News

New Yammer Role and Experience Insights Dashboard Available at Preview for Microsoft 365 Users

• By Kurt Mackie
• 08/10/2022

Microsoft this week announced a couple of perks at the preview stage for IT pros overseeing Microsoft 365 apps in organizations.

One of those perks is a preview of a new Yammer Administrator role based on Azure Active Directory, as described in this announcement. Microsoft also this week announced a limited preview of Experience Insights, which provides chart-like views on the use of Microsoft 365 apps in organizations.

Microsoft 365 Experience Insights Preview
The Experience Insights preview shows Microsoft 365 apps use information in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center portal, typically in chart form.

The kind of information shown by Experience Insights includes product feedback comments written by end users. Also, the occasions when users sought Help articles for using Microsoft 365 applications are shown. Experience Insights also shows Net Promoter Score (NPS) rankings for Microsoft 365 apps, which characterizes end users as being "promoters," "passives or "detractors" regarding apps.

Microsoft actually sends a survey to some Microsoft 365 users requesting the information that's used for the NPS rankings, according to Microsoft's "Overview" document on Experience Insights.

"By default, Microsoft sends the survey to 5% of your users and asks 'Would you recommend this product?'," the document explained, with regard to the NPS rankings.

Microsoft doesn't disclose "user-level data" with Experience Insights. It just shows data "aggregated at the tenant level only." Microsoft also limits the viewing of Experience Insights data to IT pros that have either Global Admin, Global Reader or Reports Reader roles.

The Microsoft 365 use information surfaced by Experience Insights might seem to be more valuable to Microsoft as a software developer than to IT departments. Microsoft's rationale for making the information available to organizations is to help them see where end users may need support.

"Seeing this information all together helps administrators determine whether they need to take specific actions, such as providing users with updated recommendations and support resources as workspaces and operations evolve over time," the announcement explained.

The Experience Insights preview is currently just for organizations with "higher volumes of data" and having "over 20,000 seats," the announcement suggested. Moreover, organizations must be receiving Microsoft 365 updates under the "Targeted Release" channel to use this preview.

Microsoft did indicate, though, that "we are working on bringing the experience to smaller organizations in the future."

Microsoft expects to release Experience Insights at the "general availability" commercial-release stage sometime in October, according to this Microsoft 365 Roadmap entry.

New Yammer Admin Role Preview
Microsoft is previewing a new Yammer Administrator role tied to Azure Active Directory. It's specifically set up by someone having Global Administrator or a Privileged Role Administrator privileges.

The new Azure AD-based role is just called "Yammer Administrator." It gives IT pros access to all of the tasks that can be performed by IT pros with the Yammer Verified Admin role, which includes "configuring security settings, monitoring keywords for appropriate use, managing data retention and exporting data," according to Microsoft's document on managing Yammer admin roles.

Specifically, users with the new Yammer Administrator role can carry out the following tasks, per the announcement:

1. Change a community from public to private, or private to public
2. Delete a community
3. Modify owners and members of a community without being an admin of the group/community

The distinction between the new Yammer Administrator role and the Yammer Verified Admin role seems to be that the former works in Azure AD while the latter works in Yammer. Microsoft's announcement also included an illustration suggesting that the new Yammer Administrator role will "reduce dependencies on Global Admin and Group Admin" and "integrate with Privileged Identity Management."