Yammer - Where does it fit?

Yammer is an enterprise social networking service in Microsoft 365 for internal communications within organizations. Think of it like Facebook but for your company. 

Microsoft acquired Yammer in 2012, for $1.2B, when social media frenzy was really taking off and the thought was this technology would change how employees would communicate and collaborate with each other across the enterprise. Fast forward 8 years and Yammer is still a little-known Microsoft 365 service, at least among construction organizations. 

In my opinion, the reason for it not having mass appeal/adoption is not because the technology is lacking, quite the opposite. The service is very robust and completely integrated across Microsoft 365. It provides a range of open APIs for integration, many plugins, and options for importing and exporting information. It also offers role-based permissions control as well as to do lists.

“Think of it like Facebook but for your company.” 

The issue is more with a lack of understanding what Yammer is and how it differentiates itself from other Microsoft 365 applications. Specifically, there are two Microsoft acquisitions that appear to be in direct competition with Yammer; Skype and Teams.  

Microsoft bought Skype in 2011 for $8.5B. Skype is used by both consumers and business for video and voice calls, as well as instant messaging. Skype for Business (the precursor to Teams) was and still is the go-to for messaging app, for a number of companies and is perceived to be like Yammer conversations (the core of Yammer). With the release of Teams, Microsoft is deprecating Skype for Business in favor of it’s universal communications app. Teams also includes Chat functionality and is fast becoming the “go to for everything” application, in Microsoft 365.     

So, what is so great about Yammer?

Yammer provides a really organized way of communicating with your organization as a whole. You can create conversation (chat) groups for team members to participate in as well as private messages. It has the ability to share files from SharePoint Online or those uploaded from your computer. You can create questions, polls, announcements, live events, and even publicly praise your group members. It is basically a very well-designed communications tool. But what stands out, for me, is its ability to easily organize, search, and share all these conversations across your organization. It promises to keep engagement high and conversations flowing.

A great use for Yammer would be a company training, organizational announcements, organizational lessons learned, and employee suggestions. For construction, specifically, you might want to use Yammer as a project centric Chat application because of its robust search and retention capabilities. Other opportunities would be to use an announcement area for project progress and key milestones, safety goals, value engineering ideas, safety training, and/or team building events.   

So, how does it still fit in the future of Microsoft 365? 

Teams continues to grow in popularity and reach. More and more functionality that was just in Yammer, is starting to make its way into Teams. Could it be completely absorbed into Teams?  Well there are some use cases that Yammer addresses that Teams does not. Messages in (even public) teams are not searchable or discoverable until you join a team first. Which means they are effectively invisible. There is no tenant-wide discovery feature for popular or trending conversations in Teams, and even ‘org-wide’ teams have significant membership limits for many organizations. Even the new modern SharePoint Communications sites do not deliver the power of the Yammer conversation model.

I posted a Microsoft 365 collaboration blog previously, describing how collaboration in Microsoft 365 is organized around Loops. Each application serves a specific communication purpose (Loop) and if you look at the collaboration apps, in Microsoft 365, you can start to see the angle in which a user might want to use one over the other depending on how you approach your work. 

• Content centric – SharePoint
• Organized team centric – Teams
• Task centric – Planner
• Conversation centric - Yammer

Ultimately, all of these apps could come together into one collaborative platform, like Teams or SharePoint, but Microsoft announced a new Yammer at the end of 2019; it is the biggest update to Yammer since it launched 10 years ago. 

The New Yammer, available now in Preview, boasts not just interface changes but a thorough overhaul of the complete product. Groups are replaced by Communities. The user interface is fresh and uncluttered and there are plenty of new features too. Such as pinned posts, conversations that can be closed, and the ability to push notifications for polls, praise, and question posts. The new Yammer has been in private preview since the start of 2020 and public preview in June 2020. There are also new Apps for iOS and Android as well as a new App for Microsoft Teams, called Communities, that brings the full Yammer experience into Teams.

I encourage you to try it out and see if it fits with the other applications you are currently using in Microsoft 365. 

If you have any questions and/or would like help Microsoft 365 for your organization, check out our managed services at LydonSolutions.com or if you would like a fully featured Project Management Information System (PMIS) that supports Microsoft 365, check out Construction Viz and submit a demo request.