with Yammer you create two internal networks called ‘Social’ and ‘Office 365 101’. The idea with the ‘Social’ area is that it is somewhere that people can share birthdays, sports results, holidays, etc. You may think that have a ‘Social’ group is frivolous to a business. It is, however, very specifically designed to help drive adoption. How? Well, the more restrictions you place on people, the less likely they are to use it right? So, the concept of the ‘Social’ group in Yammer is as place with few restrictions, therefore encouraging adoption of the service. If you don’t want to see the ‘Social’ stuff you don’t join that group. Unlike company wide email blasts, users can select which Yammer group they want to be part of.

The ‘Office 365 101’ group in Yammer becomes a place that is initially seeded with helpful links, videos, and the like. It is the place people come to ask questions about Office 365 inside the business and get answers from implementers. However, here’s where the real magic of Yammer happens. Although there is some initial effort required to seed the group, what you generally soon find is that soon your innovators and early adopters start answering questions posted by others as well as contributing helpful information. They start doing what they have always done, showing people how much they know and helping others. Now all you need to do is stand back and the group ‘Office 365 101’ becomes self supporting. Amazing eh?

Once users have grasped the concept of Yammer with these two groups they will come asking whether they can use Yammer to solve business challenges. At that point, you know your adoption process is on the road to success. Until that point, you have to continue to work getting users to understand the benefits of Yammer and using the service for themselves (hint, just show them search and they’ll ‘get it’).

In a nutshell, that’s why I see Yammer now as being more relevant than ever. I look at it as the starting point for all Office 365 adoption projects and in my experience is works really well in that way. Implemented correctly, it is a product that will revolutionize a business and help them understand how the ‘new world’ of collaboration with Office 365 can improve their productivity and change the way they work.

Consistent success comes from having a system and Yammer is a key part of my adoption system for Office 365. I would suggest it should also be part of yours.

Microsoft Teams and OneNote integration

One of the ways that I describe Microsoft Teams to people is as a simplified and aggregated wrapper over things such as SharePoint Teams Sites and Skype for Business. Many may not appreciate however that it is also a wrapper over one of other favourite products, OneNote.

When you create a new Microsoft Team you also get a new SharePoint Team Site as part of that. That SharePoint Team Site contains a OneNote notebook which is known as a ‘site notebook’. To view it, simply select the link Notebook from the Quick Launch menu on the left of the SharePoint Team Site.

If you open that notebook you’ll see that it is blank, as shown above. OneNote is arranged by sections, inside which are individual pages.

If you now go to that Microsoft Team (in my case, called Help Desk), you will see the normal Conversations and Files tabs at the top of the only channel I currently have in the Team called General, like so:

You’ll notice that I have already added a new tab to this channel (Polly) thanks to a bot I’ve inserted into this Team. I’ll cover bots in another post.

What you don’t yet see in the Team channel is anything to do with OneNote. The reason is that OneNote connectivity is not added by default.

To connect this Microsoft Team channel to OneNote press the ‘+’ (plus) item on the menu.

That will display a new window, as shown above with all the items you can add to menu. One of these you should find is OneNote.

Select the OneNote tile.

You’ll then be asked to give the new tab a name. Here I have called it Meetings. Select the Save button when you have made your choice.

Now you should see a new menu item across the top matching the name you just gave OneNote (here, Meetings). You’ll also notice that you are placed into a OneNote style page below the menu.

You are now free to give your page a name and enter any notes into that page.

If you now select the ‘hamburger’ menu in the top left of the page you will see,

This should now begin to look more and more like OneNote. Here you can go in and create new pages like so,

That’s really handy for everyone in that channel to capture information.

If you now return to the Site Notebook directly in SharePoint you should find the notebook looks something like that shown above. There is a new section with the name Channel – Selection name (here General – Meetings) and the information just enters appears as pages.

Thus, when you add the OneNote option to a Team channel a new section is created in the Site Notebook in the SharePoint Team Site that was created when that Microsoft Team was established. Pages you create in that channel are then saved under that section.

If I now go and create a new channel for that Team (here called Office 365) and then add OneNote to that channel as above, I again get the ability to add pages. Here, I have created a new page called Scripts in my Office 365 channel.

If I now go back to my Site Notebook in the SharePoint Team Site I can see this new channel as a section and the page I created underneath it in standard OneNote format.

So in summary, when you create a new Microsoft Team you get a new SharePoint Team Site. This SharePoint Team Site contains a single OneNote notebook called a Site Notebook. If you then add OneNote to a channel in Microsoft Teams, the name you give that OneNote tab becomes a new section in the Site Notebook. Any new page you create in that channel gets created under this section in the Site Notebook.

If you elect to Edit Notebook, as shown above, you will get the option to work with the WHOLE notebook in the web or via OneNote on the desktop. That means you are in effect opening the complete Site Notebook where you will see ALL the sections (channels) and pages below like so

Given the way the sections are named after the actual channel, hopefully this avoids confusion but there will no doubt be those who don’t see the connection between the Microsoft Team as a whole and all the channels within it and the Site Notebook which holds ALL the OneNote information for the Microsoft Team as a single OneNote notebook file. You can view the OneNote information for the Microsoft Team by channel inside the Microsoft Teams app or for the WHOLE Microsoft Team (i.e. all the channels) at once using the OneNote app.

Hopefully, this articles goes some way to explaining the configuration and connectivity between Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Teams Sites, the Site Notebook and OneNote.

Schedule a Microsoft Teams meeting in Outlook

If you have the Microsoft Teams app on your desktop and you check in your Outlook calendar you should see a new button as shown above.

This button will allow you to schedule Microsoft Teams meetings. Clicking this will create a new meeting invite in you Outlook calendar as well as the Teams desktop app when saved.

You can read more about this add in here:

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Microsoft-Teams-Blog/Now-available-Outlook-add-in-to-schedule-meetings-in-Microsoft/ba-p/71157

Need to Know podcast–Episode 159

We are back after a break due to work scheduling. Listen in for a deep drive into why it has taken so long to get this epidode out. You choose whether you believe it or not but the good news is that we a new episode for you focusing on all the latest from Microsoft, Azure and Office 365. Plenty of product updates and some news about Microsoft’s recent financial performance.

Take a listen and let us know what you think –feedback@needtoknow.cloud

You can listen to this episode directly at:

https://ciaops.podbean.com/e/episode-159-excuses/