Microsoft to discontinue Yammer Enterprise in favour of Office 365 Groups

Microsoft has provided more details as to how it will be integrating Office 365 into its enterprise-focused social network Yammer. On 1 January, 2017, the Yammer Enterprise service tier was discontinued, but the social network remained available and was integrated with Office 365 services in a number of ways.

Within Yammer itself, it will be possible for users to create Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents through Office Online. Users will also be able to move their work from Yammer to a shared OneNote notebook or to the Microsoft Planner Project Management tool.

Team members will have the ability to select files from OneDrive and SharePoint and share them with their colleagues through Yammer. Teams using the social network will also be able to build wikis and blogs as the service will soon have access to SharePoint sites.

The company plans on rolling out integration with Office 365 in phases, with the first phase beginning later this year. Yammer customers who log into their accounts with their Office 365 identity will be the first to see the integration of the two services. Microsoft will begin the rollout by targeting organisations that have a single Yammer network that is connected to one Office 365 tenant. The company will eventually stop selling Yammer as a standalone service and it is encouraging customers to move to its Office 365 plans.

Data entered into Yammer will also be affected by the integration with Office 365. Yammer notes will become Word documents and will only be accessible through the social network's Files section. After this, Microsoft plans on eventually replacing Yammer Notes with group OneNote notebooks. According to the Yammer team, the company wants to “migrate all files stored in Yammer to SharePoint.”

Yammer users will now be able to access their shared conversations through the service or in Outlook but this functionality will not work on both platforms so users will need to choose one.