Microsoft Yammer vs. Staffbase

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

Staffbase is well-suited for companies who want to drive and measure employee engagement through meaningful content. I wouldn't recommend it for companies that maintain a complex SharePoint environment with years of legacy content. It is not intended to be a CMS system. It is a dynamic platform that makes it's easy to share information through the mobile or desktop app and email and push notifications. You don't need a large team to manage it.

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

• Easy to use back-end for posting and managing content—you don't have to rely on IT for support.
• Software update releases are included in the licensing fees. No need to get outside developers involved in making changes to the platform.
• Employee segmentation is extremely easy with an API from your HRIS system.
• Translations are a breeze!
• Creating forms on the go is easy and efficient!
• Use your existing organization's SSO for ease of use and security.

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

• @Mentions could be added.

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

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

Since we selected Staffbase, they are one of a few companies that haven't been acquired or changed its business model. We would have invested a lot of time and money rebuilding our intranet otherwise. We selected them because of the standard features included, the free updates, and the reasonable licensing fees. They understand the value of communicating with non-desk employees and keeping them engaged.

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

• Engagement levels increased for non-desk employees without access to a PC.
• We leverage the tool as part of our crisis management activities, without having to invest in an additional platform.
• We can issue surveys quickly without investing in additional engagement tools.

Incentivized