Forcefully guiding staff to use Yammer for internal conversations

Recently when meeting with a client we were talking about how to further drive adoption of Yammer. While organisations we work with have a strong uptake of the service due to our change management and adoption program sometimes it still may be required to forcefully guide the laggards the last step of the way. In some cases organisations are looking to have “no email days” to enforce either the use of social tools such as Yammer, communication tools such as Skype for Business, or simply to get them off their seats and walk to the person they want to talk to.

The question that the client asked me was if it was possible to prevent internal emails, while still allowing emails to/from external recipients such as clients and suppliers. The simple answer is: yes!

Using Exchange transport rules you can simply block emails between internal senders and recipients, and use a rejection reason to explain why. J

You can also use this based on dates & times so it’s not necessarily a blanket rule that you might forget to turn off:

What the sender sees in the form of a bounce back message (aka Non-Delivery Report (NDR)) is this:

This method should really be considered a last resort, but it’s one that’s at your disposal!