We’re excited to announce that beginning April 1, 2014 Yammer Enterprise will ship with all Office 365 Education plans. As part of this update, all existing Office 365 Education plan customers will receive licenses for Yammer Enterprise. There will be no additional cost associated with these features.
How will existing customers get Yammer Enterprise once it is available on April 1?
Once Yammer Enterprise is available, tenant admins will receive an activation link in their Office 365 admin portal. Customers should visit the Office 365 Admin Portal to begin the self-guided provisioning process. Find the complete Yammer Activation Guide here. There are also additional resources on activation and provisioning from Yammer.
Is there anything my customers can do to start using Yammer now?
Yes, education customers can start using free Yammer Basic today. Yammer Basic includes basic social networking and collaboration features, along with mobile and other 3rd party applications.
How does Yammer integrate with Office 365?
The Yammer app for SharePoint that was released in July embeds Yammer feeds into SharePoint sites (similar to the Yammer web part that is available for SharePoint 2010 & 2007). The Yammer app for SharePoint is available free of charge in the Office Store (public marketplace that you can access directly from a SharePoint site) and it will work with both the new SharePoint Online in Office 365 and SharePoint 2013 on-premises. Look for more news regarding product integration later in FY14.
What should you use for social networking, Yammer or SharePoint 2013?
Go with Yammer. Yammer will power the social experiences in SharePoint, Office365, Dynamics and Skype. Yammer’s unique adoption model appeals directly to end users and makes it easy for organizations to become social ‘instantly’ – removing one of the biggest barriers to success with Enterprise Social. We’re committed to bringing the two together to deliver ‘Connected Experiences’ that combine social, collaboration email and Unified Communications with an enterprise-class social platform for security, management and compliance.
What is the our guidance for Office 365 customers?
Go with Yammer!! Yammer will power the social experiences in SharePoint, Office 365, Dynamics and Skype. We’ll be iteratively creating more and more connections between Yammer and Office 365, providing Office 365 customers the ability to choose Yammer as their social experience. As a first step we provided (1) the ability to make Yammer your default social network (2) a Yammer app for SharePoint to easily embed Yammer groups into SharePoint sites. We’re iteratively deepening these connections and by the fall we’ll be bringing the user experiences closer together and provide a seamless navigation between Yammer and Office 365, a rich document collaboration experience and a single sign-on experience. We’ll continue to add more and more connections to deliver ‘Connected Experiences’ that combine social, collaboration email and Unified Communications with an enterprise-class social platform for security, management and compliance.