The case
One of our news publishers shared a post on Yammer but it did not show up very nicely: the image was not displayed. What did she do wrong?
I remember having mixed experiences myself, and I also think Microsoft promises a beautiful sharing experience on Yammer (that prominent “Promote” button is not on every news post for nothing) so I asked SharePoint Holmes for help!
We are not the only ones to experience this, see this item from the tech community.
The investigation
1. Sharing news posts to Yammer
I confirmed that this was a Communication site.
I then used the “Promote” option to share every news post created in my earlier article on the storage of images. I also used the “Send to” option and that behaves similarly.
My own Yammer has the “new” experience, but I have not switched to “Native Yammer” yet. It may be different for Native Yammer users, but my own and work tenant have the same experience.
The sharing interface shows the image in all news posts.
But this is the result on Yammer:
After checking, it appears that only posts that have their image stored in the Site Assets library, show their image. The other posts do not. Even the post with my OneDrive image, which should be visible to me, does not show an image.
2. News posts with images in a regular Document Library
Seeing the results, and as the “From a link” is a bit of an exception (the image resides in the Site Assets library of another site) I added two extra experiments: I uploaded images to regular document libraries, one in the Intranet site where I created all news, and one in another site, created a News post with those and shared them on Yammer.
During upload to Yammer, both showed the image in their preview.
But on Yammer, they do not show their image.
They look OK in the site and on the SharePoint homepage, though.
The solution
So, it appears that you need to think beforehand whether you want to share a news item on Yammer, because your choice of image source makes or breaks your Yammer post!
I advised the news publisher to create news posts with images that will end up in the Site Assets, so that would be:
- Recent (most likely – be aware of copyright issues as this might have been taken from the web)
- Upload
- Web Search – but be aware of copyright issues!
- From a Link, if you know that the image lives in a Site Assets library
If you combine my advice from my earlier post and these results, “Upload” appears to be the best option. This is actually quite annoying – one would expect that all news posts would display their image!
According to Susan Hanley, images from Organizational Assets also show up when shared via Yammer. So there’s no more excuse…I have to learn how to Powershell this into my tenant! (I know the command, but I do not know where to enter it!)
This experiment triggered some new questions, such as the behaviour of News created in Team sites (as opposed to Communication sites), so that will be my next post!
About SharePoint Holmes:
Part of my role is solving user issues. Sometimes they are so common that I have a standard response, but sometimes I need to do some sleuthing to understand and solve it.
As many of my readers are in a similar position, I thought I’d introduce SharePoint Holmes, SharePoint investigator, who will go through a few cases while working out loud.
Ellen's Digital Workplace 