BoardPro offers board management software for small enterprise, small cap and nonprofit organizations. With it, users can create agendas, build board packs, record minutes, send actions and store files.
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Microsoft Yammer
Score 7.3 out of 10
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Yammer is used for private communication within organizations or between organizational members and pre-designated groups, making it an example of enterprise social software. It originally launched as an enterprise microblogging service and now has applications on several different operating systems and devices. The company was acquired by Microsoft in 2012.
The best scenarios for the use of BoardPro are highlighted when there is planning, development, coordination, execution and monitoring of projects and activities, in addition to being an information panel for all the members of the different teams of the organization, it provides the ability to hold meetings, an integrating element that stands out from other software. The management of the boards is exceptionally intuitive and easy to use, in addition to simplifying its content in a way that is easy to understand for all people, granting continuity and consistency to the work or works to be developed. An area of opportunity where it could be developed in a better way is offline work, since it will not be possible for your team members to work in this way.
Yammer is great when you have a company culture that encourages friendly collaboration and communication. It can be a great supplement (but certainly not a substitute) for bonding and sharing ideas and thoughts. Certain channels can be really successful, too, like a channel where people can post dog pictures or something fun like that!
Agenda-setting and writing minutes is very easy with the built-in structure offered
Compiling and distributing Board packs with BoardPro takes a fraction of the time it used to - and updates to papers are so much easier
Ability to hold all governance documents in one central repository is useful for external Directors
Directors find the Board paper annotation feature very useful. New updates to this have made it an extremely powerful tool.
Flying Minutes feature is very useful for obtaining formal decisions between meetings and then automatically adding them to the next set of minutes.
The ability for Directors to update their own interests in the Interests Register is efficient and puts the responsibility on them to ensure this is up to date - this is automatically included in each Board pack.
The actions feature is fantastic - allocating a person responsible and an action deadline which then is followed up by BoardPro email reminders keeps people on tasks and allows the Chair to stay on top of actions as they are reported in the Board packs each meeting.
Although the social enterprise network works very well, there is room for some slight improvement - such as the ability to attract users. By being part of the Microsoft Office Suite, it is offered as an "add-on" and many overlook it and see it as unnecessary at first. It would be smart for Microsoft to sell it as its own product so it could gather more popularity as a "social network".
Giving an option to filter results could be better as well as giving an option to turn off the "recent activity" bar on the home page.
Microsoft is dedicated to continual improvement on Yammer. They realize the value that Yammer brings to the table with their clients. In the short time that we have had Yammer implemented, we are just now beginning to see the strong impact it has on becoming more effective and efficient around collaboration.
Overall easy to use and intuitive, although limited in the possibility to personalize layout and look & feel of a site. Some functionalities are not easy to use, like document editing, but some others are quick and effective (posts and tagging above all). Performance and responsiveness of the Yammer site is typically acceptable, in my experience.
We have never had to use the support for Yammer. The tool works well and we have not come across any bugs. User Interface is simple and easy to use, similar to other forum type products, thereby removing the need for any extensive training. Team members are invited in and immediately are able to start using the tool.
BoardPro is on a different playing field than monday.com, in fact, BoardPro is in a league of it's own. I used monday.com at a different organisation board and actually found that I did not use it. I found it easier to download and read the PDF board pack that was provided to me. The user interface of BoardPro is such that the software is easy to navigate and use, it is intuitive and such a delight to use.
Our team briefly used Salesforce.com's Chatter product before switching over to Yammer in 2012. While Chatter is essentially the same product as Yammer, it left much to be desired. Chatter's design was (and remains) clunky and difficult to navigate. Yammer is a simple, easy-to-use product that offers similar functionality as Salesforce's Chatter.
My company is pleased with the positive impact Yammer has created departmentally and on an individual basis with work flow efficiency.
Adversely, most old and new employees are more familiar with SharePoint, causing the company to pay for training for all current and incoming employees.
As Yammer becomes more widely used, the need for training may diminish, which is where we will see our return on investment, as the product clearly provides a more effective form of file sharing and communication between employees and their department.
