NEIL PARKHURST

MB2-713 Certification (Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016 Sales), in this post I’ll cover the revision I’ve completed regarding Yammer integration.

Yammer is one element of a set of features supporting team collaboration in CRM. I’ve already covered SharePoint, OneNote and Skype. One advantage of Yammer is that posts and notifications from CRM users may get a wider audience, assuming users outside of the CRM “community” have access to the Yammer group connected to CRM.

Yammer Overview

Yammer is an enterprise social networking tool that revolving around the concepts of making posts, receiving messages etc.

Posts can “simply” be made public to the entire company or selected individuals can be made aware of a particular post. Also you can attach documents to posts.

Posts can be companywide or groups can be used to create topic areas that interested people might join. For example: You might create a “CRM Users” group in Yammer.

Yammer can also be used for polls, praise individuals and make company announcements.

Users also have the ability to like posts, follow threads, be notified of updates etc.

Yammer and CRM

All of this is great but what does it mean in the context of CRM? Well, first of all Yammer will replace social feeds on dashboards in CRM. And we can interact with Yammer directly from the dashboard. New posts created on a dashboard will be at a high level and not specific to any CRM record.

Note:
Should you wish to include the social web resource in other dashboards this can be done by selecting the msdyn/personalWall.htm web resource.

Also from the social pane within an entity posts can be made in context of that record. These will in turn also show on the social feeds in dashboards.

Configure Yammer

NOTE:
When Yammer is enabled the out of box CRM activity feed is replaced by Yammer. And there is no way to revert back! It is therefore essential to understand the implications of using Yammer before enabling the feature.

Yammer integration with CRM requires a Yammer Enterprise license, this may be available as part of your Office 365 subscription.

Yammer is only available in English, multiple languages are not currently supported.

The first step in configuring Yammer / CRM integration will be to ensure you have and can connect to a Yammer Enterprise instance. Next under settings / administration in CRM you will find the Yammer configuration option.

Here you authorise Microsoft Dynamics CRM to connect to Yammer, optionally select a specific Yammer group and set the required level of security.

I hope that in this post I have touched on all the main Yammer related areas you should revised for the MB2-713 exam. As always I encourage you to also get some hands-on time with the product. J