How to Respond to Yammer Conversations from OWA

Engaging with Yammer While Reading Email

February 13 brought news (MC203778, Microsoft 365 roadmap 61055) that OWA could now display interactive Yammer notifications. Making Yammer more accessible through email is part of the “Year of Yammer” functionality highlighted at the Microsoft Ignite 2019 conference last November. It’s intended to make Yammer conversations more accessible and useful to people who prefer to communicate through email.

More Functionality Exposed in New Format Notification

Traditional Yammer notifications contain a View Conversation button with a link to take a reader to the relevant conversation in a Yammer community. The new format (Figure 1) displays a “fully-interactive Yammer thread” offering several improvements, including the ability to:

• See the complete Yammer conversation.
• Like a comment in the conversation.
• Share the conversation to another Yammer community.
• Know how many people have already seen the conversation.
• Add people to a conversation.
• Post a comment to the conversation from OWA, including attaching files and images or @mentioning people in a comment.

Microsoft also says that you can vote on polls from OWA, but I didn’t test that.

Comments posted from OWA show up in Yammer like any other comment, with the only sign being that Yammer indicates the post was from “O365 Exchange Online” (Figure 2).

Switching Views

At the bottom of the message, a Hide Yammer conversation link allows the reader to switch to the traditional view of a notification., which is what Outlook desktop and mobile clients can see.

In MC203778, Microsoft says that the link allows the new notification to be “toggled off at the user level on an email-by-email basis.” Going to the original format notification allows people to click the link to open Yammer, but there’s no way for a user to select a default preference for how they’d like to receive notifications.

Yammer and SharePoint

Also in Yammer news, Microsoft announced on 12 February that all new photos and files posted to Yammer are stored in SharePoint Online. This applies to Yammer communities connected to Office 365 Groups because that’s how the link works to SharePoint Online. When you upload a file to Yammer, it is stored in the Documents\Apps\Yammer folder in the document library of the site belonging to the Office 365 group.

More Interaction Coming

Microsoft is very keen about connecting different parts of Office 365 together at present. Teams is due to get its Share to Teams and Share to Outlook features soon. These were originally announced for deployment in January (MC198124) but have been delayed. When they come, you’ll be able to handle email, Teams, and Yammer communications in OWA.

---

If we’re truthful, we don’t devote much space to Yammer in the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook. But if this progress is maintained, we might have to reconsider…