Yammer Analytics with Excel and Power BI. Yammer provides high-level metrics, exports, and APIs that together, contains most of the raw data you would use to perform social mining on the enterprise. However, exports and API make most Yammer Administrators feel like the information is still locked far inside Yammer. They need simple and flexible reporting tools that are familiar and easy to use. Fortunately, the Microsoft BI stack with Microsoft Excel and Power BI are here to the rescue! In this post, MTC Architect Richard diZeregas outlines the steps to take standard data exports from Yammer and convert them into detailed reporting models with rich data visualizations. See his post and a video featuring his presentation at the SharePoint Conference 2014 here.
SharePoint Timer Jobs running as Windows Azure Web Jobs. The Office App Model Samples (Office AMS) contain some great examples of writing console applications using CSOM. A console application is the foundation for building timer jobs against SharePoint Online and offers a safer alternative to full-trust timer jobs written for on-premises SharePoint. In this post, MTC Architect Richard diZerega will show you how easy it is to build a timer job as a console application, package it, deploy it as a Web Job in Windows Azure, and schedule it to periodically run against SharePoint.