The way that Yammer profiles work is changing. And for some its long overdue. From late September user profiles in Yammer synchronise with your Office profile, and you won’t be able to edit it in Yammer.

What does this mean?

After September’s update, Office 365 profiles will become the single source of truth for contact information, about me bios and profile pictures across all applications including Yammer.

Previously there has been a disconnect with Office 365 and Yammer profiles that have allowed users to modify certain aspects of their Yammer profile. This has caused issues with outdated information and inconstancies with users’ names and profile pictures. Moving forward Yammer profiles will automatically sync with Office 365 profiles to ensure parity.

*If a Yammer user does not have a corresponding Office 365 identity, they will not be affected by this feature.

Thereafter users who wish to change project, education and skills information will have to navigate to their Office 365 profile. Get there by selecting the profile picture in the top right and corner after signing into office.com and then update profile (see below). Depending on your settings users may have to contact their IT administrator to update their name, job title and profile picture.

How to access your Office 365 profile

How will this affect your users?

Office 365 user profiles will now essentially override Yammer profiles. When this happens anything that has been added to the Yammer profile will be lost and any non-AAD profile properties (profile fields that are only found on the Yammer profile) will disappear, for example, the Facebook profile field.

Next steps

There are a few steps that you may want to take to ensure minimal disruption when this update comes into play:

• Update training content, materials and onboarding processes

It’s handy to get in quick and update any reference materials so that users can self-serve any issues and add Office 365 profile population to the onboarding process.

• Let your users know

Communicate the change to your users, explain that their Office 365 profile is now the single source of truth and let them know how to edit it. This is important as it may affect keyword searches and results on Yammer.