Yammer announces external messaging, closer integration with Office 365

Microsoft has been busy with Office 365 recently, officially launching Skype for Business as more than a rebranded Lync, upgrading Office Delve, and now today, announcing the evolution of Yammer with deeper integration into Office 365 and introducing a new external messaging feature, making Yammer not only more integrated, but more useful.

Microsoft acquired Yammer, an enterprise social networking service, in 2012, and began the process of integrating it into Office 365. With today’s announcements, Yammer is now included in Office 365 Groups, and its social signals are now included in the Office Graph, meaning that Yammer conversations can now be included in Skype for Business meetings, integrated with Outlook email and OneDrive, and included in Delve content discovery.

Yammer now also makes adding external participants to a Yammer conversation easy, according to the blog post announcing the improvements:

To include an external participant, simply add their email address to a Yammer conversation in your network, and they’ll be able to see and respond to this conversation from their own Yammer network or email inbox. Your data stays secure because outside participants only access the conversations they have been added to and not the rest of the information in your network. 

This closer integration of Yammer into Office 365, along with the other recent changes brings the aggressive although a bit scattershot additions to the modern Office more in line with each other, making Office 365, with Office Graph, Office Delve, Skype for Business, and now Yammer, all working together.

Microsoft will be talking more about Yammer and Office 365 at Ignite, in just a few weeks, and we’ll be there to bring you all the latest.