2013-10-30

SharePoint Search and Yammer

While I was writing my previous post about the Post feature between SharePoint and Yammer, I stumbled upon another cool new feature! Apparently, the search results are connected with Yammer:

I hadn’t read about this new feature at all so I thought, let’s click on Search on Yammer:
My default Yammer network opened and a search for the words SharePoint and Contracts was executed. The Yammer search results also have refiners available, these are the four tabs you probably noticed: Conversations, People, Files and Topics. Let’s take a closer look at the refiners.

Conversations

I can easily follow the conversation of a particular SharePoint contract by clicking on View full conversations:
I can start a discussion, open the contract or click on one of the topics. Clicking on a topic starts a new search for discussions and documents related to the selected topic. 

People

All the users related to the two keywords are displayed. In this case only myself because of my job title SharePoint Consultant. This is a great refiner to find colleagues with a certain expertise or knowledge related to your search scope. Just click on the users name to open his or her Yammer profile:
Nice!
 

Files

All the files (documents) are shown with the two keywords, in my examples this is only contract. Be aware that only documents uploaded to Yammer are shown here! Not the documents you post from SharePoint to Yammer to start a discussion. I can download the document or go to the documents profile page:
I really like this profile page. You can easily browse through the document and there is even an option to leave comments in the document:
Awesome right? At least I think so! You can view the followers of the document (to connect and collaborate) or add related content. 
 

Topics

 
The final tab shows the related Yammer topics with the search results keywords. In my case the only topic available is SharePoint:
Another very nicely organized Yammer menu is presented. All the related topic conversations, files, notes, images, videos and links are available. Yammer is really a well made Enterprise Social Collaboration tool with many useful business features! This promises a bright future for the integration between SharePoint Online and Yammer. 

Integration with SharePoint

I do have one critical comment about this new integration. Yammer only shows documents uploaded to Yammer. It would be really nice to also see documents posted to Yammer from SharePoint so you can view the discussion about the document.

About the author 

Jasper Oosterveld

My name is Jasper Oosterveld and I live in Amsterdam with my wife Katie, our daughter Flora and our dog Millie. I have been working with SharePoint since 2007 as a SharePoint Consultant. In my role as SharePoint Consultant I support customers with the process of implementing SharePoint. Collaborating in the SharePoint and Office 365 community is a passion of mine. I speak regularly at SharePoint and Office 365 community events such as DIWUG, Office 365 User Group, SharePoint and Office 365 Saturday, SharePoint Connections and the European SharePoint Conference.