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A new-look Yammer with some useful new features is rolling out now. CompanyNet’s subject matter expert James Mackerness takes a look at what’s new.

The long-awaited new user experience for Yammer is rolling out worldwide right now. It’s the same Yammer functionality you already know and love, but with a fresh coat of paint to bring it up to a modern standard.

New Yammer, new features

It brings a couple of changes that bring it into line with the ‘best practice’ role that Yammer should have in your organisation:

• It’s cleaner and slicker, with praise, announcements, polls, and Q&A posts all looking visually distinct.
• Posts can be pinned, and there’s also a new AI-based discovery feed which should help with engagement.
• Groups have been renamed to Communities, and are now pinnable by each user.

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As CompanyNet’s migration subject matter expert Stuart McLaughlin explains, there are now more options than ever for migrating your data to Office 365.

Leveraging Office 365 Cloud Storage

For companies who are adopting Microsoft Office 365, one of the typical activities is to migrate their ‘on premise’ data from local file stores to the cloud.

Office 365 provides a large volume of storage as part of the subscription.  This is currently 1TB (as a minimum) for SharePoint Online in addition to licensed user’s OneDrive allocation.

Reducing the cost of ownership by removing file share infrastructure or additional cloud storage subscriptions is a key benefit.  Other benefits can be realised however, whether improving collaboration and secure sharing with third parties, or using the security and compliance features for information management and oversight.

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You’ll soon have the option to easily continue sharing files when you move them within or between OneDrive and SharePoint.

Reorganise without worrying about previously shared links

Moving and reorganising files is a normal occurrence as we work and projects evolve over time, and we find better ways of organising our files.

Sharing files within Office 365 is helps prevent duplicates and different versions of the same file floating around. Until now, moving files would typically break the existing share links.

Soon you will have the option to easily re-share files with your colleagues by simply clicking a check-box when you move your files. They will receive the updated link with the same permissions they previously had.

This feature will be rolling out from mid-August 2020 and is expected to be completely rolled out by the end of September 2020.

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On 6 July 2020, Microsoft announced the retirement of SharePoint 2010 Workflows within Office 365. This is part of Microsoft’s drive towards encouraging use of Power Automate, part of the Microsoft Power Platform, which lets you connect Microsoft 365 services together (as well as many popular third-party services).

So what does this mean for people still using SharePoint 2010 workflows? Well, from 1 August 2020, no newly-created tenants will have SharePoint 2010 workflows switched on. So, if you had been planning to move any SharePoint 2010 workflows to a new tenant, as of now that won’t be possible.

Clock ticking on SharePoint 2010 workflows

For those who already have SharePoint 2010 workflows created within an existing tenant, you have until 1 November 2020 to recreate these workflows within Power Automate.

From the start of November, Microsoft will begin to remove the ability to run or create new SharePoint 2010 workflows. This suggests that, while you can’t run the existing workflows, they will still be accessible. Exactly for how long, though, we don’t know.

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With less than 12 months to go until Microsoft retires Skype for Business, we look at the options for migrating your users to the ‘new world’.

The clock is ticking. Microsoft will be ending Skype for Business support on 31st July 2021. To avoid this change impacting your day-to-day business, you must move all your users to Microsoft Teams by then.

Islands mode

With many organisations shifting to remote working in recent months, a great number have been forced to roll out Microsoft Teams to enable users to collaborate and communicate online. For those who were already using Skype for Business Online, enabling Teams didn’t impact the functionality of Skype. Instead, the two services continue to coexist in what’s called ‘islands mode’.

Islands is the default way for Teams and Skype to coexist, and lets users use both apps simultaneously. From Microsoft’s point of view, this is ideal, as Teams can be switched on without an organisation needing to prepare for an immediate cutover.

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