Likelihood to Recommend 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!
Read full review For companies that want to customize almost anything and make the forum look like your site, Vanilla Forums is the one for you. Customization and automation of the data via the API with other systems is more than possible and they serve to be great as a hosting provider, dealing with all the upgrades, deployments and maintenance and threat management well. I would say they might be less turn key for a small application but the fact they have an open source community, the ability to find help and information can lower the barrier of entry for most.
Read full review Pros 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 Read full review Gamification: The ability to incentivise community members to get involved with ranks and badges is one of the main reasons that we purchased the tool. Support: The Vanilla support team are incredible, often responding to issues very late at night and proactively fixing issues as soon as they occur. Customisation: Vanilla can be completely styled with css allowing us to match it to the branding of the rest of our website. Read full review Cons 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. Read full review There are some features I wish Vanilla would implement that could improve ease of use in our specific community, but some of the ideas we have are not necessarily something that would benefit all of the forums that Vanilla works with. In the past, we've had issues with releases breaking some of our specific site features they built for us, but this has improved drastically recently. Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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.
Read full review Usability 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.
Read full review It is very intuitive and simple to operate. Our customers immediately came up with the curve and began contributing content.
Read full review Reliability and Availability Very available
Read full review Performance It's a simple product but it does provide value.
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review They did an amazing job transferring our content from GetSatisfaction. We had almost 100% success in the transfer of 8 years worth of content.
Read full review Online Training The training that Microsoft provides is very generic training for Yammer. I like the fact the training is short and easy to understand
Read full review Implementation Rating We organically implemented the product
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review From a footprint standpoint, Vanilla has less technical bloat than vbulletin or
InVision , and it outdoes
Lithium as far as features and service go. The bloat of other services and ability to use new ways of engaging communities such as through Reactions are part of the reason Vanilla was selected. However, the features are better on a couple more seasoned platforms and more equipped to deal with issues and technical problems.
Read full review Return on Investment 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. Read full review Increased uptime and overall speed in the forum (compared to our previous phpbb solution) Increased usage by users which resulted in a higher pages/session in a short amount of time Read full review ScreenShots Higher Logic Vanilla Screenshots