Microsoft Unveils Office 365 Network Online Community

Since its re-branding in 2011, Office 365 has experienced significant success and growth; becoming the latest in Microsoft’s portfolio of billion-dollar businesses. Office 365 includes a range of software products and services such as SharePoint, Office productivity suite, Exchange for email and communication technologies such as Skype for Business. Users can sign up now by heading to network.office.com. Microsoft will maintain its Office 365 group on Yammer for non-disclosure agreement based content. New users who sign up to join the Office 365 group on Yammer, will be redirected to the new Office 365 Network. Microsoft has been receiving a lot of pressure from startups in this market — slack for example. It’s interesting that rather than fix Yammer, the software giant is moving the network for one of its core products off the platform. The new experience provides the ability for community members to:

Personalize your home page so it displays community discussions and other content related to topics you select.Earn badges based on your activity in the community, which will be displayed on your profile page along with a summary of your activity—including latest posts, likes given and received, people you follow and community notifications.Search community content to uncover discussions, ideas and other information from across the Office 365 Network.View conversations as threaded conversations and hold private conversations with others using your community inbox.

Source Last month Microsoft announced the acquisition of LinkedIn; another professional network the company sees as an opportunity to integrate with Office 365. Time will tell if it will work to integrate the ecosystem into Yammer or if this is the first sign that Microsoft is rethinking the future of Yammer. Comment

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