Introduction to Yammer Development
Today, communication channels are constantly evolving and organizations are discovering that they need a new way to work together to succeed. Organizations have embraced various platforms and tools over time to deliver better employee experiences tuned to how they work and what they need to be successful, thus creating a highly productive workplace that delivers better performance and reduced costs. Figure 1-1 shows how enterprise communications have evolved.
Figure 1-1. Evolution of enterprise communication channels
Enterprise Social allows you to share information, connect with people, make quick decisions, and share updates. Rather than being a standalone tool, Enterprise Social tools work with existing line-of-business applications and provides value in a digital workplace.
Enterprise Social can be part of the digital workplace in an enterprise and can integrate with adjacent technologies such as Collaboration, company portals, and Customer Relationship Management applications to solve business challenges inside and outside the company.
Yammer is an Enterprise Social networking tool launched in 2008 and acquired by Microsoft in 2012. Yammer provides a simple, scalable solution that lets employees collaborate and connect with coworkers in a private, secure manner. This chapter introduces Microsoft Yammer and explains basics of Yammer development. The chapter provides an introduction to the Yammer platform and the technical offerings that can be used to implement Yammer integration.
In this chapter, we cover the following:
- The Microsoft Yammer platform
- Yammer integration architecture
- How to start on integration with Yammer
- Setting up a Yammer profile
- Introduction to the case study used in the book—the fictitious SPDS University app
What Is Yammer?
Yammer is a leading Enterprise Social network designed for businesses to get work done smarter and faster (www.Yammer.com).
Yammer is a micro-blogging and collaboration tool for members of a network. Yammer is also a productivity tool that helps employees collaborate quickly and take effective actions to deliver better results. Unlike Twitter or Facebook, Yammer is aligned to discussions and decisions happening inside your organization or business. As illustrated in Figure 1-2, Yammer helps you get connected to other users in your organization, allows users to collaborate together, reduces the time and effort required to reach people, helps you find information quickly, provides an easy interface to share information and grow ideas to deliver better results.
Figure 1-2. Advantages of Yammer as an Enterprise Social collaboration platform
Yammer provides a user-friendly web and mobile interface allowing users to stay connected easily. You create groups to collaborate and share information with internal and external people.
Yammer groups can be private or public, providing group owners with an easy way to manage who can see information shared in a group (Figure 1-3).
Figure 1-3. Creating a new Yammer group
Let’s explore further how public groups are different from private groups.
Public Groups
Yammer’s public groups are an easy way to collaborate on common topic/agenda/departments/functions. Employees can create a new group or join public groups, as shown in Figure 1-4.
Figure 1-4. Creating a Yammer group or joining an existing group
Messages that are posted in Yammer public groups are displayed in the Home view of every member of the group. Additionally, users who aren’t members of a public group can view messages on the group’s page. Anyone in a Yammer network can join a public group.
Private Groups
Yammer’s private groups are also a great way to improve team communications. Messages posted in private groups in Yammer are displayed in the Home view of every member in the group. However, people who aren’t members of the particular private group can’t view messages on the group’s page. As shown in Figure 1-5, Unlike with public groups, an administrator of a private group must invite members or approve membership.
Figure 1-5. The Yammer private group is for approved users only
Private group owners can select whether the group is visible to other members through the network’s Groups Directory when a group is created. Or you can do this through its Settings page, as shown in Figure 1-6.
Figure 1-6. Private group Settings page
Also note that files or documents that are uploaded to private groups are invisible to members who are outside the group. However, their file names are displayed in the network’s Files directory.
Note In Basic Yammer groups, the Network Privacy setting can’t be changed after a group is created. However, in Enterprise Yammer networks, the Network Privacy setting can be changed by the Yammer administrator at any time.
Yammer Profile provide an easy and efficient way to let others know about you. Each user on Yammer gets their own Yammer profile. Users can update profiles to share their contact details, skills, knowledge, expertise, and interests with coworkers and company employees, as illustrated in Figure 1-7.
Figure 1-7. Yammer provides interfaces to view, search, and manage user profiles
When other users visit a Yammer profile page, they can download the user’s electronic business card (vcard) and save it in Outlook (Figure 1-8).
Figure 1-8. Yammer user’s vcard, which can be downloaded and saved in Outlook
Yammer also allows other users to search for contacts and see who is online on Yammer from a web or mobile device interface.
Yammer is built around open communication, and it allows users to have conversations and share information in the open. Figure 1-9 is an overview of Yammer interface for sharing information and starting conversations with colleagues. Yammer provides an easy way to update latest events and projects, ask questions, share documents, and link with others.
Figure 1-9. Using Publisher to share the latest information
Benefits of Integration with Yammer
Some of the main benefits of integration with the Yammer platform and Yammer adoption are:
- Central repository: Yammer helps pull activities across business applications into a single place where employees can easily discover relevant information and collaborate.
- Team collaboration: Yammer helps improve internal team collaboration and enables quick decision-making.
- Employee engagement: Yammer helps employees by providing tools that they need to thrive and unleashes their full productivity:
- By improving access to information and expertise.
- By increasing the effectiveness of company-wide communications.
- Business agility: With Yammer, you can connect employees, collaborate, and accelerate the feedback loop when entering new markets.
- Team communication: Yammer helps break down communication barriers.
- Increased productivity: Yammer helps drive productivity by making business applications social and business data easily discoverable, which in turn makes it easier for users to take meaningful actions.
Note Yammer is a fast-paced platform where new features are developed and released on a regular basis. For full details of new features and future releases, refer to the YCN (Yammer Customer Network) at https://about.yammer.com/success/engage/grow-your-network/release-schedule/.
Microsoft Office 365 and Yammer
Microsoft has included Yammer as an Enterprise Social offering in Office 365. Yammer thrives in the Microsoft Office 365 environment by providing deep integration with MS office applications and SharePoint Online.
In Microsoft Ignite 2015, Microsoft showcased the power of Office Graph and showed how Microsoft Delve provides personalized information to users. Users can initiate Yammer conversations directly from Delve.
Core of Yammer Development: The Yammer Platform
The Yammer platform enables users to integrate information across disparate business applications and collaborate through a common interface while working on various business applications.
Yammer platform provides a set of open APIs that enables you to integrate various line-of-business applications within your organization. These can be internal portals, business process automation systems, change and support management applications, or mobile applications.
The main benefits of Yammer integration are:
- Single sign-on with Yammer credentials: Users can register to your line-of-business applications using Yammer credentials.
- Share information and collaborate: Yammer allows users to get the right information at the right time, making it more valuable, and allows users to make better decisions.
- Embedded social capabilities: These are embedded in the business application like surfacing feeds to give context to the users, thus allowing users to share content and extend the reach of organization’s information.
- Ease of use: Integration with Yammer is a simple and scalable data level integration. Yammer integration enables you to send important updates from business applications and surface social data from Yammer into your applications.
- Consolidation of data: In an organization, information is processed and stored in multiple locations and in multiple business applications. By integrating your business applications into Yammer, you can display information in one common interface that makes information easily discoverable, meaningful, and actionable.
The main components of the Yammer platform are:
- Embed Feed: Share and display Yammer user feed, group feed, topic feed, or Open Graph objects on other applications.
- Action Buttons LIKE/FOLLOW/SHARE: An easy way to enable social interaction and publish an activity story related to that action on Yammer.
- Open Graph: An integration protocol that allows you to define an activity that can be posted on Yammer as an object.
- SDKs: Available in various programming languages (JavaScript, .Net, Ruby, Python, Windows Phone 8, and iOS). Developers will learn in this book how to use Yammer SDKs to authenticate on Yammer and how to access Yammer APIs to develop integration solutions.
Yammer Integration Architecture
As mentioned, Yammer integration involves simple and scalable data online or on-premises applications:
- Embeddable plug-ins
- REST Application Programming Interface (API)
- Open Graph-enabled social apps
Yammer provides many components for integration with your line-of-business application. These components are REST APIs, JavaScript, Open Graph, embedded widgets, and SDKs for different platforms such a web applications, .NET desktop applications, mobile applications, and backend services. In this section, we will review each of the main elements of Yammer integration in turn.
Yammer’s embeddable plug-ins allow users to access social content across all of their business applications using their Yammer credentials. There are various embeddable plug-ins available and, in Chapter 2, we will cover the full details of the currently available Yammer Embed.
The JavaScript integration component enables you to integrate line-of-business applications using a client-side script. Yammer provides JavaScript SDK for user authentication and read/write into Yammer. We cover JavaScript in great detail in Chapter 7.
Yammer REST APIs are most commonly used for integration. They provide a secure HTTP interface that allows you to easily add social features to enterprise applications. The REST APIs provide endpoints for authenticated users to read/write data on Yammer. We cover the Yammer REST APIs in great details in Chapter 6.
Open Graph (OG)
Yammer uses the Open Graph (OG) protocol to connect applications to create the Enterprise Graph, which is a single mapping of people and objects they encounter at work. Figure 1-10 shows how Open Graph works.
In Figure 1-10, company employee Alex creates a training schedule on a business application. This business application integrates with Yammer using Yammer apps and Open Graph and allows Alex to share the training schedule with other users on Yammer. It’s visible via the Yammer Recent Activity widget.
Figure 1-10. Line-of-business application using Enterprise Social graph to share information in real-time
SDKs
Yammer SDKs are open source code that enable developers to implement authentication with Yammer and access Yammer APIs from various technology platforms. Yammer has released SDKs for these languages:
- JavaScript SDK
- .NET SDK
- Windows Phone 8 SDK
Chapter 7 describes the details of these SDKs, with examples on how to implement JavaScript SDKs and .NET SDK.
How to Start Yammer Integration
Yammer provides two types of integration:
- Lightweight integration using Yammer Embed feeds, which allow you to get Yammer feeds surfaced on your business applications. Yammer Embed provides the easiest and simplest approach to integrate Yammer into your business applications. This is covered in Chapter 2.
- Yammer Embed does not allow you to write or read Yammer data from your line-of-business application. To overcome this limitation, Yammer provides deep integration using Yammer apps and Yammer SDKs. To get started with deep integration of Yammer with an application, you need to have following components:
- A valid Yammer account
- A Yammer app that provides an integration channel (Covered in more detail in Chapter 3)
- Yammer SDKs of your choice, which provide a platform to quickly integrate Yammer with other applications within your organization
If you want to integrate Yammer with a web application, you can leverage JavaScript SDK. In case you want to integrate Yammer with a mobile application platform such as iOS or Windows Phone, Yammer has released SDKs for mobile platforms. This book explains the JavaScript SDK and Windows Mobile SDK using different examples.
As Yammer is an Enterprise private social network and Yammer is also part of Microsoft Office 365 network, there are different ways to create an active Yammer account:
- Create a Yammer account with a company email address and your personal profile. In this case, there are separate credentials for Yammer and it does not offer single sign-on.
- Single sign-on using a company email address and configuring your personal profile.
- Sign in to Yammer using a Microsoft Office 365 account and then manage your personal profile.
Let’s look at these three options in detail.
Setting Up Your Profile Without Single Sign-On
You will need your corporate email ID in order to create a Yammer account. Visit www.yammer.com and sign up by entering your corporate email address, as shown in Figure 1-11.
Figure 1-11. Sign up on Yammer using your company email address
Yammer will send you an email to confirm your email address. Once your account has been confirmed, you will be taken through the setup process. The setup process requires you do the following:
- Set up your profile by entering information about yourself such as job title, department name, profile picture, and so on (Figure 1-12).
Figure 1-12. Sign up on Yammer
- (Optional) You can invite your colleagues to sign up on Yammer (Figure 1-13).
Figure 1-13. Invite colleagues to join Yammer
That’s it! You can now log in to Yammer with your company email address.
Setting Up Your Yammer Profile with Single Sign-On and a Company Email Address
If your company has already set up single sign-on between Yammer and the company domain, you do not need to sign up on Yammer separately. In order to log into Yammer.com, navigate to https://www.yammer.com/companyname or [Company Name Portal address]. You will be redirected to the [COMPANY NAME] SSO system, as illustrated in Figure 1-14.
Figure 1-14. Log on to Yammer
Occasionally, you will need to log into the [Company Name Portal address] to verify your identity. When prompted, simply enter your domain username and password, as shown in Figure 1-15.
Figure 1-15. SSO to Yammer from company federated domain (this page depends on company account federation configuration settings)
Once you have successfully signed in, you will be redirected back to Yammer to view your company’s Yammer feed.
The most important change to understand is that Yammer.com will no longer be storing your password information. Instead, this is being handled by your company-implemented single sign-on solution, such as Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS).
Signing in to Yammer with a Microsoft Office 365 Account
With Office 365 sign-in for Yammer, users can access Yammer with their Office 365 credentials. Office 365 users can seamlessly access Yammer from their Office 365 navigation bar, as shown in Figure 1-16, thus providing immediate access to their existing Yammer account linked to Office 365.
Figure 1-16. Office 365 suite navigation bar and Yammer integration
Office 365 sign-in for Yammer is for Office 365 customers with the following criteria: Yammer Enterprise is activated in a network’s Office 365 Admin Center and Yammer single sign-on (SSO) is not enabled. Users will notice the Office 365 suite navigation bar (Figure 1-16) at the top of their Yammer network.
In order to guide you to implement Yammer integration with line-of-business applications, we will use a case study of the fictitious global company called SPDS and explain how this company is using Yammer to provide integration with an internal application.
SPDS provides an internal learning and management system (LMS), called “SPDS University,” for their employees to learn and develop their skills. The SPDS University application offers different interfaces for web applications, Window mobile apps, and SharePoint apps. Based on the employee’s convenience, they use different interfaces. This application provides annual training schedule, recorded trainings, and announcements on future trainings events. But due to lack of user engagement, not all employees are using this application at its full potential.
Also, SPDS has adopted Yammer as their Enterprise Social networking tool to make employees collaborate quickly and take effective actions and deliver better results. SPDS wants to utilize Yammer capabilities and offer Yammer integration with the SPDS University application by implementing Yammer Social features in LMS. There is strong case it will improve the employees’ engagement.
In this book, we will show you how to integrate Yammer with the SPDSUniveristy application and provide detailed explanations on the following integration possibilities:
- You will learn how to use Yammer Embed feeds to surface on an internal company portal.
- You will learn to implement “Sign in with Yammer” to provide authentication on a SharePoint app, a web application, and a Windows mobile app.
- You will learn how to use Yammer Open Graph from the SPDS University training portal to:
- Send updates on Yammer about recent activities that can be used by Yammer users during discussions.
- Send updates on Yammer about a new training venue from an internal training application. Inform users about training locations and let them know how to reach the destination with a location map.
- Share important events like a new certification attained by users directly from the SPDSUniveristy application to Yammer using the Yammer Open Graph API.
- When a new training video is created, share this video link directly from the SPDSUniveristy application to Yammer.
- You will learn how users can share an upcoming training page on Yammer using REST APIs.
- You will also learn how users can bring relevant Yammer posts into the SPDS University application using Yammer REST APIs and how to use Yammer REST APIs to search Yammer posts directly from the LMS web portal.
- You will learn how to develop more social integrations using Yammer JavaScript SDKs and create an app using Windows Phone 8 SDK.
Summary
In this chapter, we explored Yammer as an Enterprise Social platform and discussed its key features. We reviewed the core of Yammer Integration architecture and explained the different components of developing integrations with Yammer. We laid out the plan for integration by creating a Yammer account and provided details about the case study that we will be using throughout this book.
In following chapter we will start with Yammer integration using the Yammer Embed technology, which is simplest way to integrate Yammer with your business application and to view Yammer feeds directly from business applications.