Tag: API

Yammer and SharePoint Online are becoming more and more integrated. Recently, with the Yammer Embed widget supporting SSO from Office 365 to Yammer, we are in a situation where we can perform actions against Yammer from SharePoint Online without requiring further authentication.

This opens up opportunities for utilising the Yammer SDK and Yammer REST API to build all kinds of Yammer interactions directly into your SharePoint pages. It also allows us to start implementing some of those anti-patterns that customers want but Yammer doesn’t want to support as they’re against ‘social freedom’. A prime example of this is forcing users into groups. In some scenarios it may be rather practical. I won’t discuss the pros and cons of this further but do consider that Microsoft would rather you coerce users socially to make their own decision to join the ‘correct’ groups rather than programmatically deciding for them.

Regardless of that, I’m going to provide an example which, upon page load, joins the current O365 user’s Yammer identity to a Yammer group based upon their SharePoint user profile.I’d like to point out that if Yammer Embed is present on the page and is enabled with Single Sign On, then the authentication piece can be hidden entirely from the user. I am currently unaware how to achieve SSO with Yammer from SharePoint Online without pigging-backing Yammer Embed, although I haven’t looked in earnest so I suspect it’s achievable without too much effort.

A few notes on the code:

• Add the first code snippet to a page with a Script Editor web part. It calls the initiation code and any configurations can be provided here, and modified when live
• The second code snippet contains all the logic. This can be included to the page in any manner you wish but you must ensure it has loaded prior to running the init function
• In order to use the Yammer SDK you must register a Yammer app on the target network and provide the client ID as the data-app-id attribute on the script element which includes it
• Each user must authorise the Yammer app, just once, before it can act in their behalf. I have implemented this as a status message, an example of which can be seen in the image below
   

  

• The code references ‘hut Id’ which is just a value stored in user’s profile and which is used to map a user to a Yammer group
• I use local storage to prevent the code executing more often than every 24 hours. This has been commented out for clarity, however I would recommend functionality such as this is re-implemented
• The experience of signing into Yammer from SharePoint is different if SharePoint is hosted on-premise or online. Only when online is the same identity used and can an SSO experience be achieved. In contrast, on-prem, the disconnect between O365 and Yammer credentials allows users to to provide credentials for any Yammer user in any Yammer network rather than being restricted to the associated identity

And finally, the code:

Finally, for completeness, here is a the settings object which I pass to Yammer Embed to achieve SSO with Yammer from SharePoint Online. I find that in practice anywhere I would want to run the above code I also have a feed of some sort that is appropriate to display. If this is not the case for you, hiding the feed with display:none will achieve the same result as long as the width of the Yammer Embed is equal to or greater than 400px. Note that this is *not* required, however without it the user may be prompted to provide their Yammer credentials.

Cheers, Paul.