Item: Microsoft Yammer
Rating: 9
Author: Jeremiah Miller

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros and Cons

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)

Return on Investment

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.

Alternatives Considered

IBM Connections

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.

Other Software Used

Microsoft Office 365, Power BI For Office 365, Sage People

Likelihood to Recommend

Yammer is easy to use and set up because it comes as part of the Office 365 suite of tools from Microsoft. It's possible to enable and set up within a few hours. The hardest part is to figure out how to use it within an organization with access to all of the other Office 365 tools provided by Microsoft. Organizations will need to devise a clear strategy and communicate to users so they know when to use Yammer and when to use other MS collaboration tools like Teams, Groups, or SharePoint.

Yammer - Easy collaboration for large and small

Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft Yammer