Yammer profiles are about to change. And for many, this is long overdue!

From late September, profile pages in Yammer will synchronise with your Office profile – which means that staff will no longer be able to have different personal information in Yammer and Office 365.

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. This has long been true in most of the Office 365 apps – but Yammer has always had a separate profile system.

Sometimes this has been desirable – savvy Yammer members were able to change their display names to include additional information (such as indicating that they were out of the office or travelling).

But more often than not, having different profiles led to confusion. The disconnect between Office 365 and Yammer profiles meant that Yammer often had outdated or inconsistent information. It also meant that staff could (unintentionally) contravene HR policies – like changing their job titles. The disconnect also occassionally led to technical problems, with official profile pictures showing up in Office 365, but completely missing in Yammer!

Moving forward Yammer profiles will automatically sync with Office 365 profiles to ensure parity.

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

After the change takes effect, Yammer members 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 soon 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, custom ‘about me’ information, or a link to a staff member’s Facebook page.

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 staff, 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.

And if your staff have created custom information in Yammer – let them know that this change will cause that data to dissappear.