Written by Sarah Fisher, User Experience and Digital Content Office: 

Microsoft Yammer is coming soon 

Yammer, a Microsoft 365 communications tool, is being piloted at the University, ahead of its full launch in spring 2021. If you’ve had emails about Yammer but aren’t part of the pilot group, please ignore them: you don’t need to take any action. 

About Yammer 

Yammer is a workplace based social network, similar to Facebook, where friends are colleagues. You’ll see workplace reminders instead of advertisements, and updates are linked to University news, events, and questions or thoughts shared by colleagues.  

It will offer us an informal open staff communications channel, where you’ll be able to: 

• Interact with University news by liking and commenting on posts 
• Follow other members of staff 
• Create or join community groups: these can anything from sports and leisure interest groups such as ‘walking group’ or ‘book-club community’, to groups based on work-related topics and themes. Groups can be open for anyone to join, or private, where requests to join need to be approved 

Yammer is part of Microsoft 365. Where Microsoft Teams lets us set up formal collaborative online workspaces with access restricted to members only, Yammer will be open to everyone, and is envisaged to be a more informal communications tool. 

More about the pilot 

A community of early adopters are piloting Yammer to help us discover its benefits and limitations. Staff from across the University who are participating in the pilot:  

• Researchers working towards our Signature Research Themes 
• Staff in Divisions 
• The central communications team 

• E–learning staff 
• Information Services staff 
• Staff from professional services departments 

We are encouraging each of the divisions and professional service departments in the pilot to consider creating their own groups. 

What’s next 

Following the pilot, we plan to make Yammer available to all University staff; this will be early in 2021. If you want to find out more about Yammer please take a look at Microsoft Yammer for staff. 

If you’re still getting emails from Yammer, you can unsubscribe, or ignore them until the new year when you will have access to the platform.  

If you have any questions, please get in touch. 

Best wishes, 

Information Services 
University of Kent 
helpdesk@kent.ac.uk
01227 82 4888