From the course: Yammer 2018 Essential Training

Create a new group and add members

From the course: Yammer 2018 Essential Training

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Create a new group and add members

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- [Instructor] Charles, Jodean, and I are working on a new project and I'd like to create a group for our work, and we've agreed that I would do this. If we hadn't had that agreement, then I would go through the discovery process to make sure that neither of them had created the group first, or I could just ask them. But I want to show you how to create a new group and add members. There are two types of groups you can create. Internal groups, everybody within our organization. And your organization may also allow you to create external groups so that you can add people who work outside of your organization. This is a totally internal group that I'm going to create. Remember, also, that I can add an external participant to just a conversation or a thread within an internal group. The fact that I might want to ask someone their opinion later from the outside does not mean I need to create a group as an external group. This is going to be the 44 Parallel Phase 2. Note that the name is available; that's always checked. I can add people to my list. There's Charles, there's Jodean. And I have two choices, I can make this public or private. Before I make this choice, I want to tell you a little bit about the philosophy that underpins this entire Yammer experience. Yammer was intentionally created as a transparent way for people to work. One of the analogies that I've heard Yammer executives use is that a public group is like having a group that meets in a conference room with glass walls and an open door. Anyone walking by can view the conversation and anyone can walk in, and there's a real preference in business for those types of conversations, even a yearning for it, versus the private groups, because a Yammer group with private access is like a traditional conference room with the door closed. You can't tell who's in there, you can't see what they're discussing. Seven or eight years ago, Bryce Williams introduced a concept called working out loud. He described this as having work that is observable, but also taking the time to narrate your work, to be willing to talk about your work publicly, and to ask for help publicly, or talk about solutions that you've discovered in your learning, not just to brag, not to say, hey aren't we great? But because there is a utility to being aware of the work you're doing and making it public in a way that can be beneficial to other people in your enterprise. By working out loud, Williams said, we all work better, we all work smarter, because we're able to get and give information about our work and how to improve it. Yammer was built to support working out loud and that's the essence of public access in Yammer. We can be having conversations with each other about the work that we're doing, like just Charles and Jodean and I will have this conversation, edging towards collaborative ways that we might want to work on the second phase. And if Charles and Jodean and I are simply having a private conversation, then other people won't know to jump in and to offer to help. Other people who have ideas won't even know that we're talking about something that they may be an expert on. Yammer administrators are asked to cultivate the habit of questioning, is there some overwhelming benefit that we would get by making the access to this group private rather than public? If Charles, Jodean, and I believe there is, then we would create a private group. And, in that case, only members of our group would see our content, unless some group member, Charles, or Jodean, and I specifically share it with other folks. So you're not encouraged to give private access to groups, but, even if you do, then you're reminded to return to that question periodically, is there a benefit that we get by having this group remain private? To ask again every six weeks, every two months, does this group still need to be private? I'm going to create 45 Parallel Phase 2 as a public access group, and here it is.

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