Cisco Business Edition 7000 (discontinued) vs. Microsoft Yammer

Cisco business edition are well suited for the environment where we need regular communication as they are easy to dial and has got great features. The product is well suited for both small business and large enterprises. Speed dial, good voice quality are key features of Cisco phones. They are not well suited in scenarios where we do not have LAN connectivity or internet. Sometimes we may face latency and jitteriness which is not good.

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

• The platform supports up to 5,000 users connected at the same time in voice and video calls.
• Everything is virtually deployed on Cisco servers with reliability.
• Intuitive configuration and user-friendly web interface.
• It has several types of IP phones and is compatible with legacy and multi-brand hardware with SIP protocol.

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

• More cloud based services need to be added to the default service package.
• Companies frequently require a small contact center within the UC environment. It would be nice to see a build it contact center in the box.
• It would be nice to see some advanced AI based services (IVR voice recognition service) in the BE7K application list.
• Call recording should be also built in.

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

I've used 220s and 240s too, but it takes a lot of time to set them up, a lot of time to download the iso files, and set up of datastores. 7k saves the engineer a lot of pre-build assessment and evaluation time. Gets a lot done in a lot less time, returns are a happy engineer and a happier customer.

Incentivized

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 has allowed for mostly smooth communication from department to department/office to office.
• It allows for saved phone # / last contact to appear quickly.
• It has allowed for safety warnings/announcements to emerge all across every office so that everyone within the organization is on the same page about events when they occur.

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