'Document Conversations’ are coming to Office 365 this summer

Microsoft announcement on Tuesday that they are adding a great new social feature when working on documents in there cloud based platform Office 365.

‘Document conversations’ will appear on the right hand side of your work, allowing you to chat and collaborate with your co-workers while still working on that all important document. So what are the clauses?

Well firstly, you’ll only be able to use this new feature with documents saved into Microsoft's cloud via SharePoint Online or OneDrive for Business. Secondly, Office 365 users need to be using Office Online apps to access this Yammer chatting capability, so the offline version of Office 2013 won’t be seeing this feature anytime soon.

Yammer aren’t just opening this feature up to typical Office online files, it will also work with 30 file types, including Adobe Reader files (.PDF), video files (.MP4, .AVI) and graphics formats (.PNG and .GIF).

The documents get tracked using Microsoft's Graph protocol that was described back in March. If you need to rename a file – don’t worry, it gets tracked via a new link. Subsequent conversations then get associated with that new file link, it’s as simple as that. Graph is a new information fabric for Office 365 that works across Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and Yammer. It supports a new search capability, code-named "Oslo," and a new "Groups" capability, both of which are planned for release sometime this year for Office 365 subscribers.

It’s great to see Microsoft are bringing some of their products like Yammer and Office 365 together, it’s important for a user to have a great experience with lots of product’s in the same product, if you get my drift.

I for one am looking forward to getting the update.