Q & A: Why Microsoft Teams and Yammer are Better Together

Hey y’all! Dux here with a follow-up to our recent webinar, “Microsoft Teams and Yammer: Better Together.” I just wanted to thank everyone who signed up, showed up, and participated! We actually had such a robust turnout that we ended up having a pretty good problem as far as we’re concerned: too many questions and not enough time!

The question and answer portion of our webinar was so well attended that we needed a little more time to answer all of y’all’s fantastic question. So, we thought what better place to continue the discussion than the AvePoint blog? Let’s get started!

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Webinar: 5 Ways to Skyrocket Your Organizational Engagement with Yammer 

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Q: When can we expect Teams and Planner for GCC tenants?

A: According to Microsoft’s Office 365 Roadmap, Planner will be available in Office 365 US Government Community (GCC) when it meets the compliance requirements of the offering. The estimated release for Planner for GCC is May of 2018. For Teams, the estimated release date is a bit later in the year, with Teams expected to be available for GCC in Q3 of 2018. To keep updated, check out the roadmap.

Q: Can we incorporate Microsoft Teams across multiple organizations by federation or something else?

A: Yep! Guest access in Microsoft Teams allows collaboration among those both in and out of network.

Q: Can you create an Office 365 Group and not create a Team?

A: You can! For example, when you create an Outlook group, an Office 365 group, SharePoint, Planner, and OneNote are all created, but a Team is not. Check out some more information here.

Q: When would you use a Team set to public vs. a Yammer group set to public?

A: It’s apple and oranges, really. The purpose of Teams is communications and collaboration with colleagues you work with day in day out. Your department, project team, etc – a collective of people that has a high velocity of interaction (ie communicating back and forth, jointly working on documents, assigning/tracking tasks).  You can collaborate with colleagues in Teams either with instant messaging, meetings, video chats, etc.

You would set Teams to public if you expect engagement and input from other people in the organization and to have them be a part of that work. For example, a public Team might be useful for planning an office holiday party and whoever wants to join it can.

Yammer, however, is more about providing visibility and engaging across departments, offices, or an organization as a whole. You have a broader audience with Yammer whereas Teams’ is more specific.

Q: Is it possible to make one person an owner of every Team created?

A: Yes it is! By default, the creator of the Team is the owner and you can then assign other owners. Owners can also unassign ownership from themselves and change their role to member if necessary.

Q: There is a SharePoint site behind each Team. Is there any seamless integration between Yammer and SharePoint?

A: It depends on your definition of integration. If it’s surfacing Yammer conversations in SharePoint, absolutely. Most likely, what they mean when they say integration is that they just want to see the stream showing up on a SharePoint page. For more on the Yammer web part in SharePoint, click here.

Q: What is the difference between Microsoft Teams and Yammer?

A: The difference is primarily your audience/what kind of communication you’re hoping to accomplish. Yammer is for a broad audience, or if you’re looking to have a question answered by someone with whom you don’t work on a daily basis. Say, for example, you’re a salesperson looking for a piece of marketing collateral. You can pose this question on Yammer to your whole company, or if you have a marketing department Yammer group, you can ask the question in that forum.

As I’ve mentioned above, The purpose of Teams is communications and collaboration with colleagues you work with day in day out. Your department, project team, etc – a collective of people that has a high velocity of interaction (ie communicating back and forth, jointly working on documents, assigning/tracking tasks).  You can collaborate with colleagues in Teams either with instant messaging, meetings, video chats, etc.

An example would be your content marketing team working with digital marketing to optimize website copy for the web. This kind of interaction is typical of a marketing department and these folks will likely be chatting every day, more or less.  Check out this Teams On Air Episode where I shared how the AvePoint marketing team uses Teams

Q: Is there a way to show Yammer feeds on classic SharePoint pages?

A: For classic SharePoint pages, you can use this embed code https://support.shortpoint.com/support/solutions/articles/1000259154-embed-a-yammer-feed-into-your-sharepoint-and-office-365-pages

Q: Is there a way for two different teams, for example HR and marketing, to conference call or meet within Teams? Is that something that can currently be done or will it be applied later when Skype for Business is fully integrated?

A: Absolutely. All calling capabilities provided by Skype for Business today are available for Microsoft Teams today as well. However, there are some little things that aren’t quite yet available. For example, you can spin off a different chat window from a conference call in Skype for Business, while that’s not yet a feature available in Teams. Additionally, call recording in Teams isn’t yet available, but when it is, not only will it record your audio or video, but it can transcribe in the interface as well.

To keep updated on when Skype for Business will be fully integrated to Microsoft Teams, check out the Office 365 roadmap.

Q: When creating a Yammer group, it automatically creates an Office 365 group. However, we had a Team already created that was harnessing Office 365, but we could not relate a Yammer group to it. How can we import a previously Office 365 group into Yammer?

A:  That’s a great question! Unfortunately, as of right now, you can’t. Right now the only way to have an Office 365 group-enabled Yammer group is you have to create the Yammer group from scratch today to spin off one. For now, you can’t relate an existing Yammer group to an existing Office 365 group. For more on this, check out what Microsoft has to say here.

Q: Where is Planner data stored? Is it in SharePoint as a file or in Groups?

A: According to Microsoft Tech Community, The plan metadata is held in an Azure-based service while the comments for tasks within a plan are stored in the Exchange Online mailbox for the Office 365 Group associated with the plan. For the full answer, click here.

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