Feeling Pressure From Slack And Facebook, Yammer Now On By Default for Some Office 365 Users

A few years ago, Microsoft bought Yammer for $1.2 billion, and while the company has integrated the product into its Office Suite, there’s strong competition in this space. Namely, Slack has become popular with startups, and Facebook for Work is getting a lot of attention as well.

Starting today, Microsoft will be turning on Yammer by default for all eligible Office 365 commercial customers. If you are not familiar with the social tool, it’s designed to make it easier to collaborate internally with the flexible workspaces and integration into many different products.

For those of you that use Office 365 Groups, Yammer will hook into that feature sometime during the first half of 2016. Once completed, you will be able to turn your Yammer conversation into a Skype call, schedule a meeting using Outlook calendar, access your files in OneDrive, create tasks in Planner and more, all from your Yammer group.

Yammer will be rolled out in three waves in the following order:

• Wave 1 starts today and includes Office 365 customers with a business subscription who purchased fewer than 150 licenses that includes Yammer and who have zero or one custom domains for Yammer.
• Wave 2 starts on March 1, 2016 and includes Office 365 customers with a business subscription who purchased fewer than 5,000 licenses that includes Yammer. This does not include customers with an education subscription.
• Wave 3 starts on April 1, 2016 and includes all remaining customers with a business subscription and all customers with an education subscription.

It will be interesting to see if this aggressive move with Yammer can help it pick up momentum with large customers. With Slack growing at an exponential rate and Facebook having a solid brand-backing, Yammer is far from the only player in this segment.

You can read more about today’s announcement on the official Microsoft blog.