Living with SharePoint: Yammer’s Integration with Microsoft SharePoint

Saturday, September 27, 2014

Yammer’s Integration with Microsoft SharePoint

Yammer’s enterprise social networking solution now integrates with Microsoft® SharePoint®. With the Yammer SharePoint Web Parts, you can see your Yammer feed directly inside SharePoint, eliminating the need to toggle between SharePoint and Yammer.

Although SharePoint Server 2013 provides basic enterprise social features, Yammer provides a richer enterprise social experience.

Yammer is a best-in-class enterprise social network that brings together employees, content, conversations, and business data in a single location.

Yammer empowers employees to be more productive by enabling them to collaborate in real time across departments, geographies, and business applications. You can add Yammer functionality to your SharePoint sites by adding Yammer to the navigation bar or by using the Yammer app to embed a Yammer feed in a site.

About Yammer

Yammer comes in two varieties: Yammer Basic and Yammer Enterprise.

Yammer Basic is free and available to all users. It provides a way for employees to collaborate with other members of their organization.

Yammer Enterprise is a premium version that extends an organization’s basic Yammer network. It’s offered both as a stand-alone product and with various SharePoint Online and Office 365 plans .

Yammer Enterprise provides additional tools and resources to help organizations set up the best possible enterprise social network.

Use Yammer with SharePoint Server 2013

You can choose whether to use SharePoint’s social features or Yammer. If you want to take advantage of the power of Yammer with SharePoint, you can use any of the following methods:

1.1 Add Yammer to the navigation bar for SharePoint 2013

You can use a toggle switch to replace the Newsfeed link with a Yammer link on the top navigation bar for SharePoint. This functionality is included in Service Pack 1 (SP1) for SharePoint Server.

For more information, see Add Yammer to the navigation bar for SharePoint 2013.

1.2 Use Yammer instead of SharePoint Newsfeed features

To take advantage of the features provided by Yammer, it's a good idea to replace the default SharePoint Server 2013 enterprise social features with equivalent Yammer features. You can remove the SharePoint Server social web parts from My Sites and team sites, and you can hide the user interface controls that provide social functionality.

For more information, see Hide SharePoint Server 2013 social features.

1.3 Use the Yammer app for SharePoint

The new Yammer app for SharePoint lets you embed Yammer feeds (such as the home feed, a group feed, or comment feeds) into on-premises sites to make them more social and engaging.