Ellucian Portal vs. Microsoft Viva Engage

It is great and collecting information and keeping it all in one place. But once you go outside of their scope it requires a lot of outside programming that quickly adds up. It's hard to find a good, reliable developer for this software so once you do find one you hang on to them. There is a very steep learning curve, but I would suspect that for any new CRM that you bring on

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

• Collecting information and putting it into a concise place
• Creating forms for use on our website to collect user information
• Differentiating between different user types and knowing where they are in the funnel

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

• We don't necessarily think that what the sales team promised us has been delivered. There are some features we thought we'd have that require hours of outside programming
• The forms that we create for the website would be nice to have more control over the look and feel
• Creating nice looking emails in ellucian is very cumbersome. It's definitely a far cry from a drag and drop like mail chimp or delivra

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

It is about right on par with the marketing stuff that Salesforce had. If you want to use it for email marketing it's only good for very simply designed email campaigns. But the scheduling of these campaigns is pretty painless and does a very good job. It has combined many other software packages that we were using into one place which is nice, but if you need to go outside the box of how they have things set up it will cost you a lot to do some custom development.

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 turned out to be much more expensive to get what we want than we thought
• There is a lot of customizing for our institution so the dollar cost will not be seen anytime soon
• It has helped bring everything into one place, but that has taken many hours of training for a lot of our staff just to get up to speed.

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