The social network for businesses, Yammer now allows its users to invite people from other networks into groups. The external groups feature will complement the external networks and messaging components, by making work between different companies more streamlined.
However, users from other corporations can only be added to a new group, with the appropriate permissions of the group administrators. Other protective measures are in place, such as Exchange Transport Rules, which ensure that secure information is not disclosed, and obvious alerts when an external member enters the group. Extra updates to the data export system also authorize administrators to monitor exactly what information and messages other users can access.
If your company has switched external messaging off, then the external groups feature will remain unavailable until external messaging is allowed. If you do not wish to enable external groups, you can control your users by applying the necessary Exchange Transport Rules.
On the other hand, if you want to implement exceptions to these rules, you may block users from introducing external members, permit your colleagues to be accepted to the groups of other companies only, or completely firewall your company’s network altogether.
While this feature will not combine with Office 365 Groups Service, Yammer said they intend to set up integration between the two in the second half of 2016. In addition, people can only be added to an external group if they are part of a home Yammer network, and not if they use domains like Gmail.com or Outlook.com. Yammer said this restriction is something they wish to remove in the future.
You can join Yammer here to use the external groups feature. More information on how to set up and control this feature can be found here.
Source: Office Blogs