News
Windows, Mac PCs To Get New Yammer Desktop Apps
- By Kurt Mackie
- February 15, 2017
Microsoft plans to roll out new Yammer desktop applications for Windows and Mac PCs "in the next few months," the company said on Tuesday.
Currently, a Yammer Desktop Notifier application is available for Windows (but not for Mac). However, the new Mac and Windows Yammer apps to come will be "more full featured," the announcement stated, although the details weren't described.
On top of the coming desktop apps, Microsoft currently offers Yammer Mobile Apps. They're available for use on Android, iOS and Windows operating systems.
There once was a Yammer extension for the Google Chrome browser that was introduced in 2013, but it seems to have disappeared from the Google Play store. Microsoft's announcement stated that the new Yammer desktop apps for Mac and Windows "will have all the features people know and love about the Yammer browser experience and additional OS notifications to keep you updated on your groups' Yammer activity."
The current Yammer Desktop Notifier app for Windows gets installed on desktops and shows up as an icon in the Windows system tray. It's designed to alert users who may not visit a Yammer portal that new social media messages have been posted.
In my own experience, the Yammer Desktop Notifier app worked for just a short time with the Yammer Basic service. After a few months, the Desktop Notifier app completely disappeared from my system tray, even though it is still set to load on system bootup.
Microsoft once had a Yammer App for SharePoint 2013, but it hit its end-of-life phase in 2015. Microsoft pointed SharePoint users to use "Yammer Embed" instead, which has browser support with Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari. Yammer Embed is described as JavaScript code that gets added to SharePoint WebParts to establish a Yammer feed.
In other news, Microsoft announced earlier this month that there's a new preview of a WebPart for embedding Power BI reports on SharePoint Online sites. Users need to have access both to the SharePoint and Power BI accounts to view the reports. However, the WebPart has single sign-on access capability, so users don't need to be logged into both applications to access the reports. Users will need a Power BI Pro license to get access, though.
About the Author
Kurt Mackie is senior news producer for 1105 Media's Converge360 group.