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Yammer Web Part Pack for Kentico CMS
Introduction
I'm happy today to introduce 4 new Yammer web parts for Kentico CMS. If you or your company have a Kentico CMS based intranet and are wondering how to be more social than you need these web parts! With these new parts you can display your company's group feed, like a page, follow a page, and finally comment on a page. Utilizing the group of web parts is a powerful way to foster enterprise collaboration on your company's intranet.
UPDATE: There is now version 1.1 of the Yammer Web Part Pack available for both Kentico 7.0 and Kentico 8.0
Background
Why Yammer? Well, did you know that 85% of Fortune 500 companies use Yammer for Enterprise Social? I was a bit surprised that number was so high myself, but it explains why there has been a recent trend of requests from our customer base at BizStream. Customers as well as potential clients are asking to include Yammer feeds in their intranets or help them integrate Yammer with their SharePoint installations and business applications.
After seeing this trend we started using Yammer recently for our own internal BizStream intranet. I am quite pleased with the results so far. And since we use Kentico to power our intranet it was time to fire up Visual Studio and write some code.
How It Works
Of course the first pre-requisite is that you will need a Yammer account and be a member of at least one Yammer network. That’s really about it though as far as pre-requisites go. Once nice thing about Yammer integration is that it is a fairly simple set of code to implement. According to the Yammer developer documentation, the main idea is to include a set of JavaScript on your page that loads in the main Yammer script resource and then calls the yam.connect client side functionality. Each web part has its own specific call that matches the documentation.
There is also a helpful shortcut to get your Yammer network name and other configuration variables. If you visit your company's Yammer group page and click on the Embed this group in your site link (screen shot on the left) a modal pop up appears (screen shot on the right) and gives you the sample code you need to see all of the properties of the feed. I have exposed the ability to change these properties whenever you add one of the web parts to a template, more on that later on.
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The Result
After placing the Yammer Group Feed web part on a Page Template in your intranet site you should see the following.
After placing the Yammer Like or Yammer Follow web part you should see the following too.
If you do not see these working please make sure that you have filled in all he properties of the web part and have ensured that your corporate firewall is not blocking any of related script resources. For more on troubleshooting any issues check out the Yammer guide (very bottom).
Web Part Properties
Each Yammer web part for Kentico has a set of properties that control some simple options. The most important one is Network. Most of the time you will only have to set this on the web part for everything to work. Script Source and Data App ID should default for you. The Container Name property allows you to change the ID of the div that renders the script.
Download
You can download a copy of my Yammer Web Part Pack for Kentico CMS right here and eventually from the Kentico Marketplace once it gets approved. I have tested these web parts on version 7.0.30 and higher of Kentico CMS and Kentico EMS.
Conclusion
Feel free to leave any feedback on the web part pack in the comments on this post. I will try to support it as best I can over email or comments. I hope this helps save some time for other Kentico Intranet users out there.
