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.
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Projector PSA
Score 7.6 out of 10
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Projector's cloud-based Professional Services Automation (PSA) software helps project-based services organizations track time and expenses, invoice clients, schedule resources, and manage projects. Its three modules span a more comprehensive set of uses than typical project management software. The Accounting module helps the user track time and expenses and manage invoices and billing. Also it syncs with the company's accounting systems as a sub-ledger. The Resource Scheduling module matches…
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!
We think Projector PSA is a great tool to track and manage people in a professional service environment like management consulting. This system is easy to set up, easy to understand and should easily suit the needs of smaller and medium sized firms. It may be less appropriate for firms that rely very heavily on project management through another system (like MS Project) or firms that rely very heavily on a sales pipeline tracking system. While still very much possible to use, you would (I believe) have to do some re-keying between systems
Projector is a very well designed tool for project management. It has allowed us to eliminate a number of auxiliary tools for project timelines and WBS for the vast majority of our projects.
Time and expense entry is intuitive and quick for our staff.
Our forecasting and resource management capability has improved greatly with Projector and allows us to grow our team efficiently with minimal additional administrative burden.
Reporting is extremely robust. It does require some time to really get a handle on the full functionality of the reporting tool, but once you do, you can get almost any kind of report you want out of the system!
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.
Release management process needs to be improved. Currently no facility is provided to test the impact of new releases in a sand-box. This introduces business risk if there are interfaces into Projector PSA as part of it's use in the business.
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.
We have been using this tool for a year now and find our use of it continually evolves and broadens. We are also very excited about the overhaul that's under way and feel many of the improvements being put in place will help make us that much more effective and efficient. The Projector team is also very responsive and collaborative in terms of user feedback and improvement suggestions, which helps us know they will work hard to help us get what we need out of the tool.
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.
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.
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.
We did pursue Quick Arrow another tool that was similar. We found that be in inflexible in use. Projector allows a lot of flexibility in setup. Our organization has very specific business processes and we were able to set up Projector to work with those processes. Several other systems we tried were not as flexible in allowing set up to our needs.
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.
Even in the small time that I stayed to see Projector PSA reporting I saw ROI projections become more realistic. There was real data to analyze that proved we were spending way too much and charging way too less on some projects.
Although employees were not used at entering their hours, this single reporting improved operations management and validated employees concerns that more people were needed to manage workload
Project proposals were more realistic because they were driven by real data.
Decision making overall for the department became more efficient and effective
