Jive-x (formerly Jive Engage) is Jive's external facing community platform for prospects and customers. It is a leading product in the space and most often competes with Lithium Community and Telligent Community.
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Microsoft Yammer
Score 6.9 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.
blueKiwi : yammer does well in terms of user experience, initial ram, up, but less so in total feature set Jive: since Yammer is SaaS, some customers will be unable to use yammer Sharepoint: although not a direct competitor, Microsofts own solution has some overlap on Yammer as …
Jive-x is great for external communities for support deflection or customer communication and document sharing/editing. If you spend the money on the available add-ons and integrations, you could use it for customer education/learning. It's less appropriate for use as a revenue -generating tool or a lead-generating platform.
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!
I write these from the perspective of the Community Manager - You can choose your level of moderation on Jive to match the policies of your organisation. From full on content pre-moderation to to completely reactive moderation, you can take your pick. We chose the latter end of the spectrum, trust your colleagues to be professional and you will be rewarded with professional content.
The ability for users to set up their own groups very easily with out the need to revert to developers is great as this allows individuality. This allows for organic growth with out impact on the budgets of departments and teams to get their work done on Jive. The option is always there to get 'someone in to fancy it up a bit' however you will find that your own people will develop those skills themselves. Your users will also learn from each other and you should actively encourage stealing of best practice from across your organisation.
The knowledge repository or Question and Answer features are the most value-adding for me. Having searchable history that allows your to get answers quickly so the next question can be asked is the reason why you should have a collaboration platform in the first place, Jive makes that easy.
Single Sign On has been a excellent addition for us, if Jive does not make your colleagues lives easier then they won't use it.
You can customize and brand Jive to reflect your company identity.
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.
For a large company the cost can quickly escalate so this must taken into account when renewing. For me, the decision to review will be taken with upgrading to the cloud version in mind as well. My power users love Jive for it versatility but it is important to note that you must be prepared to constantly train and coach the non-power users
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.
It works wonders. My only gripe would be that there are some customizations you can't make without hiring a vendor with coding experience to implement them.
The support has been fantastic when we have been trying to code our own apps. Jive have went above and beyond what was required to help us out. Bugs fixes are generally very good and they are upfront when they are unable to help or a 'problem' is actually in need of Professional Services
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.
For the money, it just happens to fit best with our original use case. Now that it's been sold to Aurea, which essentially halted any support or dev for the product before selling it off to Lithium, we will have to eventually move off of it (this assumes Lithium won't hire devs for code they didn't build, and that's not a bad assumption). So, while I recommend it, it's with the caveat that it's been sold and will be evolving in the near future.
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.
Hard to quantify the results...but I also left the company before we had built a mature instance of Jive in-house so the final results/impact were yet to be fully realized and measured.
The use of Jive brought together multiple-departments for the first time in our 50+ year old company to truly build an "end-to-end" approach to our marketing/sales/fulfillment/customer service engine. It was truly phenomenal to watch how the internal life-cycle of a prospect-turned-customer literally transformed and unified our inter-departmental teams through the use of Jive Engage.
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.
