Yammer Roles & Permissions Drill Down

I’ve been privileged to work with a couple of very large freemium yammer networks and the taking it to the next level of making those successful enterprise paid networks.  One of the biggest tasks in the project is working through the rights, roles and permissions.  Getting governance, policies, and rights including the business buy in with skin in the game is so critical to successful deployment and adoption.  The roles in yammer often are NOT Core IT based roles as marketing, sales, and other lines of business step up in cloud service management and line of business IT take on these roles.  The critical nature of getting the right people in the right roles can mean success or failure.  It can also dictate the culture of what’s ok on the network as often those with these rights are key in establishing rules, and groundwork for what comes later. Who should take on these community manager roles, and define the business roles such as yambassadors and what permissions they should have.  What rights should help desk have in yammer if anything?  I’ve put together some charts to bring all of these more granular rights into a single chart.   I’ve tried to use the same language that yammer uses such as Network Admin, and Verified Admin.  Let me also be clear not all networks are set up with the same configuration, but the abilities are consistent at the network administrator and verified administrator level. I’ve tried to work off of common settings and default.

 

Any network admin can configure or change the default email subscription settings.  They can also add other admins.  If this is an external network, the network admin can list it in the public directory of external networks.

Administrative Roles

Group Admin – The person who created the group but can also be assigned or reassigned. When a group admin leaves a network as the only admin, it will encourage someone else to take on the role.  Group admins can delete items!

Network Admin (Also called Admin) – These are the most common and this is the most common role for managing the network.  If a message needs to be removed in the main feed you must have at least this role.

Network Admins can choose which profile attributes are available.  They can only choose from those which are already provided by Yammer.  In the external network, for example, we don’t want to have personal information, like kids’ names and people’s birthdays.

 

Profile Choices

Verified Admin – This role is designed for the highest configuration.  You should be VERY careful who gets this right, as they have god rights.  A Verified Admin is the highest level of administrative control that can be assigned to a user.  Both this role and the network admin role require a paid network. They can access all groups in the network.  They can also delete any message and manage the integration configuration.

The normal network Admins will receive a notification if they do not have the correct permissions to perform an action:

Yammer Roles and Rights

I’ve assembled a list of scenarios by role.  The x denotes that they have the ability.  There are a few that may depend on the configuration of the network.

Group Admin

File and Image Attachments:   Any number of files and/or images can be attached to any message or reply, with each file size limited to 5GB. By default, file attachments are enabled. Unchecking this setting disables this feature; however, existing attachments will not be affected.

Screenshot from SPYam, a Yammer community designed for the SharePoint Community http://yammer.com/spyam request an invite!

Yammer admins can customize branding, enable and disable features, integrate Yammer with other enterprise applications, manage users, monitor activity, export data, and more.

Newly appointed admins are designated Network Admins, and have restricted rights. To assign full administrative rights, click “Grant Verified Admin” after you’ve added them as admin.  It’s a two-step process to grant someone verified admin and requires you be a verified admin to do so.

Verified Admins can also grant Verified Admin privileges to others, and can grant or revoke these privileges at any time. Please note that you cannot remove yourself as an admin.  It requires another admin to do so.   You should be aware that admins can remove an external network.  So, you really do have to be careful to whom you give any network admin rights.

 

I put together this sample RACI chart that may also be helpful in planning your Yammer roles and responsibilities as you dig into your deployment.  You’ll note that I don’t dig into who should be the netowrk and verified admin as that will vary widely from company to company. That deserves it’s own post.

 

RACI Chart of Common Yammer Roles

 

 

Yes, some of the data in this post has previously been shared on the ViewDo blog, but I’ve added additional insights here.

 

Here are a few additional Yammer resources:

Yammer Network Roles & Responsibilities

Yammer Enterprise RACI chart –  a chart I put together (Slideshare.net applicable for most ESNs)

Integrate Yammer with SharePoint 2013

 

I hope to see more social sharing of experience from other bloggers… It surprises me a little there is few resources outside of what yammer has built.