Viva Engage Core Service Plan for Continuity and New Features

Along with their announcements that Yammer is becoming Viva Engage, Microsoft blogged about a new Viva Engage admin center (just what we need – another admin portals). The admin blog contained the news of new service plans that Microsoft has added to user account license assignments. For example, accounts with Office 365 E3 and E1 licenses now have the Viva Engage Core and Viva Learning Seeded service plans (Figure 1).

I don’t see any trace of the Viva Engage Core service plan in Office 365 E5 licenses. This might be because some accounts have Viva Suite licenses.

Good Intentions but Bad Outcome

Microsoft added the Viva Engage Core service plan to make sure that Viva users could continue to use Yammer services (like Q&A) after the switchover, saying “The service plans have been enabled for all users to provide a smooth and easily controlled feature roll out process.” The Viva Engage Code service plan will control new features and Microsoft wanted to put the service plan in place so that no one would miss out.

That’s a laudable intention, but they missed one very important point. Microsoft failed to disable the Viva Engage Core service plan for accounts where administrators had previously disabled the Yammer Enterprise service plan. Because the Viva Engage Core service plan enables Yammer services, the newly enabled license option means that people who previously couldn’t use Yammer can now do so.

Disabling the Viva Engage Core Service Plan

Most users won’t realize that they can go to yammer.com and launch Yammer with a URL like https://web.yammer.com/main/org/office365itpros.com. Anyway, if they did, they probably wouldn’t find much because the organization obviously doesn’t want to use Yammer. Considering those facts, you might think that little damage is done, but workers councils and unions might not take the same view.

Some PowerShell can fix the damage. Many organizations have a general-purpose script to remove service plans from Microsoft 365 licenses (here’s my version – make sure that you use the Graph-based script). In this case, I repurposed a script that I wrote to remove the Kaizala service plan from licenses, if only because it’s more recent work and includes logging of license updates.

To check user accounts for disabled service plans, we need to know what to look for. In this instance, the script must check accounts to see if the Yammer Enterprise service plan (7547a3fe-08ee-4ccb-b430-5077c5041653) is disabled and if so, disable the Viva Engage Core service plan (a82fbf69-b4d7-49f4-83a6-915b2cf354f4). The source for this information is Microsoft’s Azure AD license reference page.

The outline of the script is:

• Find licensed user accounts.
• For each account, check if it has an Office 365 license.
• If so, check if Yammer Enterprise is disabled.
• If so, disable Viva Engage Core.

You can download a copy of the full script from GitHub. I know the script will remove Viva Core Engage from Office 365 E3 licenses, but I don’t know how Microsoft assigned the service plan to other licenses. Because the code is PowerShell, it should be easy to amend to handle other license conditions.

Evolving License Management with PowerShell

PowerShell is a great way to automate license management operations if you don’t have something more sophisticated to help, like Azure AD group-based licensing. But remember that Microsoft will retire the license management cmdlets from the Azure AD and MSOL modules on March 31, 2023. Make sure that any PowerShell you write to work with user licenses uses Graph API requests or cmdlets from the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK.

P.S. Microsoft’s graphic to support the rebranding announcement in tweets and other social media was really quite clever. (Figure 1), even if it hid what must have been a bruising transition for some.

Learn how to exploit the data available to Microsoft 365 tenant administrators through the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook. We love figuring out how things work. We don’t like when Microsoft rebrands software products because it means that we’ve then got to update references in the book. There were 298 mentions of Yammer in the February 2023 update for the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook. March will see that number drop dramatically…

Collaboration Platform Looks for More Success Under as Viva Engage

In a predictable development, Microsoft decided to dump the Yammer name and rebrand the app as Viva Engage. The first hint of the change came in August 2022 when Microsoft renamed the Yammer Communities app for Teams as Viva Engage (Figure 1). The next came in November 2022 when Yammer introduced video and photo stories to its Storyline feature and revealed that the files used for stores ended up in the VivaEngage folder in user OneDrive for Business accounts. Not everyone is quite as nerdy as the Office 365 for IT Pros team is when it comes to tracking change, but there you have it.

Microsoft’s PR announcement says that “For over 10 years, Yammer has been the social fabric for Microsoft’s productivity cloud, bringing community and conversations into the apps that people work in daily.” That’s wishful thinking of the kind often engaged in by Microsoft marketing people attempting to make more of Yammer than it ever achieved.

More correctly, since the acquisition of Yammer in June 2012, Microsoft has tried on many occasions to make Yammer more than an also-run in the Microsoft 365 app stakes. After being told that Yammer would make email redundant, the Exchange community ignored the prediction. Exchange Online powers Microsoft 365 at an ever-increasing rate with usage that Yammer could only dream about. Teams came along in 2016 and ate the lunch Yammer wanted and is the social fabric for Microsoft’s productivity cloud. At least, 280 million Teams users can’t be wrong, can they?

Year of Yammer

Despite loudly proclaiming that (insert any year from 2012) would be the “Year of Yammer,” it’s only recently that Microsoft started to make some headway, helped in no small part by Microsoft’s determination to build Yammer into as many places in Teams as possible. Nice as it is to have Yammer power the Q&A app for Teams, true progress only really started when Microsoft decided to embrace Microsoft 365 groups and to bring Yammer networks into alignment with the rest of Microsoft 365 with networks configured in Microsoft 365 native mode.

Native mode networks date back to 2020, but it was only on September 1, 2022 that Microsoft bit the bullet to set a retirement date for older Yammer networks (MC424414). Upgrades are happening now and due to continue through October 2023. All the Yammer networks I access within Microsoft’s own infrastructure have still not transitioned, largely because they’re used by external people.

What Now for Yammer

Microsoft is now beginning a rebranding exercise to eliminate Yammer from the Microsoft 365 vernacular and replace it with Viva Engage. Yammer fans who engaged in “YamJams” and the like will have to find a new term to describe their meetups, but the basic technology will remain the same. Microsoft describes some new functionality in their blog, most of which is incremental and builds on existing capabilities (for example, Answers seems to be like the Teams Q&A app on steroids).

Customers won’t have to pay more to use the rebranded Viva Engage/Yammer.

Microsoft did make one odd reference when they talked about “the existing Communities app for Outlook.” I had no idea what this app was until MVP Kevin Crossman pointed out the Yammer logo in the OWA app rail. Basically it’s a way to have the Viva Engage app display in OWA. The app doesn’t feature in Outlook desktop and I have never used it in OWA. If your organization uses Yammer/Viva Engage, I can see how that capability would be both interesting and beneficial. For most Outlook users, discovering Viva Engage in their app rail will be a “mah” moment of the kind when Microsoft introduced the ability to respond to email with an emoji.

A New Chance to Make a Difference

I always thought that Yammer was a missed opportunity for Microsoft. Had they dumped the Yammer database soon after the acquisition and replaced it with the Exchange (ESE) or SQL databases, the task of aligning Yammer more closely with the rest of Microsoft 365 and picking up features like compliance, retention, data loss prevention, and so on would have been much easier.

Maybe Microsoft would never have developed Teams if Yammer had been a fully-functional part of Microsoft 365. But it never was and Yammer became a sideshow. It’s been an important app for some customers but you’d wonder about its long term future as a supplier of software components to Teams and Viva. The Yammer superpowers (note to self, no software has superpowers) proclaimed by Microsoft marketing have waned. Perhaps the change and refocus will make Yammer more valuable. We’ll know after another decade.

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