This week, Microsoft has been talking up its approach to modern collaboration and “the rise of dynamic teams“.

“Over the last decade, the way people work has had incredible influence on productivity solutions,” a spokesperson for the company tells WebProNews. “The need for seamless teamwork and a collective knowledge base across the company continues to drive new experiences for collaboration; people must be able to access, share and discover information in real time.”

Building on this, the company announced some things it’s doing to improve Yammer.

“Yammer is evolving in intelligent and integrated ways,” the spokesperson says.

First of all, Microsoft is integrating the Yammer experience more deeply within Office 365, making it a part of Office 365 Groups. It’s also adding Yammer signals part of the Office Graph.

“Through this deeper integration, teams can seamlessly move between Yammer conversations, meetings in Skype for Business, Outlook email, files in OneDrive and content discovery in Delve,” Microsoft’s Juliet Wei says in a blog post. “Next, we’re making Yammer itself a better place for teams to work by using our algorithmic feed to surface the teams and conversations you should know about, so you can stay on top of all your projects from the feed and engage more deeply within groups. And, because we know that teams themselves often span across organizations, we’re making it possible for extended teams to stay in sync and do more together.”

Wei also announced a new external messaging feature in Yammer, which enables users to add extended team members from outside their organizations to conversations. These might include partners, vendors, or customers.

She explains, “To include an external participant, simply add their email address to a Yammer conversation in your network, and they’ll be able to see and respond to this conversation from their own Yammer network or email inbox. Your data stays secure because outside participants only access the conversations they have been added to and not the rest of the information in your network. With 40 percent or more of the U.S. workforce expected to be made up of contingent or independent workers by 2020, companies need to empower the formation of dynamic teams. External messaging is an important step in that direction.”

The company also announced that Office 365 Video is now available to Office 365 business customers worldwide. There’s a native iPhone app and new browser capabilities.

More on this here.

Image via MIcrosoft