A look at the new simplified Yammer login with Office 365
Posted
Thursday, February 27, 2014 11:26 PM
by
CoreyRoth
The path to SSO between Office 365 and Yammer is well underway with the new simplified login feature in Office 365. Merging two separate identity systems is no easy task, but Microsoft is one step closer with this new level of integration. What does this mean exactly? It means when you are on an Office 365 site, and you click the Yammer link at the top, you will be logged directly into Yammer without being prompted for credentials.
In this example, I logged in as my test user Garth Fort, clicked the Yammer link and after a series of redirects through Yammer.aspx on the My Sites host and a number of others, it logged me into Yammer with this same user account. This is even with me never having logged into Yammer before with this user.
That's pretty awesome. To an end user, that might seem insignificant because you just expect something like that to just work. However, there had to be a ton of work behind the scenes to make that happen. Now, as Christophe (@cfiessinger) mentions should I go directly to Yammer in a fresh browser, it's going to require a login. If I go to my Office 365 site after logging into Yammer, that will require authentication as well. However, this is a significant step in the right direction.
I'll also add after I re-enabled Yammer, that I had to log out and close my browser once before any of the integration started to work.
This got me to wondering though, what happens if I use a brand new account that hasn't logged into Office 365 or Yammer before? I created a new account in the Office 365 portal and assigned a user license to give it a try. When you click on the Yammer link, it does, what we would expect, it prompts you to create a new account in Yammer.
I filled in the information, but I purposely chose a different password than what my Office 365 user account had. I then closed the browser and started a new In-Private session. When I tried the Yammer link again, it in-fact logged me straight into Yammer despite my Office 365 and Yammer account having different passwords.
Again, to an end user this seems obvious, but a lot has to happen in the background to make this happen. As a reminder, you can only get this functionality right now if you disable and re-enable Yammer in your Office 365 environment. If you are going to SharePoint Conference (#SPC14), I expect you can learn more about this functionality.