Have you ever dreamt about having a completely self-contained social media platform, just for your company? A place online where your workforce could connect, collaborate, and share ideas? If you’re an Office365 user, you already have the capability in the form of Yammer – Microsoft’s social platform dedicated to helping workgroups hit their stride through enhanced productivity and connectivity.

Yammer Features at a Glance

Yammer offers several useful features, helping your workgroups connect over projects and ideas. In the past, it may have been difficult to coordinate complex tasks across your entire organization, whether they operated out of the same location or not. By implementing Yammer, you now have the ability to coordinate workgroups no matter where they are located, simply by integrating Yammer into your workflow. It works seamlessly with all of the Office applications you know and love, allowing users to share documents easily while staying connected to the latest versions, no matter how many people are contributing to it.

Groups

Create groups to work on specific projects, and have a dedicated space for conversations, documents, images, communication, and ideas related to the group. Private, secure groups can also be created, which is very useful when dealing with sensitive information. As of March 2017, Yammer is fully integrated with Office 365 Groups. This means that when you create a group in Yammer, it will be assigned a OneNote notebook, a SharePoint team site, a task planner, and dedicated online document storage. Your Yammer group will automatically be added to your 365 Groups service. Some features have yet to be rolled out, but you can soon look forward to an Outlook Calendar integration, and enhanced connectivity with SharePoint and Planner.

External Groups

If you are working with outside vendors or contractors who aren’t normally a part of your network, you have the ability to add them to your Yammer group as well. External groups are perfect for creating a sense of community around a project, an event, or a product that pulls in individuals from outside your organization.

Search

Whether you are looking for a particular conversation, a piece of content or a person, you can find it easily through Yammer’s smart search engine. Yammer delivers search results based on your interests, interactions, and activities on the platform.

Notifications

Receive instant push notifications as soon as a colleague responds or contributes to your project. Notifications can be configured according to your priorities, making sure you receive notice of important updates as soon as they become available.

Newsfeed

Get a snapshot view of what everybody in your company is up to in your Discovery Feed. Yammer delivers items from people, groups and discussions that may be of interest to you.

Microsoft Office Document Integration

Share, preview, edit, and co-author documents in any Office application within Yammer. New versions are saved automatically, and updates can be viewed and approved instantly by your colleagues.

More Nifty Features

Outside Application Integrations

Aside from the expected allocation of other Microsoft Office apps, Yammer connects to several popular apps, including SharePoint, Trello, RSS, Slack, Twitter, Google Calendar, Box, Asana, WordPress, Dropbox, Evernote, and many more. This will allow you to move from one platform to another with relative ease, and pull in conversations and documents as needed.

Create Polls

The poll tool allows you to crowdsource information from your workgroups, your company, any group or individuals that you are connected to within the Yammer environment.

Cloud Connectivity

Yammer can be deployed and accessed through any browser, and on any device.

Rich Mobile Experience

Download the Yammer app to your iOS, Android or Windows smartphone, and access your conversations anywhere. Mobile Yammer also allows you to take and share photographs, as well as mark up and comment on your photos with your finger. Connect your OneDrive or Dropbox accounts to access document sharing and editing features right on your phone. Additionally, you can connect instantly with your Yammer contacts with just a few taps.

Stand-alone or Office 365 Integrated

Yammer is a flexible social networking solution that is designed with the Office 365 user in mind, however, it can also be used as a stand-alone platform. It has a look and feel that is similar to popular social platforms like Facebook and Google+, which makes it easy to understand for most users. It comes standard with Office 365 Business Essentials and Business Premium subscriptions, but the free version is available to anybody. As easy to get started as it is to use, Yammer could well be your organization’s new meeting room.

Yammer: Team Collaboration Gets Social

Yammer is the perfect partner to the Office 365 suite, providing a centralized social platform with which to connect your workforce and encourage collaboration. For businesses of any size, from SMBs to enterprise, Yammer provides your team with a fast, easy and smart way to collaborate. To get started with Yammer, call Greenlight ITC today. One of our team members would be happy to walk you through the benefits of Microsoft Office 365 and help you discover the great things you can accomplish with it.