Inserting a Yammer feed into SharePoint Online

All Office 365 Suites include Yammer. I have detailed the benefits of utilising Yammer in a business here:

However, one of the point of confusion for many people is when do you use Yammer and when do you use SharePoint? My guidance is that you in fact use both. Although Yammer can be used to store documents, you shouldn’t. Instead you use SharePoint to hold all the documents with all the benefits it provides and then you use Yammer to have conversations around the documents.

I have detailed how you can have Yammer conversations around SharePoint documents here:

Delve should be the centre of your Office 365 universe

Yet another way to improve the integration between Yammer and SharePoint Online is to embed a Yammer group into a SharePoint Team Site.

I’ve detailed the process in the above video but here is also the written process.

In this case, I’m going to replace the default SharePoint newsfeed you see on the page above with a Yammer group feed.

The first thing to note is that you can’t use this process to embed the ‘All Company’ or home feed from Yammer, you can only do this with a Yammer group.

Thus, in the above example I navigate to my Yammer group (called Learning Office 365) as shown above.

In the lower right hand corner of the Yammer group (you may need to scroll to the bottom of the page) you should find the section Access Options as shown above. In this area you will find a link Embed This Feed in Your Site which you need to select.

Doing so will immediately open a new dialog that contains a snippet of code. Copy this using Ctrl-C.

Now return to your SharePoint Team Site and the page into which you wish to embed Yammer. Edit the page by typically selecting the Edit icon in the upper right corner as shown above.

This will place the page into edit mode as seen above. You should be able to see the page regions and any existing web parts.

To delete the Newsfeed web part simply select the down arrow in the top right corner of the web part to reveal the above menu. From this menu select Delete.

Ensure that the cursor is in the correct location on the page where you want the Yammer feed to appear. Then select the Insert tab at the top of the page. From the Ribbon Menu that appears select the Web Part button.

This will open a window directly below as shown above. In the Categories section at the left select Media and Content. That should display a number of different items in the Parts section to the right. In the parts section locate and select Script Editor.

Select the Add button on the right to complete the insertion process.

You should now see a Script Editor web part in the location where your cursor was on the page. Go to the top right of this web part and select the down arrow to reveal the above menu. From the menu select the Edit Web Part option.

That will display a standard web part editing pane on the right of the screen but it will also display the EDIT SNIPPET option in the web part as shown above which you need to select.

This will now open a new dialog like that shown above. Simply select the box and paste the code you have previously copied using Ctrl-V.

Immediately after pasting the code the dialog will expand and appear like the above. Simply select the Insert button to save the changes.

With the page edits complete, return to the top right of the page and select the Save icon to return to normal page mode.

Once the page refreshes, you should now see the Yammer feed for the group embedded in the SharePoint Team Site as shown above.

You should also see that the conversation is exactly the same as it appears in Yammer.

If anyone now posts an update in the embedded feed, as shown above, it will appear both in SharePoint

and Yammer as you can see above.

Thus, embedding Yammer groups directly into SharePoint Online Team Site means users only have one location to visit to collaborate on a topic. They can of course still interact directly with Yammer if they choose but having the option makes it more likely that will become better engaged with both Yammer and SharePoint Online.

Enabling Enterprise Yammer in Office 365

A while back I did a post that detailed how to enable Enterprise Yammer in Office 365 which you can find here:

Enabling Enterprise Yammer in Office 365

Since I had to do this again on one of my tenants I thought I’d capture the whole process again in the video tutorial you see above.

Delve should be the center of your Office 365 universe

How do you get Delve?

Delve is currently only available to Office 365 subscribers. Delve is included with all Office 365 suites that include SharePoint Online (Business Essentials, Business Premium, E1, E3 and E4). Users who are assigned a SharePoint Online license as part of the suite will also get Delve.

What is Delve?

Under the covers of Office 365 is something called Officegraph. It monitors interactions between people and the information they use. It then applies machine learning to these interactions in order to determine what is most relevant.

One of the ways that the results of this machine learning is surfaced to Office 365 users is via Delve (Clutter is another place). As you can see from the above video, Delve is simply another location users can navigate to in Office 365 from their App Launcher.

When a user navigates to Delve they are presented with information from Office 365 that is most relevant to them at that moment. This means they could see documents from Team Sites or OneDrive. They could see emails or conversations in Yammer or content from Skype for Business.

Delve does not change or negate permissions in Office 365, a user can only see in Delve what they can see elsewhere in Office 365. If they don’t have access to it elsewhere, Delve will not show it to them.

The more important the information that the machine learning in Officegraph determines something is, the higher it will rank in a users Delve.

Why use Delve?

If you think about the way most people work in a business these days, firstly, they dive into their emails, then they may jump across and access some files. Maybe they then have a phone or Skype call with some instant messaging thrown in. Then maybe they go out to a social network to catch up on what’s happening. They then of course repeat this process over and over again during their day.

Delve alleviates a lot of this service switching by providing a single ‘pane of glass’ at which a user can get an overview across all their information locations arranged in a manner that is most relevant to them. This means that documents they have recently been working appear at the top of the list in Delve.

From Delve, users can then simply select the information they want and be taken directly to that location where ever it is in Office 365. So let’s say that you are working on a document and you save it somewhere quickly to get on with other tasks. When you want to come back to that document later you may have forgotten exactly where you saved it. Was it in OneDrive? Maybe this Team Site? No. Maybe that Team Site? Now, what did I call it again so I can search for it? By using Delve instead, you’ll see that document listed near the top of your feed and by selecting it you’ll be taken directly to that location.

Inside a business it is important to remember that we do not work in isolation. We are generally part of many teams, large and small as well as many interactions. We therefore also need to collaborate with others, share information and gain insight from understanding what others in the business are working on. Once again, Delve provides benefits because it allows you to not only see what information is most relevant to you but also what information is relevant to others in your team. In essence, if you select a colleague in your Delve you’ll see their Delve (again remembering Delve respects security and permissions).

So if I login as a user and navigate to Delve I see something like that shown above, which is information about Me.

But if now select someone else under People menu on the left hand side you’ll that I see their Delve activity feed which is different to mine.

If I now select their Profile instead of their Activity I get information about them as shown above. On this page are direct links to their email address, phone and chat.

If you look closely at a Delve card you see that it has information about the user at the top of the card, which you can select, that will take you to their profile. If you click on document in the middle of the card, a new tab in browser will open and you’ll be taken directly to the location for that document wherever it is in Office 365.

At the bottom of the card you’ll see the location of the document (here in a SharePoint Team Site called Demo) as well as links to collaborate further on this document via email, or share it with others (like you do in SharePoint but here directly from Delve).

However, what I believe is a better way to share documents to gain feedback is via document conversations in Yammer. This occurs when you select the Yammer icon below the document. When you do this a pane will slide out from the right hand side of the window and you’ll we prompted to post a link to the document in Yammer as well as see any existing conversations around this document already in Yammer as shown above. This document conversation feature used to be part of SharePoint Online directly but has been deprecated as I indicated in a previous post here:

Document conversations deprecated

The final option available when it comes to sharing are Delve Boards.

Delve Boards basically allow you to ‘pin’ information from Delve to an ‘interest’ or topic. Imagine that your business is doing a project, you could create Delve Board with the project name and then ‘pin’ information to it

When you create a board and add something to it you are sharing that across your organisation so that everyone (with suitable permissions of course) can view what is on the board and pin their own stuff to it.

You will see, just under the board name you can elect to Follow/Unfollow the board as well as send a link to the board via email.

Why is Delve important?

The more that I see of Delve and the more I understand the direction Microsoft is taking with Office 365 the more important I believe Delve is to every business using Office 365. It’s ability to function as a ‘single pane’ of glass across all your content. It’s ability to show you what is most important to you, along with the ability to access and share information directly from there points to the direction your business should be heading with Office 365 I believe.

Yes, it is probably a very different way of working from the way you currently do BUT I am very confident that using it would provide major productivity benefits across any business if utilised appropriately. Remember, you don’t have to abandon the way you do things now to use Delve, you can start using it today and then judge for yourself, which is exactly what I’d encourage you to do. Try and see before making any judgement.

Too many times we become locked into a routine, into a comfortable way of doing things for purely emotional reasons. After we embrace something new that really works we wonder why we didn’t do it sooner. I think this is very much the case with Delve base on my interactions with resellers and users (more resellers tho’).

The common mentality is, because I don’t understand it I won’t use it, whereas a true business mentality should be let me see if this can provide me business benefit. Yes, Delve is a different way of going about your work but just because its different doesn’t mean it is worse, in fact I’d pretty much wager that it will make things better. A lot better.

Can I disable Delve?

Each user can disable Delve if they so desire. The do this by navigating to Delve and selecting the Cog in the top right corner. From the menu that appears they then select Sharing Activity.

They will then be given the option as shown above to disable Delve.

If you want to disable Delve across you whole organisation you’ll need to login as an administrator and visit the SharePoint admin center. There under Settings you find the above option for Officegraph which when disallowed will also disable Delve.

Conclusion

I certainly see Delve becoming more and more the center of the Office 365 universe. It will be the central place to access all your information. It will be the place to stay up to date with what’s happening across you whole organisation. It will be the place you go to share information with people inside and outside your business. And that is just for starters.

in short, it will make you and your business more productive and that’s why you should start using it today, because from what I have seen of the roadmap for Delve and Office 365 it is only going to get better and more powerful. (see Hey, workaholics: Microsoft Delve will track your ‘work life balance as an example of what’s coming).

References

What is Office Delve?

Office Delve for Office 365 admins

Are my document safe in Office Delve?

Document conversations deprecated

It was disappointing to learn today that Microsoft has decided to deprecate the document conversations feature linking SharePoint Online and Yammer.

Just over a year ago I wrote how this new features had been enabled:

Yammer integration has arrived

and how excited I was to see social being integrated into traditional file storage. But according to this blog post from Microsoft:

https://blogs.office.com/2015/07/16/document-collaboration-in-yammer-just-got-better-with-office-online/

at the bottom amongst the questions is this.

Previously, we announced the release of document conversations, which embeds Yammer conversations inside files stored in OneDrive for Business or SharePoint Online. However, we’ve seen very low engagement with this feature in its current implementation. Today’s announced Office Online integration brings document collaboration into Yammer. We believe giving teams the ability to work on files in the context of their existing Yammer groups and conversations provides a more engaging and relevant experience. As such, with this latest release of document collaboration using Office Online inside Yammer, we are rolling back the current implementation of the document conversation feature, but will continue to explore other ways for users to start new Yammer conversations from files.

Interestingly, these new features they speak of seem to only apply to:

First, the document preview and edit experience for files uploaded into Yammer are now powered by Office Online.

To my mind that is creating another silo in which information will reside as Yammer documents are different from SharePoint Online documents. Unfortunately, as I understand it, Yammer documents don’t have the same functionality as SharePoint document when it comes to things like workflows, check in / check out, approvals, etc. at this point in time.

It seemed to me that the old way of having documents hosted in a single location like SharePoint and then having Yammer conversations around these document made a lot more sense. The new changes seem to me to be encouraging people to continue to put files in different locations and in turn cause more confusion and frustration about where the ‘single point of truth’ actually lies.

However, I do see something very positive when I read further through the blog post from Microsoft:

The recently announced Yammer integration with Delve and the Office 365 Video Portal, which enables users to have inline Yammer conversations and share content to Yammer, will also remain available.

Unfortunately, this is buried at the end of the post. What in essence it says is that you should be using document conversations from Delve and not from SharePoint Online. This makes a lot of sense as Microsoft is pushing Delve as the single pane of glass across all your information repositories. I’ll be doing a post about the growing importance of Delve soon, so stay tuned.

I have championed the fact that Office 365 users need to start making Delve the central part of their Office 365 experience for two reasons. Firstly, it makes your more productive and secondly this is the direction Microsoft is moving with Office 365.

If anything, this change in document conversations indicates that poorly utilise features will be deprecated (which Microsoft will do more rapidly since it can monitor the metrics so much easier) and secondly that Delve is becoming the most important piece of Office 365!

Need to Know podcast–Episode 84

In this episode I’m joined by Office 365 MVP Martina Grom to talk Yammer. We cover what Yammer is, how to implement it as part of Office 365 and how to ensure it is a success within a business. Martina shares her experience and technical knowledge on how to make Yammer a success.

You can listen to the episode at:

http://ciaops.podbean.com/e/episode-84-martina-grom/

or subscribe to this and all episodes in iTunes at:

https://itunes.apple.com/au/podcast/ciaops-need-to-know-podcasts/id406891445?mt=2

The podcast is also available on Stitcher at:

http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/ciaops/need-to-know-podcast?refid=stpr

Don’t forget to give the show a rating as well as send me any feedback or suggestions you may have for the show. I’m also on the hunt for some co-presenters so if you are interested on being a regular part of the show please contact me.

Resources

Martina on Twitter

Skype for Business preview

PowerShell for Office 365

Changing Office 365 plans

Azure AD Connect gets released

Configuring Yammer Dirsync

I’ve recently blogged about using DIRSYNC to connect your local Active Directory (AD) to Office 365. It is one of the most popular posts on this blog and you can find it here:

Windows Azure Active Directory Sync tool (DIRSYSNC) – the basics

I have followed this up even more recently with a post about the updated DIRSYNC tool called Azure Active Directory Sync Services and you can find that here:

Azure AD Sync Services tool – the basics

Finally, I have posted about the preview of the tool that is replace Azure AD Sync Services called Azure AD Connect and that you can find here:

Azure AD Connect (Preview) – Install

You may think these are the only tools used or required to copy you local AD to Office 365 services. They aren’t. Hopefully, you know that Yammer is now included free with many Office 365 plans and Yammer also contains user information. In fact it is possible to copy some of this user information from your local AD.

The place to start is the:

Yammer Directory Sync 3.0 Admin Guide

but before you get too far into the weeds what benefits does Yammer DIRSYNC provide?

As the guide says, after you set up this integration product, users will be able to be automatically:

– removed from your Yammer network when you disable them in AD

– invited to your Yammer network when you add them to AD

– updated with new profile information when you update their attributes in AD

and that is basically it. My personal take on this is that Yammer DIRSYNC doesn’t really provide a lot of benefit for smaller organisations that don’t have thousands of AD users and who don’t have large amounts of turnover within their staff. If that is your business or your customer’s business then you can stop reading here and not have to worry about this any more.

However, I hope that you are at least somewhat curious as to how the whole configuration process of Yammer DIRSYNC is completed, and you might also be interested in some of the ‘challenges’ I faced getting this to work. That, at least, I hope makes you read through the volume of information I’ll detail here with the process I went through.

This attempt to configure Yammer DIRSYNC was completed in a test environment. I created a new clean Office 365 E3 tenant. I installed a new clean Windows Server 2012 R2 server in Azure. I created a new set of local AD users and used AD Connect (Preview) to get them copied to the Office 365 tenant. I then assigned them licences. All of this was prior to getting Yammer DIRSYNC operational.

So the plan was now to install Yammer DIRSYNC on the same server as Azure AD Connect (Preview), which as it turns out is the Domain Controller (DC). Of course best practice should always be to install any Office 365 user syncing tool (Office 365 DIRSYNC, Azure AD Services, Azure AD Connect, etc) onto a separate members server. The same would also go for Yammer DIRSYNC, however not all businesses have this luxury when it comes to rolling out addition on premises hardware do they? Also to my mind it doesn’t make sense to roll out more on premises hardware when the real desired aim to eventually move everything to the cloud. Thus, in this case, everything will reside on the Domain Controller.

When a user is invited to join a Yammer network they receive an email like shown above that provides them a link to get started with Yammer. When you enable Yammer in Office 365 using this process that I also recently detailed:

Enabling Enterprise Yammer in Office 365

Users won’t automatically receive such email invitations, they just need to select the Yammer icon from their app launcher inside the Office 365 portal. Thus, if you are looking to drive Yammer adoption throughout your organisation, having an email automatically sent to new users telling them about Yammer can provide a benefit. This you can do when Yammer DIRSYNC is enabled.

The first step in enabling Yammer DIRSYNC is to create a service account to be used by the DIRSYNC process. Thus, I went into my local AD, created a new user called Yammer Service and allowed that to sync to Office 365 (as I have Office 365 DIRSYNC enabled).

An interesting question gets raised here. What securities does this Yammer service account require both on premises and in Office 365? From what I can determine, locally, the Yammer service account can be just a normal user in the local AD and in Office 365 it has to have at least a mailbox license. This means if you only have Office 365 Suite licenses (i.e. SharePoint, Exchange, Skype for Business, together) you will need to either dedicate a complete license for this service account or purchase a stand alone Exchange Online license and add this to your tenant (which you can do now as Office 365 plans allow you to mix and match plans in one tenant).

Once the Yammer service account has been created in local AD, synced to Office 365 and assigned a license you simply login as that account and then navigate to Yammer so the service account is now an activated Yammer user. All this is the normal way you create and activate any Yammer user.

The next step is to login as an existing Yammer verified admin (typically an Office 365 Global Administrator) and select the Yammer enterprise admin area. Once there you will find an Admins option as shown above. Here you promote the new Yammer service account to be a verified Yammer admin.

Doing so means that the Yammer service account will have full control over Yammer (i.e. a Yammer admin) without the need to be an Office 365 Global Administrator (which gives them full control over more that just Yammer in Office 365).

Once you have added the Yammer service account as a Yammer admin you will also need to select the Grant Verified Admin button above to give that account full rights in Yammer.

You should now see the Yammer service account (here called Yammer Service) appear as a Current Admin as shown above.

What I then tried to do was go back into the Office 365 licensing and remove the license for the Yammer service account as I wanted to conserve licenses given I was using an Office 365 suite. Problem is when you do that (i.e. assign no license) you also don’t appear to get a Yammer license. You also don’t get a mailbox license which it turns out you’ll need later.

So, any Yammer service account requires at least a mailbox license in Office 365 from what I can determine.

The next step in the process is to download the Yammer.Dirsync.Setup program to your local on premises server on which the sync is gong to take place. You can download this software from:

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkId=511986

You kick off the installation and change the install directory if desired. if not then it will install into:

c:\program files (x86)\yammer\directory sync\

Select the Install button to continue.

You’ll then see the software being installed.

When that process is complete you’ll see the above screen. You need to insert the Yammer service account and password in the top part of the options to the right.

Now as you can see, when I did this I received the error Unexpected login failure even though I knew the password was correct. The solution lies here:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3015691

Which in essence this is telling you that you need to generate a unique ‘app’ password for this account to move forward.

To do that you’ll need to log back into Yammer as the service account and select the three dots in the top right and then Apps from the menu that appears.

In the All Apps area towards the bottom of the page select the Yammer tab.

Locate an app and select it by name. Here I located the Windows Phone app and select the hyperlink Windows Phone.

This will show you something like the above. The information you require is in the lower left of this window.

here you should see your Yammer service account email and a temporary password. You will need to use this back with the Yammer DIRSYNC program.

Note that the app password is only available for a short period of time, so copy it from here and then immediately head back to the Yammer DIRSYNC configuration.

Place this Yammer app password in the password field and select the Login button to continue.

I next received the above message which I have no idea what it meant so I simply selected OK to continue.

The next step is to put in the details for your local domain. Here I specified my domain controller and select the Login button.

Doing so then placed my domain controller in the window. Strangely, there is no continue button so I simply selected Validate from the options on the left to proceed.

Now select the Start Validation button.

The validation process will then commence.

At this point I received the error:

Invalid or missing attributes for required attribute(s): mail

After much trial and error I discovered that the apparent reason for this validation error is because the email attribute for the user is not set in the local AD. You can see the location of the attribute in the above screen shot of a users properties in AD.

In an environment with no local Exchange server you have to wonder how this field is going to get populated? Clearly, in my case it has to be done manually. That could be quite a pain if you have a lot of users!

Now, with all the users in the local AD having their email field populated I could successfully complete the validation step as shown above.

Again, no real next button here so select Sync from the options on the left to continue.

To continue you need to enter mail server and user details as shown above. This is the reason why you need to ensure that the Yammer service account has at least an Exchange Online license.

The server in this case will be Office 365 which for SMTP is:

smtp.office365.com

Port is:

587

and Enable SSL should be checked.

A number of articles I found said that you need to ensure the FromAddress field in the EmailNotificationSettings section in the file globalsettings.config.json should be manually changed from the default of noreply@yammer.com to being the same as in the Username field above, which should be the email address of the Yammer service account.

When I searched the directory that Yammer DIRSYNC was installed but I couldn’t find the globalsettings.config.json file. Turns out it is actually located in:

C:\ProgramData\Yammer\DirSync

by default. You may, as I had to, change the default view in Windows Explorer to actually see and navigate to the directory.

Turns out there is now a Yammer DIRSYNC icon in the system tray that if you right mouse click on show a menu as seen above.

If you select About from the menu that is displayed you will see the above dialog appear.

If you then select the Advanced Configuration button a Windows Explorer window will be opened at the location of the globalsettings.config.json file which again is located at:

C:\ProgramData\Yammer\DirSync

You can open the json configuration file with notepad and make the appropriate change from noreply@yammer.com to the email address of the Yammer service account you are using. Close and then save the json configuration file.

You then return to the Yammer DIRSYNC installation program and complete all the details.

You should also then be able to select the Send Test Email button to verify everything is working.

After which you should receive a green check mark as shown above.

To proceed, select the Apply button to the right which should now be available.

The Enable Sync button at the button of the window should now be available and The Status should read Not Running as shown above.

Select the Enable Sync button to proceed.

You should see the Status field runs through a few options such as Validating Settings as shown above.

If there are no issues the Status should say Running as shown above.

You can close the Yammer DIRSYNC program and it will continue to run in the background. You should find a Yammer DIRSYNC icon in the system tray which you can right mouse click on and select Open from the menu that appears to view the program again if needed.

Here is the Microsoft documentation on installing the Yammer DIRSYNC application:

Install Yammer Directory Sync

Now according to this:

The Yammer Directory Sync utility now queries Active Directory every 60 minutes and adds, updates, and suspends users, as appropriate.

The log files:

service.log – contains sync errors
ui.log – contains UI errors

are located in the directory:

C:\ProgramData\Yammer\DirSync

along with the json configuration file.

What should happen after a a period of time is that if you look in Yammer as an admin under the Directory Integration menu option you should see that it has been enabled as you can see above.

If you return to the on premises server you installed Yammer DIRSYNC on you will find a service called Yammer Directory Sync 3.0 as shown above.

Now, what I found was that Yammer DIRSYNC service was taking a very long time to actually sync. This was probably due to the fact that the first sync is quite large but my overall experience is that Yammer sync is quite slow and there is now way to force it like you can with Office 365 DIRSYNC. You simply have to wait.

When I look at the service.log file after this et I was seeing an error:

INFO [2015-06-11 23:18:28,807] – Scheduled interval set to 60 minutes
INFO [2015-06-11 23:18:28,807] – Starting with sync enabled: False
INFO [2015-06-11 23:18:44,224] – IPC Server running successfully
INFO [2015-06-11 23:19:51,595] – Registering callback for Yammer.DirSync.Core.IPC.Transport.NamedPipeServerBus+CallbackReference
INFO [2015-06-11 23:20:06,842] – Changing sync enabled to True
ERROR [2015-06-11 23:20:06,880] – Error saving enabled state
System.UnauthorizedAccessException: Access to the path ‘C:\ProgramData\Yammer\DirSync\globalsettings.config.json’ is denied.
   at System.IO.__Error.WinIOError(Int32 errorCode, String maybeFullPath)
   at System.IO.FileStream.Init(String path, FileMode mode, FileAccess access, Int32 rights, Boolean useRights, FileShare share, Int32 bufferSize, FileOptions options, SECURITY_ATTRIBUTES secAttrs, String msgPath, Boolean bFromProxy, Boolean useLongPath, Boolean checkHost)
   at System.IO.FileStream..ctor(String path, FileMode mode, FileAccess access, FileShare share)
   at Yammer.DirSync.Core.FileSystemRepositoryBase`1.Save(T settings)
   at Yammer.DirSync.Core.FileSystemRepositoryBase`1.Save(Action`1 update)
   at Yammer.DirSync.Service.ScheduledSyncService.SetEnabled(Boolean status, Boolean interrupt)
INFO [2015-06-11 23:20:07,014] – Starting sync because sync state changed.

After another long period of troubleshooting what I found the solution that removed this access issue from the log file was changing the Yammer Directory Sync service to run as a domain administrator rather than the Network Service.

The other issue I saw a lot of in the log was:

Waiting for previously running sync to complete.

So in the end I left the sync process running and went away to do other things.

Eventually after at least 4 hours I returned to find that syncing was now successful.

INFO [2015-06-12 00:09:39,647] – Sending remote job Suspend with 1 users
INFO [2015-06-12 00:09:40,674] – Data received for job syncie-2-e2007c89-007f-44c6-8bd8-8e66b4ab6e9e, processing has begun.
INFO [2015-06-12 00:09:41,589] – Waiting for previously running sync to complete.
INFO [2015-06-12 00:49:51,074] – Yammer Directory Synchronization has completed.
1 Users Added
1 Users Updated
0 Users Suspended
0 Pending Users Deleted

I find it interesting that it took at least 4 hours to initially sink a clean demo system with only a handful of users! Again, my experience has been that Yammer DIRSYNC is quite a slow process.

INFO [2015-06-12 00:49:51,157] – Sync attempt finished with status: Success
WARN [2015-06-12 01:50:03,650] – Some attributes do not exist in directory CIAOPS-DC2: title, physicalDeliveryOfficeName, telephoneNumber, mobile, department, proxyAddresses
INFO [2015-06-12 01:50:03,774] – Reading directory users
INFO [2015-06-12 01:50:09,522] – Completed reading directory users. 0 total users.
INFO [2015-06-12 01:50:09,897] – No changes for sync phase CreateOrUpdate
INFO [2015-06-12 01:50:10,278] – No changes for sync phase Suspend
INFO [2015-06-12 01:50:10,278] – Yammer Directory Synchronization has completed.
0 Users Added
0 Users Updated
0 Users Suspended
0 Pending Users Deleted

As you see from the subsequent sync log above I was still get warnings which I wasn’t really sure what they meant or how to fix them, so I ignored them.

However, now after I created a new user in the local AD, allowed it sync to Office 365 via Office 365 DIRSYNC, then assign an Office 365 license, waited some more for it to sync to Yammer, the new user did receive for Yammer via email as you can see above.

Phew, that is a lot of work just to get that one email!

I then also deleted a user from the local AD, saw it removed from Office 365 and also no longer be able to login to Yammer so I am confident that the deletions in Yammer DIRSYNC also work as expected.

At this point I started to get more errors occurring with the Yammer DIRSYNC program to the point where the Yammer sync process would stop. I did some initial research on what might be causing these issues but abandoned that after a short while as I couldn’t really see much ROI in Yammer DIRSYNC.

At this point I abandoned further work on Yammer DIRSYNC as I had gotten it working.

Summary

The smaller the organisation the less of a need for considering Yammer DIRSYNC. I don’t believe it provides much real value unless you are adding or removing lots of users from you AD on a regular basis.

I found a lot of issues getting Yammer DIRSYNC operational and keeping it running in a small test environment. Maybe I overlooked some things or did stuff wrong, but I really couldn’t find a lot out there to help. I have included some helpful sites below in the references section.

It seems to me that the Yammer single sign on experience will be driven in future from Office 365 and Azure rather than a local application on a server syncing local AD. Hopefully something Azure AD Connect will one day incorporate all the synchronization Yammer requires. I expect this to be the case as Yammer becomes more and more integrated with Office 365.

The synchronisation of information to Yammer is very slow and only happens once an hour at most. I found now way to be able to force this synchronisation.

If you do have issue with Yammer DIRSYNC don’t be afraid to raise an Office 365 support ticket. The Yammer support people were very obliging and knowledgeable.

References

http://www.lifeonplanetgroove.com/setting-yammer-directory-sync-office365/

https://about.yammer.com/success/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2013/05/Directory-Sync-3.0-Install-Guide.pdf

https://about.yammer.com/success/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/Directory-Sync-3.0-AdvancedConfig-Guide.pdf

https://jorgequestforknowledge.wordpress.com/2014/10/08/setting-up-yammer-dirsync/

http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/SharePoint-Conference/2014/SPC368

How to audit users in Yammer – https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn783348.aspx

http://blogs.technet.com/b/askyammer/archive/2015/05/18/yammer-directory-sync.aspx

Plan for Yammer DIRSYNC – https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn799027.aspx

The Business of Yammer

A little while back I spoke at the Sydney Office 365 users group about the business benefits of a tool like Yammer. This post provides a summary of the major points of that presentation as well as making the slides available for download from:

http://1drv.ms/1M8V3fk

This first video should highlight why email is not a collaboration tool. Email is best used for private one to one interactions, not one to many that could public. The main difference here is simply visibility, it is a lot easier for people to work together when they can all see the information in one place.

If you have a think about how you communication to day, at work or at home. Then stop and think about how your kids or the younger generation communicate. Chances are your kids are not big users of email or the phone but prefer Facebook and SMSing. Now look at your business, it is going to be composed of a range of individuals who prefer and use different methods of communication. Has your business every given you guidance on what forms should be used for what? Unlikely. Without guidance people use the communication methods and medium they are most comfortable with, not those that their recipients are most comfortable with or the ones that make most sense for collaboration.

Ask yourself if you really understand what social networking is. Ask yourself what you use personally and what your business uses. Chances are that you doing use social networking in either context. Chances are you only see it as something that proliferates pictures of cats that look like Hitler.

Another important point to remember in discussions about social networks is that it no longer limited to people. With the dawning of the age of the Internet of Things there will be a growth of devices talking to each other and sharing information. So social networking is a critical components of our technological world as we move forward.

What I love about this picture I stole from someone is the fact that it is providing guidance on how they want their employees to communicate. The simple ability of having corporate information and conversations made public make it far easier to use the power of search to locate relevant data. Why is that important? Because information has value.

Too much time is spent inside organisations currently siloing information. The worst culprit for this is email and most employees would tell you they are overloaded with email to the point where it actually makes them less productive. Remember, your inbox is generally a priority set by someone else which does little but destroy your productivity.

Stop and think about the bulk of emails your receive everyday. Do they all need to be private? Could they in fact be posted in a common area? What happens to email when people leave an organisation? They may get archived somewhere but are they ever referred to? Doubtful but if that information was public and searchable then it would continue to provide value for everyone. Why? Because making information public means making it searchable and search is technology’s killer app.

So where do new employees go to find information now? Who do they go to when they need help? Many businesses today want to be more social but struggle to understand how to do this. Don’t forget that a business is more than just its employees. It includes customers, suppliers, partners and so on. Any concept of social should also extend here.

Although perhaps a bit saccharine, the above video provides an excellent business example of how social provides business benefit in solving a problem. It is also interesting to note that:

1. Most of the interactions take place outside the traditional office

and

2. Most of the interactions happen on mobile devices

So, when you think social you also need to think mobile.

So what is Yammer? It was launched in 2008 and sold to Microsoft in 2012 for $1.2 Billion. It is a cloud only solution (i.e. there is no Yammer server on premise you can install). There is a free version anyone with a business email address (i.e not @hotmail or @yahoo.com) can sign up for. The Yammer Enterprise version is free of all Office 365 Suites:

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-au/library/office-365-plan-options.aspx

So basically Yammer is laid out like many other social networks. There is a newsfeed in the center of the page. On the left are the groups you belong. On the right you see information about recent activity, people to follow, files and so on. In the top right is the search field along with the more options menu (i.e. the three dots). In the bottom left is the network link that allows you to move between all the different networks you belong to.

The major take away from the above video that Yammer provides is the ability for anyone inside a company to be heard and contribute. Here you have someone working at the coalface with customers having direct input into the latest version of a product. That not only makes the product better but it also makes the employee feel much more involved and engaged with the business. All from simply being social.

Yammer is now part of Office 365 and can be purchased stand alone or part of all suites. It is also directly integrated with SharePoint Online to allow conversations around documents to take place (i.e. no more sending yucky attachments via email). It also provides behavioural information to things like Officegraph and Delve to help surface more relevant information based on usage patterns.

The above video highlights how Yammer provides opportunities to those inside a business. It flattens traditional corporate structures and provides reach and visibility across all areas. It also critically allows two normally disconnected parties to connect and interact.

So how can you get started with Yammer? Sign up for a free account at Yammer.com, complete your profile, join some relevant networks, introduce yourself (i.e. don;t be shy) and then start following people and topics. If you are looking to utilise Yammer via Office 365 the recommendation is to keep the free Yammer account separate from Enterprise Yammer.

if you plan to set up Yammer Enterprise with Office 365 remember you’ll need to have publically accessible website that matches the domain you are signing up for. The Enterprise version will give you more features and control. You can link it external Yammer networks (i.e. those outside your organisation) but there are some integration limits at this point in time that will disappear as Yammer becomes more and more integrated. Have a look at this previous blog post for information on Yammer via Office 365:

https://blog.ciaops.com/2014/09/basic-yammer-administration-via-office.html

In summary, social is the way we are moving when it comes to communications. Look at how your kids communicate if you want an inkling of what the future holds. This requires a different approach from what most businesses have traditionally become comfortable with. Social allows collaboration across the length and breath of the organisation as well as up and down the entire structure. The integration of Yammer into Office 365 will continue to grow over time so there has now never been a better time to start implementing social within your business.

Successful businesses understand the benefits and power enterprise social networking provides. It is not a fad, it is something that is only now beginning to change the way humans and technology interact. No matter how big or how small and organisation is, tools like Yammer (which are now part of all Office 365 suites) provide the power to improve productivity and offer incentive to all employees but the only way to know is to start using it today. Be social, be mobile and work like a network.

Resources

Yammer moments – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTmugBKQkx4

Activating Yammer Enterprise for Existing Office 365 E subscriptions – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZGP8kqFLSE

Work like a network – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSktb_Hrdj8

Billy’s yammer – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FU6C7puAwYg

Shawna’s Yammer moment – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FE2HquueJn8

Hotel room keys – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1U9X8LbGTxk

https://about.yammer.com/success/

https://about.yammer.com/success/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/Ready-Set-Go_en_US.pdf

https://about.yammer.com/success/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/New-User-Checklist_en_US.pdf

Add and Manage users on Yammer – https://about.yammer.com/success/activate/activation-guide/add-and-manage-users-on-yammer/

Need to Know podcast–Episode 66

I’m joined in this episode by Office 365 MVP Darrell Webster to discuss enterprise social in Office 365, specifically Yammer.

Darrell let’s us know what Yammer is and how it can be used inside a business. We also cover off what are some major challenges facing Yammer adoptions in businesses large and small, including some strategies on how to overcome these.

If you are yet to come to grips with Yammer then this is a great place to start learning from one of the experts.

You can listen to the episode at:

http://ciaops.podbean.com/e/episode-66-darrell-webster/

or subscribe to this and all episodes in iTunes at:

https://itunes.apple.com/au/podcast/ciaops-need-to-know-podcasts/id406891445?mt=2

The podcast is also available on Stitcher at:

http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/ciaops/need-to-know-podcast?refid=stpr

Of course, I’d love to hear what you think of this episode or any others. Also, if you are interested in being a guest on the show to discuss business or technical topics also feel free to contact me (director@ciaops.com).