Why yammer is bad

These are noble aims. Microsoft has been trying to walk this line in the Office platform, as evidenced by the many investments in things like access control, security, eDiscovery, Legal Hold and many other features. Files across the Office services are stored in SharePoint or OneDrive—and because features like DLP, hold and discovery are supported for SharePoint and OneDrive, any Office service that uses this storage model inherits these compliance capabilities.

Until recently, Yammer has lacked the architecture to leverage either the substrate or SharePoint for primary file storage. Thus, Yammer has been out in the cold as far as many key compliance requirements go. You had to treat Yammer like a separate service and come up with your own compliance strategy. A stubborn insistence that any user should be allowed to create a Yammer group at any time for any reason meant that Yammer could not fit into any workspace provisioning strategy that you created for other Office services.

Users would have to use a more structured process than the out of the box behavior so that you could gather more details about the purpose, ownership and details of the collaboration that will take place in that new workspace. You could simply disable the native self-service capabilities for Office Group provisioning in Azure AD and now users would have to use your alternate process if they wanted to provision a new workspace.

But Yammer did not play by these rules. This meant that, again, you had to deal with Yammer as a separate entity in your overall Office governance strategy. The specific benefits of Native Mode are:. Essentially this change means that Yammer is moving in a direction where your provisioning, guest access, data governance, and hold and discovery approach can be unified across all the core Office services.

If we remember back to the beginning of this post, some of the frustrations about using Teams for our communities of practice were because Teams lacks the ability to curate posts and content over time into a usable library of knowledge.

Our strategy for our product area communities will allow the SMEs in each community to aggregate posts about a component of a product. This ensures that everyone knows where the event and the recording will live, but also allows the conversation to continue long after the training is done. These are just a few of the new or enhanced community management features of Yammer that will be coming based on the roadmap Microsoft provided at Ignite last year:. In addition to the community management features mentioned above, the Yammer communities brand new, modern look and feel will both help to re-ignite interest and spur adoption as the service becomes easier and more pleasant to use.

However, the best way to get them back is to show them this new Yammer is both easier to use and more accessible that ever before. The best way to do this is by showing how we can bring Yammer right to them —in the places that are working today, namely in Teams and in their inboxes. Soon, community members and managers will be able to have full-fidelity interactions with Yammer from directly within their inbox using the new Outlook integration. But, I also recognize bringing Yammer fully into the Office fold was essential.

Hopefully this first post of the series helped you understand why we are embarking on this project to transition our communities of practice from Teams to Yammer. It is crucially important for me that we do not fall into the trap of simply chasing the shiny new object.

Success will look like a collection of fully vibrant and engaged Yammer communities AND the continuation of our high adoption of Microsoft Teams. Any conversation-based system needs gravity to be successful. Users must be drawn to it daily and so if gravity is the lifeblood, neglect is the death knell. Great Article! I have one question. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Collaborate with confidence. AvePoint is the largest Microsoft data management solutions provider, offering a full suite of SaaS solutions to migrate, manage and protect data. Perhaps there's a team or department that is buried under meetings and Reply-All emails and would be grateful for a tool that will eliminate a good chunk of those. And when in doubt, ask! When you're finding out where people's pain points are in their jobs, ask what they think would help, and work in Yammer to that conversation.

Ask if they'd be willing to try it again to make their lives easier--or even as special insiders testing out functionality. People do like feeling that they're part of an exclusive crowd even when the goal is to make an inclusive experience. Shaun Jennings great questions. A one of our guest blogger has written about similar experiences. Check out the take on this here. But the NRMA article was new to me. Thank you for those resources. It is still going to be a hard adoption process and once we start, failure is not an option if we wish for it to thrive.

You're right about the use cases and the buy-in from leadership. I would love to also have a fully configured Yammer on roll-out, but isn't Yammer access and profile creation dependent upon user sign-up unlike other O resources? You must be a registered user to add a comment. If you've already registered, sign in.

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With no upper limit on the number of people who can take part in a conversation, Yammer provides the ability to communicate with thousands of employees, spanning diverse departments and locations.

It allows us to bring out the best in your culture, in your employees, your people. One example can be found at Rolls Royce, where a Yammer group focused on mental health and wellbeing has been transformational for the business. That means the organisation talks more about these issues. Talk was soon turned into action, with the brand now running bespoke performance culture training.

As part of this, participants are asked to use a mood elevator, designed to allow people to pinpoint where they sit at any given time on a scale of feelings. The enterprise social network gave people the chance to challenge this use of the word, and to ask if that was empowering sufferers, or if, in fact, it was supporting the stigma of mental health issues, and not acknowledging what it was really like to live with depression.

Case uses like this demonstrate the key difference when compared to Teams or Slack. While you can have conversations over the latter two platforms, their primary purpose is to assist and facilitate work. Yammer, on the other hand, leans more heavily toward social networking in its approach.

Admittedly, it may not be as suitable a solution for smaller enterprises, but for those with large especially deskless or mobile workforces, Yammer is still the app of choice. The rise of collaboration — and why Yammer is key. Richard Acreman. By Richard Acreman on 23 December Share this story. Topics Viewpoint.