Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft Yammer
I use Microsoft Yammer as part of a non-profit technical consortium that our organization is a member of. It is used to collaborate between various working groups for users in many different similar organizations. Users can post questions in a variety of groups organized by topic, track responses, and get alerts to topics or threads of interest.
- Organizing users into groups and providing tools to those groups
- Social networking with other users within the organization/network
- Excellent notification options (e-mail, etc)
- Clean, easy-to-understand user interface
- Can be difficult to get phone support if there are questions
- Some of the tools are not quite as feature-rich as competitor products
- Integration with Office 365 suite can be a little confusing because there is feature overlap (for example, Yammer vs Teams, or Yammer vs Sharepoint)
- Yammer is typically included in the O365 suite of products so there is no additional financial commitment (depending on the subscription you purchase)
- Increases social collaboration and discovery outside of organizational and departmental silos
- Encourages interactions and improves morale, which has a positive impact on the bottom line.
IBM Connections has a more mature set of features however it is expensive and difficult to maintain. Traditionally IBM Connections require an on-premise installation which required a large capital investment and an ongoing level of expertise to maintain. Although now IBM offers a cloud-based version of Connections, they are not easy to work with, especially for organizations with less than 10,000 users. Yammer is significantly cheaper and much easier to maintain.