Yammer is an increasingly popular microblogging service for enterprises. With Yammer you can limit the access to your network to include only the people within your own organization. While Twitter has global reach, Yammer reaches only the people within your company, group or organization.

I do not intend to describe Yammer as such in this blog post, however, I have recently joined multiple Yammer networks and I want to share  with you how you can set up your Yammer account to span across multiple networks.

Why you might want to use more than one network

The company I work for, Capgemini, uses Yammer as the preferred social networking and microblogging service internally. I recently joined a project with one of our clients, Statoil, which is also using Yammer. For a few desperate hours I logged on and off my two different Yammer accounts to try to stay updated on both networks. I soon realized that it was not a clever way of using a tool that is supposed to be dead simple and user friendly.

After a quick Bing search I found the solution, and thinking that colleagues and other readers might be facing the same issue, I will explain what I did to make it work.

Guide for setting up additional networks

1. First of all, start by logging into your primary Yammer account. I consider the Capgemini account to be my primary Yammer account (e.g. your.name@capgemini.com).

2. Once logged in, go to Account settings in the upper right corner (see Figure 1 below).

3. In the Account dropdown menu, click Manage Networks (see Figure 2 below).

4. Within the Account screen and the Manage Networks tab, add the e-mail you used when signing up for you additional Yammer network (e.g. your.name@statoil.com, see Figure 3 below).

After completing these steps you will receive an e-mail where you have to verify your your relationship to the newly added network. After confirming your networks are merged for easy access from a single Yammer account. You will have a new Networks menu in the upper right part of the screen. Use this menu to easily swap between your networks. It worked for me, and I hope it works for you!

Happy Yammering!

Multiple networks with the Yammer Desktop application

I got a question from people wondering if multiple networks could also be used with the Yammer Desktop application. Yes you can! This is available under the Accounts menu (see Figure 4 below).

For more information on Yammer, see this article from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yammer