Yammer?

Yammer is a social communication platform for organization. Employees can communicate with each other to share valuable information, they can get in touch with the right group within the organization to get right information, to get their issues resolved. Yammer is social site like other social sites: Facebook, etc. but this is a private social network for the organization only. It is a social network for a company, where employees can post messages, respond to a message, like a message and share the message. Employees who belong to the same department can create groups in yammer; and can start the conversation and sharing information. Yammer introduces a real time work in organization. And so many organizations use Yammer as their social platform today. Sometimes they also want yammer integrated with their application; and this article talks about how to integrate Yammer with SharePoint.

Yammer Integration with SharePoint

Everybody knows that Yammer will be integrated with the SharePoint 2013. There are couple of phases in which integration will be done: Basic Integration and Deep Integration.

In Phase 1, they are just planning to replace the NewsFeed with the Yammer feed. So for this you can either use the Web Part (which was provided for SP2010) or embed code provided by yammer. Also App for SP 2013 has been released; so we can have this option.
In Phase 2, we will have single sign on and more features.

In this article we will see how to use Yammer Web Part to replace the NewsFeed in SharePoint 2013, how you can use yammer web part to display search results from yammer, how you can see feeds of particular user, etc. Before continuing with this article please make sure Yammer web part is installed / activated in the web application, if not then contact your administrator.

Integration with Yammer Web part

The web part is called “Yammer Feed Web Part” and it brings the real time threaded conversation of Yammer to SharePoint. Following are the options this web part is providing:
Company Feed: Provides a view of all messages within a Yammer Networks.
Group Feed: Content to a specific Yammer group.
My Feed: Provides My threaded conversations, and it is good to put on My Site.
User Feed: Display individual users feed.
Search: Integrates with an Enterprise or Basic Search Site to provide matching search results from Yammer.

The steps are very easy to follow. We will see them one by one. Note: here you will see screenshots of SharePoint 2013, no need to worry, as the steps for other SharePoint versions are very similar.

1. Navigate to the page where you want to put web part.
2. Choose edit from the Site Action
3. Click on the Add web part and select the “Yammer App” web part.

     4. Add the web part.
     5. Now select the appropriate app and configure it according to your requirement. You can choose Company feed to display conversations of company/network; Group Feed for group’s conversation. Generally My Feed and User Feed is selected when the web part is placed on the My Site.
     6. After saving the settings, save the page and stop editing; you will see all yammer conversations in the SharePoint.

Similarly you can place the Yammer web part on the search result page and configure it for the Search App and save the page. You will start to see the search results of yammer on share point page. You can also post messages, reply to message, like and follow the message using this web part. It provides all the social features of yammer in SharePoint. The Yammer web part was released for the SP 2010 but you can still use it in SP2013 but there is App in market for SP2013

    Search Web part on search results page:

        

    My Feeds On My Page:

        

Till now we see how to replace the Newsfeed of SharePoint or how to configure Yammer web part for two way communication in web part. But what about starting conversation around a particular list item or document or commenting on the list item or document? What about liking and following SharePoint list item, document on Yammer or with the help of Yammer?  Yes we can do this using the Yammer Embed Code Commenting. To learn more about Yammer Embed, click here. Before starting using the embed code commenting you should understand how it works.

Integration with Yammer embed code

So once you put the embedded code on a page (here for case study we will put embedded code on the DispForm.aspx or display page of list) , it renders the Yammer UI which displays conversation and provides the controls to comments and for other social things. Initially it is empty as no message has been posted, but as soon as the first message get posted from that page from the UI which is generated by embed code, the Object gets created in Yammer. And all conversation and social activities on this page (DispForm.aspx) happens around this Yammer Object only. This Object is created uniquely and remembered using the actual URL on which Embed code is placed (here in our case it is DispForm.aspx page). In SharePoint the list or document library has single display form page but it has different URL for different list items or documents. And we can use these URLs and start commenting on the particular list item or document.

Steps to configure it are very simple, let’s see them one by one:

1. Create one html file using Visual studio.
2. Put the following code inside it and save it:

        Here you need to put the name of your network. And choose the appropriate type.

 

      3.  Upload this html file to the SharePoint library and remember the address of file which will require afterwards.
      4.  Go to the DispForm.aspx (choosing any document or list item).
      5.  Start editing the page. You can also choose the SharePoint designer to edit this page.
      6.  Add the Content Editor Web part in the web part zone.
      7.  Point content editor web part to the html file using the URL of file by editing web part.
      8.  Save the web part page settings.
      9.  Save the page. 

After following these steps you can start commenting on each list item or document in yammer separately as shown in below screenshot.

Same way you can use Like and Follow’s embed code. You can use this to replace OOB Comment web part provided by SharePoint 2013. You can use this for list, document library, task list, calendar, blogs, etc. In this way without so much coding you can start Yamming on your SharePoint environment.