Microsoft Yammer vs. Planview IdeaPlace

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

If you have a community with more than 100 active users, and you're looking for ideas around operational improvements that can be acted on in a 6-12 month window, Spigit will work great, and it's one of the best options out there. If you're trying to customize the platform much, you should plan on paying Spigit's service group to do that for you, because it's not easy to do yourself. If you're looking for ideas that will take more than about a year to implement, Spigit is as good as anyone else because that's a really tough thing to do in an innovation community!

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

• Acknowledges and supports the culture around the problem and market it is trying to serve. Just using the platform won't solve our problem, we need a cultural shift and Spigit has helped support that process.
• Customer service - just overall amazing service. Responses are very quickly turned around, they've gone the extra mile many, many times. They are also very open to platform improvements and take feedback very seriously.
• As the system administrator, I feel their platform incorporates a great balance of templates, out-of-the-box formatting, etc., and customizable content. In a nutshell, we are able to do what we want but we don't have to spend forever to do it. We can use what they have or we can add in our own design.

• 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

• There are many ways to configure the solution. Some features make more sense to use at times and should be hidden from users at other times. It would be nice if Spigit had pre-defined configuration templates that reflect the experience and knowledge of their current customer's experience using the software and not just a 1 size fits all base configuration. The good news is with a little experience, these configurations can be created as saved templates.

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

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

Most platforms had a nice UI, this wasn't the differentiator. What it came down to was mostly around we don't know what we'll need in the future:

• Market leadership: on stable ground, not going anywhere
• Thought leadership: improving the software, inspiring new ways to use it
• Highly configurable platform: supports use cases we don't know we even need right now
• Strong services if you need them: always there if you run into trouble or are short staffed

• 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

• Firstly, it is hard to define or describe an ROI for an innovation project (and tool) that is in its experimental phase... But a positive is the impact in the overall engagement of employees, especially in overpopulated structures where it is not easy to "become visible, and the smart ones wait for a chance like this platform.
• Where a clear and strong sponsorship is in place, this platform can stimulate ideas that can potentially have a great impact in services improvement
• Based on our specific limits in engaging top management, we still cannot see a speed in products or processes improvement.

Incentivized