M365 Changelog: Yammer: Essential Announcements
MC248004 – Updated May 25, 2021: Microsoft has updated the rollout timeline below. Thank you for your patience.
Having received customer feedback about not knowing how many members actually receive Yammer community announcements, Microsoft is excited that this new Essential Announcements feature will allow Yammer community admins to achieve a guaranteed distribution of important community announcements via email for all community members. This will rollout to Yammer web and desktop.
This message is associated with Microsoft 365 Roadmap ID 70741.
When this will happen
Microsoft will begin rolling this out in April and expect to complete rollout by late June (previously late May).
How this will affect your organization
This uncertainty is because when a user turns off email notifications from Yammer, announcement notifications are automatically turned off as well. This release will enable Yammer community members to receive email notifications for Announcements, even if they have email notifications from Yammer turned off. This is default off, and must be enabled by community admins for each announcement they consider important and essential for all community members.
What you need to do to prepare
You might want to notify your users about this new capability and update your training and documentation as appropriate.