Yammer was acquired by Microsoft and is available stand-alone or can be integrated with Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
Prior to Yammer, Activity Feeds was provided for CRM as a way to follow records. Activity Feeds is still available. Integrating Yammer with CRM is optional but integration replaces Activity Feeds. An enterprise edition of Yammer is required for integration.
- For CRM Online, integration was possible after the Dec 2012 Service Update.
- For CRM On-premise, integration was possible with the 2013 release.
With CRM 2013 onwards, activity feeds is part of the installation and cannot be removed.
With Activity Feeds, Follow and Unfollow buttons appear on enabled entities. The Post tab appears on the Social pane on forms.
Individual entities can be disbabled for activity feeds and Yammer in Settings | Post Configurations. Settings applies to both activity feeds and Yammer.
After Integration with Yammer
If you configure integration with Yammer, activity feed posts remain in the CRM database but will not show in the user interface. Instead posts in Yammer are shown in CRM.
There are differences between Activity Feeds and Yammer posts.
- Cannot Like or reply to a System Post
- Documents and images can only be added in yammer.com not in the CRM user interface but the interface will show documents and images
- Activity Feeds provides a Both tab that shows user and system posts but after Yammer integration there is no both tab
- Can only mention other Yammer users (@), Activity Feeds allows you to mention other users or records
- No integration with Lync in Yammer
- Activity Feeds can only be seen by CRM users
- Yammer posts can be seen by Yammers users who might not be CRM users
- Yammer users are managed in Yammer not CRM