Sean Wallbridge
Yammer has the powerful ability to “email to a Yammer group” whereby you can send an email from your email client to a specific address and have it post to a Yammer group.
For more information on how to accomplish this you can check out my post and video here: http://brainlitter.com/2014/11/08/how-to-move-an-existing-email-conversation-to-yammer/
This functionality bridges the world of Enterprise Social Media with those who still prefer to perform the majority of their work by email. One feature that a number of us here at itgroove have been searching for is the ability to “@ notify” or CC people when posting via email.
For example if we were working directly in Yammer we would go:
Hey @John Smith can you help me out with…
But if we were posting by email if we typed @John Smith it would appear as plain text and wouldn’t be recognized as a CC.
Last night while working on something else we figured out a trick to accomplish what I described above.
When composing the email the trick is to use what Yammer calls behind the scenes the user’s “short username”. For example on Yammer I’m Sean Wallbridge but my short username is swallbridge. To find out someone’s short username you can simply hover over a link to their name anywhere on Yammer. In the URL you will see the short username.
Therefore, in the body of my email message we would write:
Hey @swallbridge I got this email I thought you might find interesting…
When we send the email to the Yammer group it appears exactly as if I had “@ notified” the user directly in Yammer and they receive a notification as per their notification settings.
Please note: Something that tripped me up at first when testing is that you cannot CC yourself in a message that you are composing. Your name will get linked but you will not be CC’d and you will not be notified. Obviously Yammer assumes that if you mention yourself in a message you do not need to be alerted.
For added bonus points… consider using Quick Parts to store the short usernames of people you need to @ notify frequently (to avoid having to look them up constantly). More information on using Quick Parts in Outlook can be found here: http://smallbusiness.support.microsoft.com/en-us/gp/hacks-gettin-your-lazy-on