Built for Teams vs. Microsoft Yammer

Perfect for allowing employees to track their paid time off and sick days. Useful for providing job summaries, explanation of benefits. We don't use it for tracking compensation, but it could be used for that purpose. We also post job announcements on the platform which is useful for me to see what kinds of jobs we are hiring for.

Incentivized

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!

Incentivized

• Managing PTO (sick and vacation)
• Tracking firm demographic information
• Ensuring that we have plenty of staff in the office each day
• Employees get easy to use access to all of their time off data

Incentivized

• Providing a platform for social news in the company where "bottom up" topics can percolate freely across department
• Social networking across the company where folks can divide their work into topics instead of teams
• Basic collaboration within a group including document sharing with ability to pin documents to a team

Incentivized

• Reporting can be more robust.
• More user control and real-time communication via the app would be helpful.
• A better online calendar layout could be more efficient, but the current one is sufficient as well.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

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.

Very available

It's a simple product but it does provide value.

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.

Incentivized

The training that Microsoft provides is very generic training for Yammer. I like the fact the training is short and easy to understand

We organically implemented the product

Slightly different focuses and I still use both. Microsoft Visio is great for creating all kinds of diagrams. Whereas Built for Tens is more about people management, so you can set up who is where and track their relationships through the other individuals in the organization. it’s all about using the right tool for the job at hand.

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.

Incentivized

• It makes tracking PTO super easy
• We replaced a very expensive and clunky custom SharePoint intranet with an extremely cost-effect Built For Teams service.
• It is super easy to maintain, leaving me free to tackle bigger issues in the organization

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized