SharePoint Thoughts

Yammer is an awesome tool to have company-wide communications. With open communities that people can join and interact with each other without having to work with each other on a daily basis. It’s a perfect network where people can reach out together, interact with the upper management, and share thoughts across the whole organization.

The bad thing about Yammer however, is by default it would allow everyone in the company to create Groups (newly named as Communities), and there’s no way by default for a Yammer admin to restrict the creation of these communities to be just for a subset of people. So how can we do it?

Knowing that the creation of Microsoft 365 groups creation can be restricted, so why not making Yammer follow the same policies as Microsoft 365?

Let’s have one step back and see the restriction on creating new Microsoft 365 groups. To restrict the creation of new groups in M365, you’d have follow steps mentioned in this article:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/admin/create-groups/manage-creation-of-groups?view=o365-worldwide

Basically, you’ll need to creation a group in Azure AD, and use Azure AD PowerShell module to restrict the creation of new groups to only this security group as the article describes:

$GroupName = "[AddSecurityGroupNameHere]"
$AllowGroupCreation = "False"

Connect-AzureAD

$settingsObjectID = (Get-AzureADDirectorySetting | Where-object -Property Displayname -Value "Group.Unified" -EQ).id

if(!$settingsObjectID)
{
$template = Get-AzureADDirectorySettingTemplate | Where-object {$_.displayname -eq "group.unified"}
$settingsCopy = $template.CreateDirectorySetting()
New-AzureADDirectorySetting -DirectorySetting $settingsCopy
$settingsObjectID = (Get-AzureADDirectorySetting | Where-object -Property Displayname -Value "Group.Unified" -EQ).id
}

$settingsCopy = Get-AzureADDirectorySetting -Id $settingsObjectID
$settingsCopy["EnableGroupCreation"] = $AllowGroupCreation


if($GroupName){
$settingsCopy["GroupCreationAllowedGroupId"] = (Get-AzureADGroup -Filter "DisplayName eq '$GroupName'").objectId
}

else {
$settingsCopy["GroupCreationAllowedGroupId"] = $GroupName}
Set-AzureADDirectorySetting -Id $settingsObjectID -DirectorySetting $settingsCopy
}

This is exactly the same code mentioned in the article, just make sure to have the correct group name you created in M365 that contains people who are allowed to create groups (Make sure to add the required people as members, adding them as owners only won’t grant them permissions to create M365 groups)

Now that we managed to have a security group whose members are allowed to create M365 groups. We’ll need to let Yammer follow same rules as M365. For that, we’ll have to put Yammer in Native Mode for M365. So what’s the native mode for M365 in Yammer?

The native mode is a way for Yammer to follow same rules of M365, so the documents will be stored in SharePoint online. The creation of a new Yammer community (group) will result in the creation of a new M365 group, you can search for Yammer content in the M365 security and compliance center.

So how do we put Yammer in native mode for M365? First we’ll need to enforce O365 identity in Yammer, which basically tells Yammer to let users login with their O365 accounts (which makes sense since you’d want them to login to Yammer that way). You do this step by going to Yammer admin page, and on the left menu under “Content and Security” click on “Security Settings”. Make sure to have “Enforce Office 365 identity”:

Now after enforcing O365 identity, we’ll finally tell Yammer to follow same rules as M365, but putting it in native mode for M365, to do so go to “M365 Native Mode” from the left menu in the Yammer admin page. You’d have to generate the Alignment Report. This report will show any warnings in case some users won’t be able to exist in the network if it’s migrated to the new mode, or if some old groups are available that aren’t already connected to O365 groups.

Old groups will have O365 groups provisioned and connected to them. If you have any naming convention policies for M365 groups, they won’t be applied in this case for these existing Yammer groups.

After running the alignment report, you can download it, I opened it in vscode like this:

and the page will be updated to show you the results of the analysis:

At the very end of the page, you confirm that you want to proceed with the conversion, the reason for that is that this change won’t be rolled back, once you go Native Mode, that’s it.

Now users who aren’t allowed to add a community (group), won’t see this option in Yammer: