Item: Microsoft Yammer
Rating: 8
Author: Erik Ralston

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Yammer is our hub for social networking within the company, allowing for sharing of various internal news from sales team wins through to birthdays. We are broken up into various groups from "Product Q&A" to "Animals" ensuring there is an open forum for news and discussion across the company.

Pros and Cons

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

User experience in Yammer, while improving on mobile, has been stagnant for years - it's the same product since 2014
Integration with the other O365 features - such as O365 groups - is completely lacking
It competes with other Microsoft products (Microsoft Teams, Kaizala) for collaboration tools

Return on Investment

Yammer keeps collaboration across teams out of email and out in the open, increasing emergent teamwork
Yammer is a bit chaotic most of the time, so we have to choose when to use Teams over Yammer

Alternatives Considered

Workplace by Facebook

Yammer's biggest competition is definitely Workplace by Facebook. Both provide a "post, like, share" social network experience adapted to an enterprise paradigm. Both provide real-time chat on top of that to drive collaboration. Both have lightweight content management to manage documents and files shared with posts.

Yammer's big strength is that it's already bundled with Office 365. For anyone already of O365, there should be no reason to leave when Yammer is more than enough.

Facebook by Workplace has a superior user experience - at least a more familiar user experience. The fact that 99% of employees will already have exposure to Facebook means it's zero training to adopt.

Support Rating

Since acquiring Yammer, Microsoft has made only a modest investment into the evolution of the product. While the service has been 100% reliable for us - across not just our small company community, but also across much larger Microsoft networks in which I participate - the UX is stagnant. Aside from adding GIFs to the platform a couple years ago, almost nothing has changed.

Key Insights

Do you think Microsoft Yammer delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Microsoft Yammer's feature set?

Yes

Did Microsoft Yammer live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Microsoft Yammer go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Microsoft Yammer again?

Yes

Likelihood to Recommend

Yammer provides a social network experience for the enterprise, providing a "Facebook for work". Its mobile app provides an excellent user experience, showing the full mix of communications happening across topics and teams. The web app, while it hasn't evolved much in the last few years, provides a good experience consuming news. Personally, I use Yammer every morning to see what's happening across my company and comment, like, and share to interact across silos.

As long as the size of the network inside of Yammer is managed - likely partitioning a large organization into business units, etc., - then Yammer provides an excellent platform for social news and "bottom up" collaboration across teams. Its free-form posting style, including articles and polls for interactive content, helps break down silos across the organization. Contrasted with the boring world of email, Yammer is a tantalizing world of pictures, GIFs, and videos.

At LiveTiles, we share company and team news via Yammer, enabling others to see the progress and milestones - from a new office to a new customer - without the heavy burden of a company newsletter or similarly curated content. Even though we have fully adopted Teams for day-to-day, intra-team communication, Yammer is still the gold standard for inter-team communication.

Microsoft Yammer - Social Networking for the Enterprise

Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft Yammer