Lately we have been getting more and more questions about exporting messages from the Viva Engage (Yammer) community. All messages or during a certain time, messages in one specific community or several communities, sometimes we are asked to export all messages posted by one specific person. In this article we will share all the possible options that we know. Spoiler: there is no magic button “Export messages” and there are no easy ways to do that. Viva Engage is an internal corporate social network, previously called Yammer.
Options Available to user (community member or owner)
Custom development
This is the only free and unconditional option. Anyone who has user-level access to Viva Engage (community member or owner) – also can access the same messages/communities programmatically – using Yammer classic API. It is called Yammer API because this API was born when Viva Engage was Yammer and did not change since then. This option require some coding skills – e.g. PowerShell, Python, C#, Java – any programming language that can call API (invoke web request).
Here is how to authenticate and call Yammer API: Working with Yammer API from code
Code example in PowerShell:
$webRequest = Invoke-WebRequest –Uri "https://www.yammer.com/api/v1/messages.json" –Method Get -Headers $headers
$results = $webRequest.Content | ConvertFrom-Json
$results.messages | ForEach-Object {
$message = $_ ; Write-Host "Message body:" $message.body.parsed
}
3-rd party tools
There are probably 3-rd party tools that allows exporting messages from Viva Engage communities.
But still, it’d be your procurement who buy licenses, your security who assess solution and your admins who install/configure/support 3-rd party software.
Let us do some research. We’ll share results here… So far:
Service from company/admins
There are some options available for Yammer (Viva Engage) Admins that’d allow exporting messages, but it still require some custom development as there is no Out-of-the-Box button or report or other features to export all messages from one specific community. See details below.
Options Available to Yammer (Viva Engage) Admins
Custom Solution
There is an option available via Admin Center GUI or Yammer API that allows export all data – including communities, users, messages…
Sounds nice, but! It exports everything for the specific period of time. So there is still no option to export one specific community all messages. Only all messages from all communities during e.g. last week. But technically it is possible to design/build a custom solution that
- Connects to Viva Engage via Classic Yammer API
- Exports all data
- Initial export of all historical data
- Scheduled job that exports new data
- Selects from all data only required data – one specific group messages