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As of March of 2022. This is a work in progress, created for our Microsoft 365 Conference Make-a-thon attendees. Thanks for coming! Information is only as current as date above. Use at your own risk. Cheers!

Start Here for Viva Insights Documentation

FAQ – Personal Insights in Teams

FAQ – Personal Insights – The Briefing Email – has info for both IT Pros and User.

FAQ – Manager Insights

FAQ – Leader Insights – also known as My Organization Insights, so don’t be confused.

FAQ – Advanced Insights

Roles in Viva Insights – this has info on “who can do what” which helpful since there are differences in what is possible based on when licenses are assigned. IMPORTANT NOTE: as the documentation states: these are assigned independently, not cumulative and do not roll up.

Glossary

Metrics Descriptions

Best Practices – this is a handy starting point to explore best practices on dealing with things like email overload, manager coaching and customer focus.

Your Organizational Data Upload – this info is for your first one.

Languages supported in Viva – it is more complicated than you think.

Pricing for Viva Insights – Personal Insights come with in all Microsoft 365 E3/A3/E5/A5, Office 365 E1/E3/A3/E5/A5, and Microsoft 365 Business Basic/Standard/Premium plans. Manager and Leader Insights and Advanced Insights require Viva Insights licenses.

Pricing for Viva Insights Capacity – You get so many capacity units with Advanced Insights to use for custom analysis a month. Viva Insights Capacity can be purchased to give you more if you need it. How Microsoft puts it: Customers receive one capacity unit per licensed user per month. Customers can use these capacity units—pooled at the tenant level—to access advanced insights capabilities, including custom analysis and preconfigured Power BI analysis templates.

Differential Privacy – is about varying data slightly to protect privacy but doing so in a way that doesn’t impact what you’re measuring. Being introduced first with Manager and Leader Insights.

Here are five of my favorite Microsoft Teams keyboard shortcuts you can learn today. If five seems like too many, pick three. Just commit to learning them – they’ll improve your Teams life.

Note: I use the same shortcut notation as Microsoft. When a keyboard combination requires two or more keys pressed at the same time, you’ll see the plus sign (+).

Get to the top and search for stuff

Ctrl+E will get you to the top of Teams, to the Search Bar. Once there, you can press / (the forward slash) to invoke commands. If you’re looking for a file you recently worked on but can’t remember the Team and Channel, type /files to see your recent documents. “Do Not Disturb” is there, too. Type /dnd and your status is set.

Helpful On and Off switches

Meetings and calls are no time to be scrambling for the on and off switches. The Teams team has conveniently created shortcuts for your camera and your audio. Toggles are:

Ctrl+Shift+O to turn your camera on and off. As in Control Shift Oh no, my video is on! NOTE: this does not work for the Teams Web app.

Ctrl+Shift+M to mute yourself or unmute. Anything to avoid the dreaded “You’re muted!”

Where’s my files?

To get your files quickly, press Ctrl+6. You will be presented with your recent files, Teams files, and Downloads in addition to your OneDrive. For the Teams Web app use Ctrl+Shift+6.

Zoom (not THAT Zoom)

Need a little boost to your eyesight when working late on a Friday night? Zoom is for you. To zoom in, press Ctrl+= (Control plus equal sign) and to zoom right back out, press Ctrl+- (Control plus minus sign).

To find the keyboard shortcuts in Teams, click on your profile picture and you’ll see it listed on the menu. Or, /keys in the box at the top of Teams will get you the list too.

Keyboard shortcuts save time

See this interesting take on how much time shortcuts save.

Author’s note: This post is a February 2021 revision of a post I wrote back in 2018. I started the article with “We’ve all been there. You’re on a Teams call and an otherwise sweet, normal family member starts up a chainsaw behind you. Or a rant. You lunge for the mouse and frantically look for the mute button!” Things really haven’t changed much! Thank you very much for stopping by.

In just under a month, I’ll be in Las Vegas attending The SharePoint Conference. In its second year back, the show continues to add valuable content for SharePoint folks but that is in no way its sole purpose. Attendees will have plenty of Microsoft Teams, OneDrive, and Yammer sessions (and much more) to choose from. I picked five Yammer sessions that I think are can’t miss presentations. Hey, all the sessions look good to me but if asked by a first time attendee or someone new to Yammer, these are my five.

What’s New and What’s Next

This is where you’ll get THE word on the latest Yammer happenings. These product leaders, including Murali Sitaram, the Yammer GM, will lay out their big bets for the product. I am excited to get an update on how they are progressing with weaving Yammer into all of Office 365.

What to expect: A full house and a straight-forward road map update. Don’t miss: Steve Nguyen’s positive messages about the value Yammer brings to customers.

How Yammer Security and Management Works Behind the Scenes in a GDPR World

Don’t be put off by the title. If you are battling objections based on security concerns, by the time you leave, you’ll have all the knowledge you need to overcome even the most strident security obstacles. Martina Grom is a seasoned presenter and this session will get you access to one of the planet’s best minds on Yammer.

What to expect: Thoughtful best practices based on years of experience. Don’t miss: the opportunity to ask her your specific questions on Yammer and GDPR.

Hosting and Managing Live Events in Yammer

Live events is a cross product investment that should signal to anyone in your company’s C-suite that Microsoft is serious about employee engagement. This one-two punch of live events and Yammer means your communications and culture initiatives have a modern broadcast tool at their disposal. Very cool but live events can go wrong, so make sure to attend for important tech tips and best practices.

What to expect: a thorough look and demo of live events. Don’t miss: dynamic co-presenters, Michael’s humorous and solid approach and Kasia’s event expertise (TedxSanFrancisco).

How Microsoft Leadership Stays Connected to Their Employees with Yammer

One of the fundamental tenants of enterprise social networking is that, done right, it reduces the power distance between leaders and workforce. As many folks in this ecosystem know, Microsoft has been on a journey to change their culture and Yammer has played a role in that. This session looks to be a lock for on the ground examples of how Microsoft uses Yammer.

What to expect: Great insight from Yammer veteran, Angus Florance. Don’t miss: There may be swag.

Why Yammer is Still the Universe to Me

This is another session presented by Martina Grom. I’ve included it in my top five because this presentation will be a great primer on Yammer’s business value.

What to expect: business stories to take home. Don’t miss: One more chance to get great ESN advice.

The SharePoint Conference is May 21st to May 23rd at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada. If you are planning on going, please consider using my code: SWANN for $50 off. See The SharePoint Conference for more information.

Author’s note, September 2018: When I originally reported on Microsoft announcing SharePoint will be the default file storage location for Yammer, the estimated date for release was August 2018. While this did not happen (it was an estimate, after all) there is news. The Yammer team is seeking a few customers to preview this new feature. Which likely means they are pretty far along. There is no new estimate of general availability but my guess is by end of the calendar year. Here is the roadmap item on the Office 365 Roadmap.

If you are attending Microsoft Ignite in Orlando, John Bacus, a Senior Product Manager at Microsoft, will be giving a demo of the feature. His session is on Wednesday, September 26th at 2:00 PM. Check out session BRK3219 for more details.

I am just back from a wildly successful SharePoint Conference North America held last week in sunny Vegas and I’d like to report some news on the Yammer and SharePoint front in case you missed it. While I was bummed at the length of the barbecue line at the B-52s concert held poolside, I was not disappointed at what I heard from Dan Holme (@danholme) and Steve Nguyen (@espnguyen) on the state of Yammer, specifically its better together story with SharePoint.

Empower and Connect

Yammer’s mission is to “empower and connect every person across an organization to maximize their impact.” In order to deliver on this, and to maximize their own impact (to steal a phrase) Yammer is teaming with other Microsoft technologies, including SharePoint. This is a good thing. Why? Because Yammer’s core value prop is the conversation modality. The public or private conversation that you can have with people inside or outside of your organization. But it needs friends to extend its potential.

With that in mind, here is what I hear when I read the above mission statement: empower (people) and connect (them through conversations) to maximize their impact (to deliver business value). All the words in parenthesis are mine, put there for emphasis. Yammer can transform an organization when in the hands of innovative, determined change agents. Now imagine that same capability mashed with care with SharePoint goodness and you can see the value it can bring to customers.

Core Investment Areas

The message is clear: Microsoft recognizes the strong business value for customers by investing in what Yammer does well and lean on SharePoint for its content management strength. Yammer is spending its time and betting on the following areas:

1. Employee engagement and connections
2. Being the social layer of Office 365
3. Being enterprise-grade with security and compliance

Employee engagement and connections

A key focus area is to strengthen that all-important two-way conversation. To make it rich and relevant. To make it live and breathe. if you are familiar with the concept of a YamJam, just note that it is about to get a big boost. Coming soon: the ability for users to hold live townhall events using Stream, in Yammer. This is a big deal. Known as “Broadcast Meetings in Yammer” this road map item can be found here, under the “In Development” area. This is not just for traditional top down meetings; imagine the power of learning among and between colleagues.

The Social Layer of Office 365

This is where we really see that “evolving together” story unfold. Soon, SharePoint file storage will be turned on by default for Yammer. When you store a file via Yammer, that file will be stored in SharePoint. This feature will begin shipping in August 2018. You’ll want to have Office 365 Groups enabled to take advantage of it. This makes a lot of sense. Yammer should be about the conversation among colleagues and making connections. This lets SharePoint do what it does best, hitting on its core capabilities of enterprise-grade content management.

Yammer understands the need to make content in your feed engaging. The Yammer team is working hard to bring rich previews of SharePoint documents into Yammer. No stated timing on this yet, but I plan on keeping on eye on this for the customers I work with over at tyGraph.

Finally, in the works, is a significant improvement to the social experience in SharePoint, a native Yammer feed, described as very much like the feed in Yammer, but in SharePoint. This crossover moment is the strongest signal yet that Yammer is becoming the social layer.

Enterprise-grade Security and Compliance

Along with the splash of live video for townhalls and the social layer in SharePoint, Yammer will continue to invest in being enterprise-grade with security and compliance. Yammer has already done work to provide user management using Azure Active Directory (AAD) and the ability to create dynamic groups based on AAD properties. One further example, the “Erase User” functionality, described as the ability to erase a user’s name and personal information as well as their usage data in Yammer is here, just in time for GDPR.

By the way, the SharePoint Conference in Vegas? That is a thing again. Hope to see you there in May of 2019. In the meantime, I will continue to report on these evolving changes. I’d be interested to hear what new capabilities are you looking forward to?

April saw a handful of new features released for Microsoft Teams. In this post, I’ll take a closer look at the uses for four of them and add a brief mention of the others.

First: two ways to get to “What’s New”

In my blog on the command box, I mentioned that a good keyboard shortcut to know is “alt-k”. That will get you to the top of the Teams UI. From there, if you type “/whatsnew” you will see the latest the Teams team has added or changed.

A second way: click on your profile picture in the upper right, then “Help” and there you’ll see “What’s New” on the top line.

“Here is the chat I wanted you to see…”

No question, Teams has a strong chat feature, and if you are like me and my colleagues, we can get chatty in a hurry and I often find myself needing to point a teammate to a specific post. New this month is the ability to go to a specific chat message, copy a link and then drop that link off to colleague so they can quickly hop to the linked post.

To copy a link is super simple, just click the ellipsis of the desired post and click “Copy Link” and you’re set.

Once you post the link, you’ll see the name of the OP (original poster) followed by a colon and a chunk of the message plus the Team name, Channel, and date time stamp of the original post. See example below:

Two new ways to get chatting

Speaking of chatting, Teams added two ways to kick off a chat with a teammate. Have you ever been reading through a channel and wanted to chat with a specific person in a thread? All you have to do is mouse over their profile picture and their contact card will pop up. Message box is at the bottom of the card. Type your message and hit reply. The message will show up in either a new chat or an existing chat with that person, (re: Chat area in the left navigation pane).

The second way is to use the command box. As mentioned above, you can get there quickly with an alt-k. Once in the command box, at mention them, by typing the “at” key, “@” and their name; hit return and you’re ready to message.

The key to both of these shortcuts is that you don’t lose context. An important concept that the Teams team and other product folks are getting a handle on is the critical nature of keeping you, the user, contextually close to your current task. Losing context means having to endure the “switching cost” of leaving one task and picking up another. Like leaving email to fact check something on the web only to lose a half hour catching up on the Kardashians.

Team Owners, show the team where to start with favorite channels

If you are a team owner, you can auto-favorite up to ten channels for your team. So, let’s say you have eight channels in your team, but three of them are critical for teammates to have. You can auto-favorite them so they show up for all team members. Just know that your teammates can unfavorite them later.

One more new feature worth noting

You now have the ability to get a reminder if your team is expiring. But, I’m jumping the gun a bit here. You first have to have the Azure Active Directory policy that allows an expiration date to be set, turned on. This is a premium feature of AAD. There are two references you should check out if interested. Here is one on the Office 365 Group Expiration Policy  and you might want have a look at this one too, the quickstart on AAD Premium.

Finally, as I usually mention, I am interested in how others use collaboration tools like Teams and Yammer. If you have something to share, drop me a note. Thanks for checking out my blog.

 

 

 

Part of being productive is knowing what you need to know, when you need to know it. Microsoft Teams has a healthy list of notifications to help you with that, but the options can be overwhelming. In this blog, I’ll break down those options so you can see what makes the most sense for you.

Where are they? 

Notifications are easy to find. First, click your profile picture. Then select settings, then notifications. Your choices begin there.

Three Categories

Notifications are clumped in three categories: messages, mentions, and the catch-all, other. There are thirteen features that you can tinker with and decide what notifications to receive. Each of those come with variations, which I will explain soon. But first…

What can I just turn off?

There are nine that can be. Here they are:

1. Channel Mentions
2. Team Mentions
3. Chat Messages
4. Replies to conversations I started
5. Replies to conversations i replied to
6. Likes
7. Team Membership changes
8. Team Role changes
9. Sound

What are my options? 

Most of your choices come down to these three. You can be notified:

1. In the banner and email
2. Just via the banner
3. Or just leave it to be shown only in the feed

Those scenarios cover the nine I mentioned previously plus Personal Mentions and Followed Channels.

Three from “Other”

There are three features or options that don’t fit that pattern.

1. Sound
2. Email Frequency
3. Chat with Skype for Business

Sound can be just call, mention, or chat or it can be all or off. Frequency of email can be as soon as possible, every ten minutes or every hour. Finally, Chat with Skype for Business can either be enabled or disabled. If you change that one, you’ll need to restart the app.

Full Options List for Notifications

Here are all the options for notifications as they relate to the feature listed.

 

For your most productive self, how do you set your notifications? I’d love to hear about your Microsoft Team experiences, drop me a note below!

As I sat in a We Work Unbound session this past Friday, I got some knowledge dropped on me that was so intriguing, I woke up early on Saturday morning and drove to my local library so I could get my check-out privileges back.

Here it is. If you are a resident of just about any county in Minnesota, and you have a library card, you also have access to lynda.com, the online learning home of over 6,000 courses for free. Yep, free.

No matter what your current gig calls for, you should always be feeding your brain. Not only to cover off “just in case” but to get your mind right for whatever your day brings. Getting outside of what is warm and cozy for you and pushing on should be a muscle in continual practice. Which is why I found myself in a conference room with people not from my company to occupy the same space for most of a random Friday (again, see We Work Unbound).

As our host, Melanie Hohertz (@Hohertz3) was establishing the baseline for LinkedIn profiles, she casually mentions this lynda.com deal. If you’re not familiar: lynda.com started in 1995 by Lynda Weinman as a way to support her books and the classes she taught. It has grown to a massive learning enterprise, which led to a LinkedIn acquisition back in 2015.

The critical bit here is two-fold. Libraries remain as awesome in 2017 as they were when Andrew Carnegie was building over 1,600 of them here in the US at the turn of the previous century. Libraries are important public spaces, especially as public spaces are becoming more rare. This leaves libraries as Donald Barclay states, “…perhaps the last remaining indoor public spaces where an individual can remain from opening until closing without needing any reason to be there and without having to spend any money.”

The second critical piece: maintaining skills and learning new ones is on me. Can’t put that on my boss or my company. I gotta show up and learn. Lynda.com is going to help me do that.

My first stop, my friend Steve Nguyen’s (@espnguyen) Lynda course, “Getting Work Done in #Office365.” This is a course that runs just under two hours and was co-authored with Steve Somers (@ricksteve) on being more productive using Microsoft’s Office 365 platform.

Time to feed my brain.

As the snow fell, I knew it might impact folk’s ability to get downtown Minneapolis for our Yammer meetup. The first snow of the season can throw a “hard no” into your desire to drive anywhere. Cortana might as well said, “Estimated time to your destination is…never.” While I am sure it crossed the minds of some, the twenty-eight or so Yammer users who braved the drive found themselves alongside some of the most inquisitive and helpful group of social collaborators I know.

A diverse crowd of users, the group included mature social collaborators and some that were just getting their networks off the ground. A good mix to be sure. This meetup was structured around the simple, informal idea of crowd-sourcing the asking and answering of  Yammer questions while enjoying the very best of Chino Latino‘s fusion food menu. As guests arrived, my co-host Steve Nguyen (@espnguyen) and I pointed to the two whiteboards in the back and asked them to take a moment to jot a question down or to tell us about a Yamwin they’ve had.

Once we reached critical mass, questions and answers started flowing. While Steve and I were in our official capacity of co-hosts, we really felt the room was full of co-hosts. Great thing about Yammerites, much like a lot of the Microsoft eco-system, people were more than willing to offer insights and not afraid to ask questions.

Like they often do, questions ranged from granular security functionality to broad, baseline social networking questions like, “How do I engage my leaders in Yammer?” I always dig this question because, doing social means being social and the responses reflected that. Here are some of my favorites.

1. Find a part of the business strategy that really matters to the leader and seeing if Yammer can help in its execution.
2. Get to know the leader’s administrative assistant. They can help get you access but they have to know you first.
3. Encourage the leader to take pictures during their next site or plant visit and teach them how to upload to Yammer.

I haven’t been in a public forum on Yammer without these two questions:

1. Yammer is still not dead, right? Tough one to control my eye roll on. Some folks just want to hear the answer. The roadmap and commitment on this one is clear. Why I think this is worth mentioning: I love to ask, “where did you hear that?” without putting people on the spot, I am just always curious. Inevitably, the response is something like, “I heard it from this guy…I don’t know where he heard it.” A lesson of this Yammer meetup and meetups in general, don’t presume people know what you know and answer their questions sincerely and best you can.
2. Teams and Yammer, what to use when? One of my favorites. Steve walked us through this with the fairly well-known analogy, “Inner loops and Outer loops.” What was fascinating about the discussion on this night was since the Ignite conference, our audience of Yammer pro’s, had begun to develop stories, and company-fitting analogies of their own. These analogies were very much in the spirit of Inner loop/Outer loop, but customized to match company culture and therefore more likely to resonate with their users.

While we didn’t get to all the questions, the night came to a close after a good many chunks of Yammer wisdom were passed among the attendees. There was that familiar vibe of Yammer helps business when business engages and as our guests walked into the wintry night, they had a few more stories to share back at the office.

 

She stood watching over the IT guy’s shoulder as he made the final switch to throw them from Basic Yammer to Enterprise. As the slider choice took hold, Becky Benishek (@bbenishek) took the steps back upstairs to her office two at a time to see for herself that nothing was amiss with her thriving Yammer network. Of course nothing was. Worked as advertised.

As she came back downstairs to celebrate their launch, Dan Pankonen, the IT guy in this story, said, “That was quite the sprint. You know, you have a laptop, it does travel.” Just another friendly jab in what has been a great collaboration between Business & IT to roll out Yammer.

But I’ve started this story midway. Let me go back to the start.

Becky is the Social Media & Community Manager for a company that has been helping organizations like schools and hospitals create safer work environments for over 35 years. Crisis Prevention Institute (CPI) provides safe de-escalation training for behavior management as well as person-centered dementia care. Serious, real world stuff. The folks they train then train others. These trainers—Certified Instructors–are CPI’s customers. And from the first time she saw Yammer, she saw a clear use case for CPI’s customers. A community that could share, contribute, and continue collaborating long after their training was complete.

Tip #1: Divide the duties and trust. This is widely known but hard to practice!

With the business challenge firmly in her grasp, Becky knew that she needed a partner from IT to ensure that any tech hurdles could be addressed. Dan, the Network Systems Manager, became that partner. For Dan’s part, he has many opportunities to try out new solutions but has to make choices where he and his team spend their cycles. He recognized that Becky understood the business problem and could handle the change management while he focused on issues related to infrastructure and security.

A timely SharePoint conference provided the opportunity for Becky to get Yammer Power User certified and for them both to attend sessions on Yammer implementation and effective collaboration. They brought this back to CPI and began to take steps on their social journey, first establishing CPI’s Yammer Home Network. Around the same time, Becky built a Yammer External Network for CPI’s customers, and named it the CPI Instructor Community.

Right away, there was a challenge.

CPI’s instructors are not a 9 to 5 bunch. One of Becky’s key requirements was that she wanted instructors “to experience no waiting on nights and weekends” to become members of their Instructor Community. External Networks have a built-in manual approval which is great for business hours, but what about after hours? She needed an auto-approval process.

Tip #2: Use the “discuss, decide, support” model for effective decision-making.

Becky, Dan, and their team faced a common dilemma for IT and Business: Do we buy or build? Dan was quick to recognize that this was a one-off problem so he recommended they seek an external solution. About that time, Microsoft’s Yammer Customer Network was moving its own members to a different Yammer network (the Office 365 Network). Figuring they weren’t manually approving thousands of customers, Becky contacted some folks she knew in the network and they put her in touch with a solution provider from New Zealand.

Once they were down the “buy” path, Dan and team’s only involvement was to ensure the auto-approval app met their security standards and that it was built in such a way that CPI’s dev team could make modifications as needed. Becky finalized the sourcing and purchase, and the auto-approval process for CPI’s External Network became a successful part of their onboarding of instructors, regardless of time of day, day of week, or holiday.

Months later, the CPI Instructor Community continues its growth, and the partnership between IT and Business is equally strong and working together to make the most of their investment in solutions like Office 365.

Tip #3: Have a plan to measure and demonstrate the value of your network.

Becky added reporting and analytics to her Yammer toolbox because she knew it would be difficult to show progress without it. “But eyeballs aren’t enough,” says Becky. “You need to show the value of your network with data. I can’t make good business decisions without that.” While there a number of options available, I am grateful they chose tyGraph for their reporting and analytics needs. All of us at tyGraph are amazed at the work they do with their customers.

 

Note: Want to know more about analytics for Yammer? I was very fortunate to share the stage at Microsoft Ignite 2017 with Becky. Our session, “Mining Yammer Data for Gold” includes information about what is available for reporting and analytics for Yammer and why it matters to community managers, business stakeholders, and IT pros.

Lots to like coming out of the announcements on Office 365 Reporting last week in beautiful, warm Orlando. There is a little something for everyone with the importance of signals being recognized. What I heard: customers and partners want better data and critically, more accessible data. Here are a few key announcements from the show.

Rolled out: The Reader Role

Conventional wisdom dictates that you should limit the total number of admins in your organization. Hard to argue that. There are four types of admins for Office 365: Global Admin, Exchange Admin, Skype for Business Admin and SharePoint Admin. You’ll note that list doesn’t include your Yammer Verified Admin. While not the only one, this was one of the factors that played into the feature request for Reader role access to reports. Admins and community managers who care about what is going on, need reporting. Enter the Reader role.

The capability for Office 365 admins to grant regular ol’ users the ability to consume all the reports in the Admin Center was announced by Anne Michels (@Anne_Michels) and others from her team at the show. There was much rejoicing. Available now, all you have to do is convince your admin to give it to you. If you do, you’ll also be able to instantiate the Adoption Content Pack (ACP) just like an admin. One thing to look out for though: in our testing, if you are granted Reader role and you instantiate a Content Pack and then your role is revoked, you still have access to the ACP in Power BI. Just a data point on early testing. If that changes, I’ll report back.

Coming Soon: ACP to go GA Early Next Year

The ACP will be generally available early in the new year. The exact date was not announced. In fact, a look at the slide I saw indicated a Q1-ish, Q2 feel. But, when it does, it will have a new name: Office 365 Usage Analytics. I quibble a little bit over the analytics part as I am believer in drawing a distinction between reporting and analytics as described in this informative blog  by John White (@diverdown1964).

Coming Sooner: Teams Reports in Admin Center

If you want to talk about a Microsoft product that is hotter than flapjacks in a mining camp, pick Microsoft Teams. Two reports were announced that should show up in the Office 365 Admin Center by mid-October: Teams Activity report showing what’s popular and an Apps Usage report. This is good news but please, some signals via APIs would be nice. And some flapjacks.

Good tip: Message Center

This immediately got the Captain Obvious award but when Anne mentioned it, I made myself a note. If you want to know what is coming, keep an eye on the Message Center. That is the straight goods.

Yammer Group Statistics

The Yammer team announced group level statistics are now in the UI at the group level and will begin rolling out soon. These stats are based on Likes, Reads, and Posts and are available in three set date ranges: 7 days, 28 days, and 1 year. The key here is that the Yammer product team is listening to its user base. The level of these allow for some insights but leave room for third parties like my team at tyGraph to go deeper, if and when community managers, business stakeholders and IT professionals need it.

UPDATE: The roll out is set to begin on November 2nd. Here is the wording of the announcement as it appears in the Message Center:

“On November 2, 2017, we’ll be rolling out the group insights feature in Yammer. Group insights will provide group admins and members with a comprehensive view of group activity and engagement. This message is associated with Office 365 Roadmap ID 20504.

How does this affect me?

While not a comprehensive list of all the reporting announcements, the above indicates that understanding usage and adoption is an important business goal and should be part of an overall collaboration strategy.

What thoughts do you have on what was announced for Office 365 reporting? I’d love to hear them!

(Blog notes: I sketchnote exclusively on a Surface Pro 4. The “holding newspaper” doodle is derived from a similar work by Jessica Esch (@jesch30).