Microsoft has revealed that it is finally closing off Yammer, the business social network it bought for $1.2 billion more than ten years ago.
Yammer’s founding team was based in San Francisco, and co-founder David Sacks officially launched the company during a TechCrunch startup event in 2008. Before Microsoft intervened with their $1 billion offer four years after the company’s founding, it raised more than $140 million in fundraising. For More Tech News then Click the premobiles.com.
The longevity of the Yammer brand is astonishing in many ways. Microsoft has been working on tangential communication platforms like Microsoft Teams, which the business combined with Yammer in 2019. This is despite the company’s best efforts to make Yammer widely available by integrating it into its main Office suite of products. Then, two years ago, Microsoft introduced Viva, which was positioned as a “employee experience platform” analogous to the corporate intranet of the past. Microsoft has been accelerating Viva over the past few months, and last year it introduced Viva Engage, which it described as a “evolution of the Yammer Communities app” at the time.
Confusing
Yammer’s place in Microsoft’s line of products was becoming increasingly obvious, and having two names that essentially did the same thing was perplexing. As a result, it is now fully discontinuing the brand and focusing exclusively on Viva Engage.
In a blog post, chief vice president of Viva and Yammer Murali Sitaram stated, “Over the last several months we’ve heard your feedback that having two apps surface similar experiences and the same services and content has introduced confusion and made it challenging to drive adoption and create clarity for end users.”
Short version:
Yammer will be completely replaced by Viva Engage in 2023, with branding changes occurring gradually across all products. This will involve switching the current Yammer mobile apps to Viva Engage starting in March, and starting this summer, the Yammer web app will follow suit.
Microsoft has used Yammer to power community experiences for more than ten years. Since then, we’ve observed how our customers have used Yammer to shape their corporate cultures, unite staff at difficult times, share expertise, and give staff members a voice that helps drive positive change within their organizations. You have influenced us at this time, helped us grow, and inspired us. We started the process of rebranding the Yammer Communities app for Teams as Viva Engage six months ago in order to better integrate Yammer with our Viva family of employee experiences. Since then, we’ve continued to add new features, like as storytelling, to both the Viva Engage and the Yammer apps. We’ve been hearing from you over the past several months that having two applications present the same services, content, and experiences has caused confusion and made it difficult to increase adoption and provide clarity for end users.
Yammer is changing into Viva Engage.
Yammer experiences will be rebranded as Viva Engage throughout the course of the upcoming year in order to better fit with Microsoft Viva and establish themselves as a cornerstone of the Microsoft Employee Experience Platform. This update will integrate Viva Engage across web, mobile, Teams, Outlook, and other platforms, and we are thrilled about it. The feedback we’ve received from you, our customers, has directly influenced this development, which will enable us to create an integrated experience and a single Viva Engage platform across apps and endpoints—wherever you choose to engage.I want to reassure you that for current Microsoft 365 users and/or M365 SKUs, these branding changes will not affect Yammer’s present features, value, or pricing. You will still have access to all the features you currently have with your M365 license; they will just go by the name Viva Engage.
Today we are introducing new features.
Authentic expression, corporate communications, events, and information sharing and discovery are just a few of the new Viva Engage features we unveiled in September. These encounters are now spreading across the globe.
For users of the Viva suite, recently available enhancements include:
Leader announcements for the storyline
Employee Leadership Corner
Events for Ask Me Anything
#Campaigns on social media
Advanced Analytics In-Vivo Answers
Customers of Viva Topics can also access Answers in Viva.
Obtaining the new functions
– Native Mode: In order for users, groups, and content to be compatible with and mapped to their equivalents in Azure Active Directory and Microsoft 365, the new experiences necessitate Native Mode, and shortly we will require all networks to be converted to Native Mode. Find out more about this change’s implications and how to organize your upgrading.
– New Admin Center: Administrators may complete tasks and assign roles and responsibilities for authorized Viva Suite users in the new Viva Engage Admin Center. Here is further information on these new admin actions.
What will Viva Engage do next?
In 2023, the entire Yammer platform will transform into Viva Engage, putting an end to the Yammer brand. Updates to the Communities app for Outlook and the Yammer mobile apps for iOS and Android will launch the first wave in March.
The Communities app for Outlook will receive an update in March to incorporate the Viva Engage brand. There is no need to take any action in order to observe this modification; it will occur automatically.
In March, Yammer’s iOS and Android mobile apps will also get a new name: Viva Engage. This will give users a native mobile experience that is built for social sharing and rich media. To see the changes, you must upgrade the app.
We will keep you updated as we finalize the schedule beyond March for rebranding the remaining Yammer endpoints to Viva Engage.
Come to a Viva Engage AMA with us!
The technical and product teams at Viva Engage are eager to work with you throughout this year and into the future to develop this product. Join me on February 23rd for an AMA with the product leaders from the Viva Engage team to learn more about the changes that were announced today.
