How can I use SharePoint Server 2013 to search for Yammer content?

Question

What options are there for either indexing Yammer content from an on premises farm or federating search. So far I've only seen REST API that provides results for current user, but I don't think it's open search compatible.

I really would like to see a deep integration where Yammer activities influence relevance, such as ratings, likes, mentions, social distance,etc.

I have a feeling I will be disappointed at this time

Answer 1

There aren't any solutions (at the moment) for federated search with Yammer. As you state, you can use the REST API to add an additional search vertical to a search results page. This requires that you custom-code that solution though.

This is something that the Yammer product team is working on though. It will be coming to Office 365 soon.

Answer 2

The short answer is no, you cannot index Yammer with SharePoint; hence you also cannot take advantage of things like ranking or promoted results, etc. However, you can use Yammer's extensive REST API (which appears not to have changed much since 2014) to effectively view and search Yammer content from SharePoint.

First remember that you must authenticate with Yammer (and get an access token) before you can make any REST calls, and that Yammer does not pick up Windows credentials automatically like SharePoint does. This in and of itself may be a show-stopper, since you probably don't want your users to have to "log in" to Yammer from SharePoint just to search it.

See more about Oauth2 and Yammer at the below page: https://developer.yammer.com/docs/oauth-2

The Yammer search endpoint (https://www.yammer.com/api/v1/search.json) returns JSON that looks like this:

{
"count": {
    "messages": 2,
    "groups": 0,
    "topics": 1,
    "uploaded_files": 0,
    "users": 1,
    "pages": 0
},
"messages": {...},
"groups": [],
"topics": [{...}],
"uploaded_files": [],
"users": [{...}],
"pages": [],
"search_uuid": "c574292f-83ae-49ba-b8aa-070404e9af0d"

}

From this it should be fairly trivial to build a "search vertical" page that displays a certain sub-set of the results, for example, messages, topics, users, etc. But these results will always necessarily be separate from SharePoint's "native" search results.

This below page provides instructions on how to do this, using JavaScript and Bootstrap: SharePoint 2013: Deep integration of Yammer Search with SharePoint search.

Here is the documentation page for the Yammer search endpoint: https://developer.yammer.com/docs/searchjson