Integrating Yammer with SharePoint Online

There is no question about the importance of social media in our daily lives. What were we doing 8 or 10 years ago without all these Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn…. The big buzz of these days is the "Enterprise Social" for sure. Every conference I attend, everybody I talked to there is always "Enterprise Social" in the menu. In some organizations these public social networks are restricted to end-users however they still talk about the social in the enterprise. So what is this? How does is work?

If you haven't heard about Yammer, Chatter or Jive then it will be soon that you'll get introduced to either one of these network through your organization. These are the special Enterprise level social networks that brings Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn type of functionality to your company. The major difference in between these social tools vs. the public ones is the security and control. Your IT department will have more control over how you social and what you share in the organization by utilizing these networks.

Well, to keep it short I would like to jump to Yammer directly. Yammer is acquired by Microsoft in 2012 for about $1B. It was a big news and very important acquisition for Microsoft. The goal is to integrate it with the SharePoint however it was too late in the development/release cycle of the SharePoint 2013 therefore it wasn't truly baked in.

However Yammer is very easy to integrate with SharePoint 2010 and 2013, especially with SharePoint Online which is one of the productivity tools comes under the Office 365 service offerings from Microsoft. In this blog post I would like to walk you through step-by-step instructions on how to integrate your existing Yammer ESN (Enterprise Social Network) with SharePoint Online. At this point I am assuming that you already have a Yammer network as well as already setup a SharePoint Online environment.

First you need to make sure that the account you are using for this task is the Office 365 Global Admin account. Then you need to go to your "SharePoint Admin Center" in your Office 365 administration site. And click "settings" on the left hand side quick links menu to get to a screen which you will be able to enable your Yammer service.

In this screen on the Enterprise Social Collaboration section please select "Use Yammer Service" and click "Ok"

Next you will have to get the Yammer SharePoint App from the Microsoft Office Store. In order to do this you need to go to your Office 365 SharePoint Admin page which is located at https://XXXXX-admin.sharepoint.com. Then select "Apps" from the left menu and then select "Purchase Apps". You will then land into the SharePoint App Store.

Once you are in the App Store you can locate the "Yammer App for SharePoint" either by browsing or searching. After you locate the app you will then "Add it" to your site.

After some confirmations the "Yammer App for SharePoint" will get installed in your site collection and now you can add this app to the site collection but before doing that we need to make the app available for use. Please go to the site collection which you want to add the Yammer App for SharePoint. Then click "Settings" and select "add an app" from the pull down menu. From the "Add you can add" section select "Yammer App for SharePoint". Then you will get the screen that SharePoint is asking you to trust the app for that particular site collection.

  

As soon as you hit "Trust It", SharePoint will add the app to the site collection.

No you are going to add "Yammer App for SharePoint" to the page where would you like to see the Yammer feed. Navigate to the page and then select "Page" -> "Edit". Then select "Insert" from the ribbon and click "Add an app"
 

 

 Select the "Yammer Feed" from the Parts section and then select Yammer feed app before clicking "Add". Now you've added the Yammer App for SharePoint to your page. Just click Save and exit from the editing mode. Yammer app will ask you to login to your Yammer feed by using your email and password. Just go ahead and enter your credentials. Here is how it should look like at this point.

 

Yammer app will ask you to chose the type of feed you'd like to see. Lets select the "Home" feed. And here we go. We just easily integrated Yammer App for SharePoint with Office 365 - SharePoint Online.

 

 

 

I hope you enjoyed it. Please let me know what you think.

SharePoint Calendar Overlay in Cloud - Office 365

A SharePoint team site comes with some standard lists such as Announcements, Links, Tasks, Calendar and The Discussion Board. If you have used these lists you agree with me on the fact that these are pretty basic and requires some sorts of configuration and/or customization.

When it comes to calendar, it is a great feature however nowadays everybody is complaining about the time and inability to manage their calendars and the time. If you look around there are calendars everywhere. Your peers have their own calendars, your team has a calendar, you probably have one calendar for each board room in your office, I didn't even mention your own personal calendars yet, and the list goes on and on.

If you were to manage all these calendars individually it would be a nightmare, however SharePoint 2010 supports multiple calendars and give you ability to overlay one on top of another. This way you will be able to see all similar type of calendars in one view. For example, if you are going to book a room for the next department meeting you will be able to overlay all boardroom calendars in one view and clearly see the open spots for the meeting room you want.

These calendars could be SharePoint calendars or Exchange calendars. It is actually possible to overlay an Exchange calendar on top of a SharePoint calendar. In this blog I will try to explain how to how overlay multiple SharePoint calendars into one view.

Business Requirement: SouTech Inc would like to integrate Finance, HR, Marketing, Sales, and Support  calendars into one calendar and displays on the home page. 

Functional Specification: SouTech SharePoint home page will display calendars from Finance, HR, Marketing, Sales, and Support department's calendars into a single overlay display.


Let's get started.

1. This is our corporate calendar for SouTech Inc. At this moment there is only one event listed in the main calendar.

2. On this screen select, "Calendars Overlay" under the Calendars tab and then select "New Calendar"

3. Now give a name, description, to the calendar and chose the colour. In the web URL field enter the home page link for the Finance site. For example: http://xyz.sharepoint.com/soutech/finance/, then select the list and the list view for that particular calendar and click Ok. Repeat same actions for HR, Marketing, Sales, and Support department calendars.

4. And this is how it looks like with all the SharePoint calendars displayed in one view:

Enjoy!

SharePoint Content Roll-Up on Cloud - Breaking the Silos

SharePoint is a great platform of sharing the information and collaborating in between the business units. When t is not planned carefully or some basic functions are not in place information silos can occur. After a while you end up finding your organization's information isolated to each department and not sharing necessary information between the departments.

There are many ways of breaking the silos in the enterprise using SharePoint. One of the ways of breaking the silos are using the famous "Content Query" web part.  Content Query web part placed on any page but it can render the data from different sources as such, different sites, libraries, lists, and content types. You can also filter the information in many ways.

The Content Query web part is one of the most powerful web parts comes handy with out-of-the-box SharePoint. I will  try to demonstrate how easy it is to use Content Query web part to break the silos on the Cloud (Office365).

Scenario: Soutech have Team Collaboration site for each departments. Corporate communications department publishes announcements and documents that will be consumed by other departments.

Soutech Departments:

• Corporate Communications
• Operations
• Sales
• Finance
• Customer Support
• IT

Before we start make sure to enable SharePoint Server Publishing on both at the Site Collection and on the sub-sites. If you are wondering how to do it, just follow the link http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint-server-help/enable-publishing-features-HA010378243.aspx

First of all we need to create a site column for Soutech Departments. And add this column to Corporate communications Announcements. This is how it looks like after adding the site column to announcements list.
 

And then we need to enable "SharePoint Server Publishing " feature at the site collection level as well as at the each site level.

Now it is time to set our Content Query Web part for department sites. Let's do it for Corporate Communications first. We go to home page of Corporate Communications site and start editing the home page. Then select insert -> More web parts and then select the "Content Query" web part. Let's edit the web part.

Once we have done setting up the web part. Here is the result.  We can repeat same scenario into different departments and have them receive the announcements relative to their department.

I hope you'll enjoy the benefits of The Content Query web part while utilizing your Office365 on the Cloud.