Microsoft Corp. announced Tuesday that it was retiring the Yammer Enterprise plan and integrating its features into Office 365 instead.

The move comes some four years after Microsoft acquired Yammer for $1.2 billion. Microsoft will retire the standalone Yammer Enterprise plan on January 1, 2017, for all volume licensing and direct channels. July 1, 2017, will be the date of the retirement of the plan sold via partner channels, such as syndication and cloud solution providers. The six-month gap is due to Microsoft’s requirement to adhere to its syndication terms and conditions.

Yammer itself is not going away. The service is being integrated and is allowing functions such as making a Word, Excel, and PowerPoint document using Office Online within Yammer itself. According to Microsoft, additional integration will allow team members to be able to select existing files from OneDrive and SharePoint and share them within Yammer, along with Yammer teams now obtaining their own SharePoint sites which is said to enable them to build wikis and blogs.

OneNote Integration

The new integrated Yammer is also combining with Microsoft’s increasingly popular collaboration tool OneNote, to allow team members to “help ideas take shape” but also let them to take down notes, keep meeting minutes and “brainstorm the next big thing.”

In addition, the integration with Office 365 Groups allows Yammer content to be shared by email, or vice versa, with emails being now being able to be sent to a Yammer group. And with Yammer now connected to Office 365 Groups, all properties, including name, description, profile picture, membership and public/private setting, are now available in both Yammer and Azure AD.

The first customers to receive the integrated experience will be those who enforce an Office 365 identity when they form new groups in Yammer. Subsequent phasing in of full integration for enterprise customers is said by Microsoft to follow “later this year” with eventually all customers automatically migrating.

“Since Yammer was turned on for all eligible Office 365 customers earlier this year, we have seen huge growth in usage,” Microsoft noted. “The vast majority of Yammer customers now use it as part of an Office 365 subscription. With Office 365 applications such as SharePoint and OneNote becoming an integral part of the Yammer experience, users will need an Office 365 subscription that includes these services.”

Yammer will continue to be available through Office 365 plans.

Image credit: Microsoft