In an effort to drive the collaboration experience and further the adoption of Yammer, Microsoft announced on the 2nd of February that Yammer now meets all of Office 365’s security and compliance requirements and Yammer will be activated across all Office 365 tenants that contain a Yammer subscription. This will be a retrospective activation as well as being enabled by default for any new tenants. The rollout will be in three stages:
- Wave 1 has commenced as of February 1, 2016 and includes Office 365 customers with a business subscription who purchased fewer than 150 licenses that includes Yammer and who have zero or one custom domain for Yammer.
- Wave 2 starts on March 1, 2016 and includes Office 365 customers with a business subscription who purchased fewer than 5,000 licenses that includes Yammer. This does not include customers with an education subscription.
- Wave 3 starts on April 1, 2016 and includes all remaining customers with a business subscription and all customers with an education subscription.
As Yammer is automatically activated, users with a license that includes Yammer can immediately start accessing the service through Office 365 and Yammer features will be available from within other Office 365 apps. The activation process will either create a new Yammer network or connect to an existing Yammer network that has all or a subset of domains managed within the Office 365 tenant.
Microsoft are continuing to work towards deeper integration between Yammer and Office 365 and this change will lay the ground work for new features. One of the exciting new capabilities coming in the first half of this year is integration with Office 365 Groups adding the ability to initiate Skype for Business calls, access OneDrive for Business files, schedule Outlook calendar meetings and create tasks within Planner, all from within a Yammer group.
I’ve had a number of customers choose not to deploy Yammer to their user bases for one reason of another and it is possible to block this from occurring. As of February 2016, the Yammer license is an option that can be disabled. Previously the Yammer license was embedded and enabled by default into E plans; provisioning of the Yammer service is what activated a users’ ability to get into Yammer. If your business is not yet ready to adopt Yammer, it will now be necessary to revoke the Yammer license via PowerShell for individual users.
For more information, see https://blogs.office.com/2016/02/02/get-ready-for-yammer/