You can read more about the Communities app in the Teams store in this article.
At ClearPeople we always keep looking for ways to improve adoption and governance of the digital workspace, so in this context we are going to explain in this article how to push this new Yammer Communities app (or any other Teams app) to your users’ main navigation bar in Teams to help push real adoption and usage of the key tools you need in every employee’s digital workspace.
First you need to be a Teams Admin in your tenant to be able to perform the following actions:
- Access to https://admin.teams.microsoft.com The administration site for your Microsoft Teams tenant
- Here you need to expand the “Teams apps” main navigation item and access “Setup policies”
Here I recommend you create at the very least a custom policy to test the setup before pushing to all users in your organisation (you can also edit one of the existing ones for immediate push to the users affected by that policy).
Once you have edited the policy you have to click on “+ Add” and search for the app “Communities” and confirm the addition and finally “Save” the change to the policy (or the creation) at the bottom of the page.
You are all set! Keep in mind this type of change takes a while to be applied to everyone and usually requires the Desktop app to be restarted so you may expect a change done today to impact your users generally tomorrow so Friday last thing or right before bank holidays are usually good times to apply these changes if you want a global launch to happen for everyone more or less at the same time.
The final result for the above setup should something like this:
Note: There are two other options you can set up as of today in a Teams app policy depending on if you want your users affected by this policy to be able to upload their own apps and/or re-order/pin apps in their main teams navigation (e.g. you may want to ensure adoption of a specific app for a period of time for a group of users and disable re-ordering/pinning apps for a period of time to enforce the presence of the app targeted).
Tip about the new Yammer experience on mobile: I’ve mentioned above this applies for desktop users. That’s because the Communities app doesn’t work just yet on mobile inside Teams, something that for sure is on the roadmap. In the meanwhile, both Android and iOS Yammer apps have been updated with the latest version of the Yammer experience and can be used as standalone apps on mobile.
