Microsoft Updates Yammer Group Tools And Promises Deeper Office 365 Integration

Microsoft has announced a range of new updates to its Yammer online collaboration suite. Customers now have new group collaboration tools that Microsoft hopes will improve the group work experience. The company also announced that deeper Office 365 integration is coming next year.

In a blog post, the company describes the new “immersive group experience” as being achieved by a cleaner group interface, wider team conversations feed and a full-width header. New notifications provide updates on real-time group activity and new navigation options will allow for easy access to the next group. Yammer also provides new photo markup, email attachments from external sources, inline at-mentioning on mobile, and the ability to invite coworkers via email to join Yammer.

Users also now have access to a new “Discovery” feed that promises to surface content from other teams that you might have missed out on. The feed is designed to make it clear where the relevant conversations came from, and allow users to join groups they haven’t already joined yet if they find content they want to see more of.

The update follows a previous expansion of the suite's document collaboration tools. Yammer was purchased by Microsoft in 2012 for $1.2 billion, and since then the company has gradually expanded the suite's functionality to improve group work. In the announcement, Yammer also promised further integration with Office 365 in 2016, including support for multi-user co-authoring via Office Online and integration with Office 365 Groups.

Yammer is planning to host a “YamJam” on Wednesday, Sept. 9, from 9-10 a.m. PDT. Similar to a Reddit “Ask Me Anything,” the team will be on hand on the Office 365 network to answer any questions consumers may have about the new updates.