We’re all busy at work, and staying up-to-date on new posts in our favorite Yammer groups isn’t easy. Fortunately, Microsoft Flow can help! I previously shared a blog post on using Flow to monitor Yammer and send email notifications when a specific “watch word” was used. Now let’s take look at another common scenario: setting up Flow to send you an email each time your manager posts in Yammer.

Here’s an overview of what the flow looks like:

And here are the steps to re-create the flow:

1. Create a new flow from blank (aka not from a template).
2. Add the trigger When there is a new message in a group.
3. In the Group Id field, select the name of the Yammer group you want to monitor.
   Note: This flow doesn’t monitor multiple Yammer groups at once; it triggers to run when a new message is posted in a single Yammer group. If you’d like to run this flow across multiple Yammer groups, you’ll need to copy your completed flow and create a new flow for each group you want to monitor. The process for copying your finished flow is provided in step 22. 
4. In the Network Id field, select the name of your Yammer network.
5. Add the Get user details action. In the User ID field, add the Message List Message Sender field. (This action pulls the email address for the user who posted the Yammer message.)
6. Add the Get my profile action. (This action obtains your email address and identifying information. You’ll need this to pull your manager’s information and configure your email notification later in the flow.)
7. Add the Get manager action. In the User field, insert the dynamic content User Principal Name. (This action obtains your manager’s email address.)
8. Add the Compose action. You’ll be using this action to translate your manager’s email address into all lowercase letters. Odd I know, but this ensure you don’t have any capitalization-based mismatches in your flow.
9. Place your cursor in the Compose action Inputs field.
10. Click the Expression option in the config box.
11. Under the String functions header, choose toLower(text). If you don’t see the toLower option, click the See more link in the String functions header bar.
    
12. Click the Add dynamic content option in the config box.
13. Under the Get manager header, choose Mail.
    
14. Click the blue OK button to save your expression.
15. Add a Condition action.
16. In the Value box, add the Yammer User Email field.
17. In the Choose a value box, add Output.
18. Add a Send an email action in the If yes box.
19. In the To field of your email, insert the Get My Profile Mail dynamic content. You may need to select “See more” under the Get my profile header to see the Mail content.
20. Add additional details for your notification (e.g. subject line, email verbiage, etc.).
21. Save and test your flow.
22. Optional. If you’d like to set up this flow for a second Yammer group, follow these additional steps:
    1. Go to the information page for your flow.
    2. Click on the More dropdown and select Save As.
       
    3. Specify a name for your copied flow and click Save.
    4. Return to your My Flows page and edit your newly-copied flow. Update the Yammer group identified in your trigger, save the flow, and turn on the flow.
    5. Repeat step 22 for each Yammer group you want to monitor.

That’s it! I’ll now receive an email each time my manager creates a Yammer post in my Microsoft Flow Yammer group.

Sharing your new flow:
Now that you’ve created your flow, it’s time to think about sharing it with others in your organization.

• Check out my post on the new Send a copy feature in Microsoft Flow. With Send a copy, you can quickly share a copy of your flow with users and security groups in your Office 365 tenant.
• Support Microsoft Flow adoption with the creation of an internal organization-level template gallery. The gallery will enable users to share and re-use flows internally.

If your organization uses Yammer to drive information sharing and employee knowledge transfer, you have a potential treasure trove of great content. But staying up-to-date on Yammer conversations can be tough, particularly when you’re running from meeting to meeting. It’s easy to miss key Yammer posts, even if you subscribe to email notifications.

Fortunately, Microsoft Flow can help! Let’s say you want to monitor a particular Yammer group for one or more “watch words.” When a message that contains the watch word is posted on Yammer, you’d like Microsoft Flow to send you an email notification. This functionality enables you to audit Yammer groups for the content you’re most interested in.

Here’s an overview of what this flow looks like:

And here are the steps to re-create the flow:

1. Create a new flow from blank (aka not from a template).
2. Add the trigger When there is a new message in a group.
3. In the Group Id field, select the name of the Yammer group you want to monitor.
   Note: This flow doesn’t monitor multiple Yammer groups at once; it triggers to run when a new message is posted in a single Yammer group. If you’d like to run this watch word flow across multiple Yammer groups, you’ll need to copy your completed flow and create a new flow for each group you want to monitor. The process for copying your finished flow is provided in step 15. 
4. In the Network Id field, select the name of your Yammer network.
5. If you’d like your watch word email notification to include the name of the person that posted the Yammer message, add the Get user details action. In the User ID field, add the Message List Message Sender field.
6. Add the Get my profile action. This action obtains the SMTP email address for the current user (e.g. john.doe@mycompany.com). You’ll use this SMTP email address to configure your email notification.
7. Add a Condition action.
8. In the Value field, add the Message List Message Body Text field.
9. Change the is equal to field to contains.
10. Type your watch word(s) in the Choose a value field. In the example flow shown above, my watch word is PowerApps.
11. Add an action in the If yes box. Since I wanted to send an email notification when my watch word was used, I added the email action.
12. In the To field of your email, insert the Get My Profile Mail dynamic content.
    Note: You may need to select “See more” under the Get my profile header to see the Mail content.
13. Add additional details for your notification (e.g. subject line, email verbiage, etc.).
14. Save and test your flow.
15. Optional. If you’d like to set up your watch word flow for a second Yammer group, follow these additional steps:
    1. Go to your flow’s information page.
    2. Click on the More dropdown and select Save As.
       
    3. Specify a name for your copied flow and click Save.
    4. Return to your My Flows page and edit your newly-copied flow. Update the Yammer group identified in your trigger, save the flow, and turn on the flow.
    5. Repeat step 15 for each Yammer group you want to monitor.

Now that my flow is built, I receive an email notification like the one shown below each time the watch word PowerApps is mentioned in my Microsoft Flow Yammer group:

Sharing your new flow:
Now that you’ve created your flow, it’s time to think about sharing it with others in your organization.

• Check out my post on the new Send a copy feature in Microsoft Flow. With Send a copy, you can quickly share a copy of your flow with users and security groups in your Office 365 tenant.
• Support Flow adoption with the creation of an internal organization-level template gallery. The gallery will enable users to share and re-use flows internally.

Credits (and a few words of encouragement):
If you’re working with Microsoft Flow and are having a hard time figuring out how to build the workflows you need, don’t despair! When I first started trying to build this “watch word” flow, I got completely stuck. I couldn’t figure out how to build it without complicated formulas or JSON. Many thanks to Jon Levesque, Marcel Haas, and many others on Twitter for jumping in and teaching me a better way to go about it!

As an Office 365 product manager and corporate evangelist, I’m responsible for engaging users and driving adoption of Microsoft Collaboration tools. Measuring the saturation and use of Office 365 is a key part of my role. Yes, I regularly review Office 365 usage metrics for high-level trending. But metrics alone don’t tell the story of user satisfaction and adoption. In order to build better training and adoption programs, I need to understand why my dedicated users love the tools and why others remain resistant.

Many companies rely on surveys to gather end-user feedback. While surveys are useful for gathering specific types of quantitative data, surveys are one-dimensional. You can’t dynamically ask follow-up questions to learn more about specific survey responses, and you can only capture a limited set of data points. Innovation games enable you to gather a much broader set of quantitative and qualitative user data, but require an investment of time to facilitate games and distill the results. For best results, I recommend a multidisciplinary approach that leverages Office 365 usage statistics, user survey responses, innovation games data, user testimonials, etc. to measure user satisfaction. 

With the release of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine-learning algorithms, we also have the ability to gather user sentiments automatically. If your organization uses Yammer to drive employee engagement and empower open dialogue, you have a wealth of user data that can be analyzed. With Azure Cognitive Services and Microsoft Flow, you can perform automated sentiment analysis of your Yammer group posts. Sentiment scores for each Yammer message can be stored in SharePoint and visualized for trending analysis via Power BI. You can even send push email notifications to your Office 365 administrators or Corporate Communications team when strong positive or negative messages are posted in Yammer.

Chris Bortlik, Principal Technical Architect for Microsoft, recently shared a blog post on Yammer sentiment analysis. I used Chris’ model, with a few modifications, to gather and report on Office 365 user sentiment.

The scenario:
My organization leverages a Microsoft Flow Yammer group to foster employee conversations and questions/answers about flow. We want to monitor the Microsoft Flow Yammer group using sentiment analysis so we can:

• Identify negative flow Yammer posts that require follow-up
• Identify positive Yammer posts that can serve as user testimonials or references
• Define trends in our Microsoft Flow Yammer posts (e.g. daily/weekly/monthly positive and negative trends, overall positive or negative sentiments for flow, etc.)
• Validate the success of our Microsoft Flow education and adoption program (e.g. confirm we’re seeing growth in the volume of positive flow Yammer posts over time)

The setup:
Follow the steps outlined below to set up automated Yammer sentiment analysis.

Step 1: Confirm you have a Cognitive Services Text Analytics Account. In order to set up this solution, you will need a Cognitive Services account key and a root site URL.

Step 2: Create a SharePoint list to store your Yammer sentiment analysis scores. Flow will create a new item in your list for each Yammer message it analyzes. Here’s a list of the custom columns I added to my list:

• Score – Number column; stores the sentiment rating for each Yammer message
• Message link – Hyperlink column; stores a link to the rated Yammer message
• Posted by – Person/Group column; stores the name of the person that posted the Yammer message
• Thread ID – Single line of text column; stores the Yammer thread ID for the message. Enables you to sort, filter, and group sentiment scores for a given Yammer thread (including original message and replies).

Azure Cognitive Services will provide a numeric sentiment score between 0 and 1 for each Yammer message it analyzes. The more negative a Yammer message is, the closer to 0 its score will be. More positive messages will receive a rating closer to 1.

Here’s a screen shot of my SharePoint list. Each list item represents a rated Yammer message:

Step 3: Identify the Yammer group you want to perform sentiment analysis on. You can set up sentiment analysis for multiple Yammer groups, but each will require a separate flow process. I also recommend setting up a different SharePoint list to hold sentiment scores for each of your Yammer groups. (Having different SharePoint lists enables you to set up different trending reports on Yammer group sentiment.)

Step 4: Create your Microsoft Flow. I created my flow from scratch (not using a template). Here’s a quick breakdown of the flow conditions and actions:

• When there is a new message in a group – Detects when a new Yammer message is posted in my Yammer group
• Get user details – Pulls Yammer user profile details. (Enables us to capture the full name and email address for the person posting the Yammer message.)
• Detect Sentiment – Calls the Azure Cognitive Services API so it can calculate a sentiment score for the Yammer message
• Create item – Creates a SharePoint list item for the Yammer message being analyzed
• If the comment is negative – Sends an email to my Office 365 admin team if the sentiment score for a Yammer message is ≤0.3.
• If the comment is positive – Sends an email to my Office 365 admin team if the sentiment score for a Yammer message is ≥0.7.

Step 5: Create Power BI report(s) to visualize your Yammer sentiment scores. Published reports can be rendered in your SharePoint Online Communications or Team sites using the Power BI web part. For help in setting up sentiment analysis slicers, check out this DataChant blog post.

Here’s a sample dashboard that shows Yammer sentiment data for my Microsoft Flow Yammer group:

Step 6: Distill the results. Once you start calculating Yammer sentiment and have reports to visualize the data, you can analyze the results and follow up where needed. Here are a few ideas to get you started:

• Break down negative Yammer posts (e.g. posts with a score ≤0.3) by user. Schedule follow-up meetings with Office 365 end-users that consistently post negative messages. The goal is to ask questions and understand the pain points the users are facing. Perhaps they have hardware or network issues that impact their productivity. Or maybe they’re having issues with Microsoft Flow and need a coach/mentor to spur their learning. Having one-on-one dialogues provides the opportunity for candid feedback and enables you to make a difference in the user’s productivity and technology experience.
• Identify Office 365 enthusiasts. Break down Yammer posts by volume or by high sentiment average in order to find power users across your organization. Set up meetings with these enthusiasts to understand how they leverage Office 365. Incorporate them into your user group or internal community and support them in their growth. These enthusiasts can become your Office 365 evangelists!
• Monitor the volume of Yammer posts in your group. Build a gauge that shows your number of Yammer messages month-to-date and identifies progress towards your monthly Yammer message goal. Keeping an eye on your total posts month-to-date and year-to-date will help you monitor use over time and highlight areas you may need to invest additional time and adoption efforts in.

• Optimize your communications. If one of your Office 365 admin resources has consistent negative Yammer sentiment scores, have them evaluate the verbiage they’re using. Slight wording changes can change the tone of their messages, increasing Yammer sentiment scores and better engaging with end-users.
• Take a health pulse. Build trending visuals that show average post volumes and sentiment averages by week or month. If you start seeing spikes on volume of posts and/or significant changes in your sentiment averages, it’s time to dig deeper. Perhaps you’re seeing a spike in interest in PowerApps after a compelling user group presentation or have network bandwidth issues that are causing issues. Either way, Yammer sentiment analysis can be your early warning indicator that something has changed.