Living through a Yammer Network Merge

As my former company Paradyne progressed through its acquisition by ████████████ one of the last things to move across was Yammer. The main reason this took so long was challenges in liberating the paradyne.com.au domain from our tenant (separate blog post to come on those challenges).

At Paradyne we used Yammer heavily and as such were quite concerned having never done a network merge before. We’d completed plenty of Yammer tenant to tenant moves (as in disconnecting Yammer from one tenant and re-connecting it to a new tenant with the same vanity domain name) but this was new territory for us.

The key document to work through is this one “Network migrations: Consolidate multiple Yammer Networks“. One of the big challenges for us before we pressed the big red button of the Yammer network merge was getting consistent answers out of Yammer support and product managers, as we found there were slight inconsistencies as well as with the documented process on the support page.

In many cases when merging Yammer networks, you might still be keeping users on the @companyA.com domain, however in our case all of our UPNs were changing from @paradyne.com.au to be @████████████.com.au. Our concerns were more so around external network membership and remaining connected to our identities.

So without boring you with all the details and frustrations we went through, here is the reality of moving a Yammer network from one Office 365 tenant to another Office 365 tenant that already has a Yammer network:

• The most important thing to note is that you CANNOT migrate content. Only identities and external networks (both ones you created as well as those you are members of) will come across.
  • This means you need to choose which Yammer network will retain its content, CompanyA’s or CompanyB’s network.
  • If you want to “migrate” content, you can run a content export from the CompanyA however there is no tool/method/API to import it into CompanyB’s network.
• The domain used in the Yammer network (eg. CompanyA.com) from CompanyA’s tenant must be removed from their tenant and added to CompanyB’s tenant before you can do the merge.
• You can perform the network merge yourself through the Yammer network admin UI, however don’t be surprised if the domain you’re bringing in doesn’t appear – just move on and create a Service Request.
• If you are changing user UPNs in the process, then you must use the bulk update process to change existing user UPNs from user@CompanyA.com to user@CompanyB.com BEFORE users sign-in after the merge.
• This will ensure they retain access to external networks they were already members of.
• If you don’t do this you will end up with creating duplicate user objects (which is messier to clean up as you’ll need to disable the wrong one, then update the correct one to the same address as the wrong one).

I hope this helps clear things up, as we found ourselves quite confused and nervous going into this process as it wasn’t entirely clear.

Also published on Medium.