Connect people across the entire organization through communities in Microsoft Teams

With a global health crisis compelling so many of us to work remotely, it’s more important than ever for leaders and communications to connect people across teams and organizations. Last November at Ignite, we unveiled the new Yammer, with a beautiful new design that powers community, knowledge-sharing, and employee engagement. The new Yammer includes a fully interactive Yammer app called “Communities” that brings your communities and conversations directly into Microsoft Teams. Put simply, it’s Yammer—in Teams.

Starting today, this app is available in the Microsoft app store. Here, I’ll go over how your team can use it for company-wide communication, knowledge-sharing, and employee engagement, as well as how to install it and where to find it. By offering the full Yammer experience right inside Teams, we want to help you keep everyone at your organization engaged, informed, and moving forward. Let’s get into it.

The new Yammer app for Teams keeps everyone connected to what’s happening in their communities conversations, share announcements, attend live events, and connect with coworkers just as you would in the Yammer web or mobile apps.

How to use the new Yammer app

More than 44 million people are now using Teams every day to get work done. And while many of us spend more time than ever collaborating with our own teams, we also often need to reach beyond our core work groups to chase down information, share experiences and expertise, and voice feedback.

With the Yammer app in Teams, customers can:

Communicate broadly

Leaders and communicators need modern solutions to ensure people have the information they need, wherever they are. The Yammer app enables them to share a poll or question at scale, and instantly notify people of important news by sharing an announcement targeted to the entire organization or specific communities. And the app offers easy visibility into the reach and impact of those communications, too.

Announcements and pinned posts increase visibility for important messages.

Connect with experts and answers

The familiar social experiences of Yammer make it easy to discover valuable conversations, ask questions, loop in experts with at-mentions, and mark best answers.

The personalized feed is powered by artificial intelligence (AI) to show conversations and content that are relevant to you.

Host company-wide events

Leaders can use live events in Yammer to broadcast company-wide, town hall–style meetings with video, interactive conversation, and Q&A sessions to share vision, drive culture, and engage employees.

Users can attend company-wide live events in Yammer in the app.

How to install it

Starting today, admins and users can install the Yammer app, named “Communities,” from the Teams App store. Then, it can be pinned to the Teams app bar on the left. IT Admins can choose to deploy and pin the app for all users or particular departments through custom policies. Meanwhile, individual users can install and pin the app themselves using the options in the app bar.

Install the Yammer app, called “Communities,” from the app store in Microsoft Teams.

Further questions

Now, you may have some questions on where this app will be available in Teams and whether it will impact the places you use Yammer today. For instance, you be wondering if the new app will be in Teams for iOS and Android. The answer: not quite yet! But while it’s currently available today for Teams desktop and web clients only, we’ll be bringing it to mobile soon, too. Meanwhile mobile users can enjoy the new Yammer mobile apps today. And you can also continue using Yammer for Windows and Mac and Yammer on the web (currently in preview, due for worldwide release soon). The new “Communities” app is available to all Teams customers today, even if they haven’t used the preview of the new Yammer experience.

Looking forward

By bringing Yammer into Teams, we want to make it easier for leaders and communicators to quickly and effectively communicate with their teams and organizations, even when they need to work apart. We’ll continue to create a more seamless Yammer communities experience within Teams, including unifying notifications and search and bringing the Yammer app to Teams mobile. We hope you find them useful as you navigate your organization’s remote work experience.