Yammer Reviews

I just wanted to try out the program to know what it was and how it works and if it could enhance our office communications.  

I do not see the point of the product, and I do not like it to be honest. For example, one thing which I do not like overall with Microsoft products is that they are constantly changing them. The issue with that is that most of the updates and features which they are pressing users to adopt are not good or just not wanted or needed by the customers using the products.  

As an example, we did an email migration. Some of our users had contacts that were linked with the Outlook linking feature. This is a newer feature in Outlook, and nobody wanted it in the first place. It just made things confusing by adding unwanted information automatically, and a new feature does not need to be confusing. It shoul be tested first, it should be optional, and the current software trend is to do public beta testing. One person in our company had something like 30 linked contacts — emails and full phone numbers which were not his actually his own contacts. In the migration, these contacts all showed up as his.  

Microsoft has too many updates and they are updates that are not wanted. I could understand if updates were discussed or features are wanted, but Microsoft just throws things out there. In this case, they actually rolled back the feature some time after releasiung it. That should not be necessary and it just makes for further confusion. I think I am actually saying nothing new here, but lately almost every update which is coming out has some bugs or stops something else from working. Sometimes it is a driver problem, sometimes it is something else. But the frequency of the rollouts just increases the frequency of the bugs. It is not the best plan for software management.  

I would say the whole experience was negative, so that is why we stopped using it.  

We used the product recently for a short period of time less than a year ago.  

We did not use it long enough to really do testing and evaluation of the stability.  

It is enterprise software and was meant to be scalable. We never got to the point of rolling it out for the company.  

I have contacted technical support and it was okay but not very helpful. Many times the support people can not actually do anything. If I call about a problem with a feature or a bug, they can not fix it over the phone. So yeah, maybe they are trying their best and they are polite, but if you call about an actual problem rather than how to use a feature, they can not really be of much help. The support guys were great, but the issue is that they are not magicians.  

The initial setup was straight-forward. We were able to set it up on and we did it by ourselves.  

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate Microsoft Yammer as a four-out-of-ten. It was probably not useless, but it was of no help for our company and our situation.   

We primarily use the solution for the social sharing of announcements, pictures, and articles related to our sector, among other things.

The most valuable aspect of the solution is that anyone can post anything. It's free and people can do it on their own. They don't have to translate to publish. 

It's really easy to use the solution.

Because we are in Belgium, we have two languages and the program is only in one language. It could have been interesting to have it in both French and in Dutch. 

We tried to integrate into SharePoint, but it was not really efficient.

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable, We had no problem scaling it. We have about 300 users right now.

Technical support is okay. I don't think we've had to contact them a lot.

As I recall, the initial setup was easy. It's very straightforward. We have two people handling maintenance currently.

We use the cloud deployment model.

I've heard people say that we have lots of tools for doing things that are quite similar to Yammer. People in our organization don't really understand if they have to go on SharePoint, the internet, or Yammer. My advice to others would be to inform people how to use the tools and the purpose of these tools and give their team training. 

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.

I primarily use the solution for business related chatting. We use it mainly to publish and to have social communications on the business side. On a business level, it's used for the internal team to publish their opinions or their ideas, and share them to the group.

The design of the solution is its most valuable feature.

Yammer shall not stay an independent non integrated service and shall not duplicate what team and outlook services do - it can be the heart of outlook conversations / publishing

The solution is stable.

I've found Team or Skype for Business are more useful than Yammer.

I'd rate the solution three out of ten.

I did not find Yammer too useful for my type of business. You cannot sell a Ferrari to someone who does not drive very fast, for example, as they would give Ferrari a low rating because they aren't using as it's meant to be used. For my type of business, I need something to be more flexible on integration. I'm not on the marketing side and do not need to publish something on Yammer for everyone to see, or for everyone to share their opinion on. 

If Yammer were to have more integration, the product might be more useful for me. I'd probably rate it at a nine or ten in that case. However, for me, in terms of helping my type of business, it's not ideal and I'm rating it rather low.

The integration with Teams is the biggest value for us. In fact, it has only become more valuable now that it has integration with Teams. Teams allows you to stream, so that's good.

The solution must be able to stream by itself, without integration, the same way that you are able to do it on Facebook Live, Instagram, etc. Streaming must be embedded into it.

The ability to just be live, I think is very important. You don't want to leave the app to go live. You want to be able to just go live within the app. So I think that their internet streaming ability would be a very good feature to add.

I'll give it a six out of ten because I'm comparing it to what's out there. It's not the best solution out there. It doesn't compare well to the new tools that are in the market. It's not the best, but it's getting there.

We are system integrators, and we use this solution in our group for social networking.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the communication events. We can set up meetings and events. 

I would like to see secure communication channels for our group.

This solution needs to be integrated with the Microsoft Cloud.

This solution would be improved if it was well integrated with other communication applications.

We have a lot of applications for communication, including WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram. In the future, I think that we need to have only one application for communication.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

Primary use is for workgroups. We already have some in place. Yammer is quite good.

Users can access their own workgroups and it improves the communication among people, particularly people who have the same task to perform in different locations, in different countries.

The integration with Microsoft Office and the fact that it is in the cloud. Also, it's quite easy to use.

I would like to see a fancier user interface. That is one of the weak points of Yammer.

I haven't had any complaints from users about the availability of the system.

Scalability is good. The only point of concern we have is that you need to be registered in Active Directory, and that can limit usage. But apart from that, I think that we can grow with no particular issues.

As far as I know, we have not had any requests for support. We are able to manage it internally. I don't have any open requests for external support. However, I'm not the person who manages it.

We didn't use any workgroup tool before Yammer. We adopted Yammer because it was included in the Office 365 toolset.

Our most important criteria when selecting a vendor, apart from the product being easy to use, accessible, cloud-based, include security - that is another big and important criterion for us - and, finally, the ability to reach people who are not in our Active Directory domain.

The initial setup was not that easy because of managing the tenant in Office 365. The migration to that tenant for countries that are not in the same domain was not easy, the domain synchronization. Managing the forest of different domains was not as simple as expected.

Specifically, my search was related to a tool for employees to communicate to all employees; not really for work-grouping, but more related to one-way communication, top-down, from the HR people to the employees. The point is how to reach people which are not IT or IS users. Not all our employees are IT users and we need to communicate with them through their own devices, typically their smartphones.

Yammer and Facebook were the only choices on our shortlist.

Look closely at the Office 365 context you are in, and be sure that the accessibility or the availability of the system will be spread as much as possible throughout the organization.

I would rate Yammer at eight out of 10 because it's good, it works, it's reasonably easy to use. But, again, the weak point would be that the user interface is not as fancy as people are used to having, like when using social networks. It is less social network-oriented than Facebook, for instance, in terms of ease of use and user interface. And again, there is the point that users need to be in the Acting Directory to exploit the features.

Ease of use and the ability to join networks outside of the organization. These are valuable to drive adoption and to collaborate, be informed of events, and developments in related organizations.

We have set Yammer up inside IFrames that appear on our intranet home page, most content pages, and in all-team sites. This has enabled us to cater to large and very small audiences where they interact and not require a separate application or login.

The ability to edit replies to previous posts or answers would be useful. Navigation to different Yammer Groups could be improved. Navigation to external groups could be better integrated to reduce clicks. This is a minor annoyance only.

We have been using this for four years.

There were no issues with stability.

There were no issues with scalability.

No external support has been needed from the vendor. Online help and community support has been enough.

Apart from chat programs and discussion lists (e.g., SharePoint, MS Lync, and IBM Sametime), there hasn't been a similar product I've used at work previously.

The installation was very simple. Just follow the prompts and the setup help.

I haven't been involved with licensing issues.

This was installed when I joined this company.

Undertake a small trial before rolling it out to an enterprise. This will help build interest. Don't attempt to control what gets posted, apart from the usual ethical/legal guidelines and rules.

Messaging and groups are the most valuable features.

It is easy to join groups of interest and keep up-to-date with the relevant topics.

You can only search by words or person, you cannot filter by person plus terms, date, etc. If you are looking for a message that was posted by a certain person two months ago, you will have to scroll back through all of their posts to find it. Thus, the "search" feature needs to improve.

I have used this solution for three years.

There were no stability issues.

The technical support seemed okay. I was not really involved, but from my perspective as a user, it seemed like any technical support which was required was available. The Yammer portal/service had very few outages.

Previously, we were using the company's intranet and emails. Switched to this solution in the hope of better visibility and employee involvement.

It is okay as a company initiative, but it can be bypassed as some teams move to other options like Slack.

• Ease of creating groups
• Simple but good user experience on mobile
• Ability to adaptively stream videos inline in the wall
• Ability to track foul words

• Increased collaboration between geographically distributed teams.
• Good way to share files and videos on topics of common interest.

Cannot import/invite bulk users from an active directory security group.

Two years.

No issues.

No issues.

Not interfaced with the support team.

Used Jive, but switched as Yammer became bundled with Office 365 at no additional cost.

Not involved in admin activities/setup, hence I cannot comment.

Cannot comment, as I do not have this info.

Jive and SharePoint.

Create a good governance mechanism and be weary of group/community explosion in the initial fad days. Need to ensure duplicate groups are not created.

My organization makes more use of Office 365 Groups rather than Yammer.

Yammer is a good collaboration tool for the entire organization. You can create groups that are public or private for specific users.

There is a need for full integration with the other features of Office 365.

Office 365 uses Outlook for the messaging box but Yammer has it own messaging box. Searching in Yammer is restricted to its own messaging box. The Outlook box can still be accessed offline.

I would like to see Microsoft's Lync integrated with Yammer for video conferencing.

I have used this solution for three years.

There were no stability issues.

There were no scalability issues.

Office 365 Groups is well-integrated with the other features of Office 365, especially SharePoint.

The setup was straightforward.

I would recommend Yammer to new users.

Streamlining departmental workflow with built in QC. Here are only a few use cases:

for Human Resources:

Company wide announcements

Company FAQ / Policy and Procedures

Company Polling

Forms Repository

New Hire Orientation – Group Communication/Documentation

Training Videos

for IT departments:

Very useful client side, remote site, managing projects/rollouts or in the server room.

Yammer can be accessed from hand held devices as a traveling KB for staff.

Help Desk personnel and Engineers can access software in remote locations.

Personnel can update projects directly from their mobile devices providing real time status updates.

Tenant disk space is not effected - archiving files

Software Deployment / File storage

Help Desk FAQs – Rapid Response

Real time project tracking,

Managers can look into conversations and see employees pain points.

Built in Quality control and some Lean Enterprise tact

Users can self organize and collaborate quickly

Document control - Used as a doc repository..

I can go on and on with valuable uses.

going on 2 years

No

No

No

6

6

No

Straightforward. But to understand all options in the portal a little bit of reading is required..

I Implemented for numerous orgs.

Ongoing.

Here are just a few benefits of Yammer

Closes Gap between Management and Customer facing employees

Lean process improvements and quality control are built into Yammer

Instant process improvements

Built in quality controls

Removes redundancy in daily workflows

Continuous improvement is built in

Every user streamlines daily workflows with specific people/orgs they interact with. Users adapt and change dynamically as initiatives and daily work flows change.

The ability to easily communicate and engage with the entire organization is my favorite feature, as it allows everyone within the organization to have a voice.

It is especially valuable for multi-site and multi-region organizations. It allows for input, feedback, and discourse regardless of where the users are.

There is room for improvement in the customization and administration aspects of the product. Being able to edit posts with a revision history is a long sought-after feature.

I have used this solution for five years.

I have never experienced any major stability issues.

As the product is a hosted solution, the scalability from an infrastructure perspective in non-existent. However, there can be some hiccups in scaling the usage to different sites or regions, i.e., if they do not know how to best use and harness the power of Yammer.

The technical support is outstanding, and the Yammer team is open and responsive on issues, feedback, and suggestions.

Prior to Yammer, the go-to collaboration for the enterprise was generally SharePoint team sites.

The product is bundled with all the Office 365 levels, and is an invaluable part of the package.

We looked at other solutions including HipChat, Campfire and Teambox.

If you're a business that has Office 365, then utilizing Yammer should be a no-brainer. I'd recommend allowing users to create groups as they see fit, but it may be worth setting up the naming and branding standards when doing so. This ensures, that regardless of where the users go on Yammer, they'll have similar experiences across all the groups.

Collaboration and the integration with O365. There are so many features, everything you could ever want, which is great for team collaboration.

It breaks down the silos of communication in organizations.

It just needs a more defined roadmap. Yammer is part of O365 and the whole platform is ever evolving, and new features show up sometimes unannounced, and you don't find out until one of your end users mentions it.

We have been using the solution for over five years.

We did not have any issues with stability.

We definitely did not have any issues with scalability.

We didn't use any other solutions previously, other than Facebook or Twitter.

The setup is extremely easy.

Pricing is part of the O365 subscription.

We did not evaluate other solutions.

You need an upper-level management buy-in and a good communication plan for end users to make this successful.

I have found it to be a good tool for building communities and for improving communication. I love the ability to create public and private groups, moderate comments, and export messages.

Yammer allowed our institution to engage many of our online students all over the world.

Perhaps keep working on the integration of other Office products.

I have been using this since 2014.

Being able to tag another user is valuable when you want them to see your post. As a developer, I have to work and coordinate with various other teams and business areas. Being able to tag another user from those areas allows me to provide transparency with my work.

Yammer has allowed the entire company to be able to communicate with each other when the company has internal employees from all over the world. It allows us to provide transparency on projects and everyday happenings.

There needs to be an "Edit" functionality for posts and replies because grammar and spelling mistakes do happen. Sometimes they aren't caught until after posting.

I have been using this solution since I started my current position as a software engineer about two years ago.

Yammer has been fairly stable. I've only experienced a few downtimes in all the time I've been using it.

Since we use this through Office 365, scalability doesn't apply on our end.

Our Help Desk is the contact point with their technical support. The tech support does seem to be fairly responsive to our questions and downtimes.

This was implemented before I arrived at the company.

Most of the development teams have been moved to Confluence and Slack, but they still use Yammer.

Split your functional teams into Yammer groups. If those teams have small groups within them, then give them their own Yammer group too.

This product was intended to be a corporate social network, but it serves many purposes to different people.

• In our organization, we have groups dedicated to outside interests like Formula 1, exciting innovations, internal projects, client projects, and knowledge sharing communities of practice.
• The groups enable group discussion on a large scale without polluting my email inbox. I can access it at my own pace, in my own time. 
• I use Yammer to learn from others and to get access to the wealth of knowledge in our organization.
• Primarily, the group conversations and document sharing capabilities are what we use. Some people have not adopted it, so it is only as useful as the information available, based on the user base.
• It can be a really useful tool to avoid duplication of effort where others share things that they have done before.
• I would say the network and reach you get with this tool is what makes it great. I get answers from people I don't know and have never met. However, I get to learn from them and 'virtually' meet them, broadening my own network.

Productivity can be increased as colleagues from across the world share their knowledge and experiences, reducing the need to create deliverables that may have been previously created.

It also broadens the network of an employee and gives them opportunities to learn from people in the same field. Those people would not normally be known to them and they would not have met them or gained that knowledge, without a collaborative conversation tool like Yammer.

The product itself is fine, in that it serves a purpose. The issue is in the adoption.

• Employees need to be trained on how to use it, and to understand its benefits to encourage more adoption.
• Without people using the tool, email traffic increases. The knowledge sharing is limited to people who they know in their local communities.
• In addition, Yammer is just one of many tools Microsoft has for collaboration. Knowing which tool to use can be daunting.
• With the release of teams and groups, Yammer is losing its purpose slightly.
• I think that my rating is really around the usefulness of the product.
• In terms of how it works as a collaborative tool, it is probably a 4. My issues with Yammer are mostly around the fact that Microsoft has included it with Office 365, but they haven't integrated it with all of their other tools.
• The user profile is separate to the one on Delve and it has to be maintained separately.
• When documents are uploaded to Yammer, there is no way to add metadata to it.
• Documents are not stored in an associated SharePoint site, so it is separate to the document management solutions we have with SharePoint.
• It is disjointed and Microsoft doesn't seem to be doing much more to integrate it. They are spending more time integrating teams instead.

I have used Yammer since 2011/2012.

We have not had any stability issues.

We have not had scalability issues. However, the larger the organization and the less the adoption, the less value you get out of the tool.

There was no tool that I used which served the same purpose. I think SharePoint had a social wall feed, which was similar on team sites, but this wasn't well adopted. Some more technical teams used Slack.

There was no setup required when it came about. It was a case of going onto the website and signing up with your corporate email and creating a password.

Initial issues stemmed from the first person in the organization signing up, thereby becoming the network admin. This has changed now with Microsoft acquiring Yammer. It has become part of the Office 365 offering and security is much more managed.

All users get access through their corporation if they use Office 365.

We didn’t look at alternatives. It was a free tool initially and now forms part of the Office 365 offering at all licensing levels.

• It is all about creating a strong culture from the leadership down, where collaborating and sharing on Yammer is encouraged.
• Adoption will be the key between success and failure of the Yammer network uptake and usefulness.
• It also needs someone to manage it and encourage positive sharing, whilst monitoring usage.

The ability for people from anywhere around the world, from any team, to connect and share their posts in groups, create polls, make group announcements, and provide feedback and recognition posts.

• In its simplicity, it has given our people across our organization and around the world a voice
• Helped people to network, ask questions, and get answers
• Helped people to share activity and best practices
• Segments liked-minded people together
• Creates engagement
• Allows people to give feedback and improve our culture

It's constantly evolving and Microsoft allows users to suggest ideas to improve.

There's always going to be room for improvement, because it's not the answer for everything. But it is a start.

For me, it's about:

• Having more control over the all network feed
• Improving how people filter the good stuff from all the noise
• Allowing you to make certain important posts sticky at the top
• Improving the removal process of people who are no longer with your business
• Better integration with Microsoft products in the cloud

I have used Yammer for about three years.

There are not problems with stability. It's all Microsoft stuff, so it’s pretty well managed.

We have had no scalability issues.

I haven't used support yet, but plan to soon.

We didn't have a previous solution.

It was a really simple setup. You can either join Yammer Freemium or purchase an Enterprise Office 365 licenses, which includes Yammer. I'd recommend this approach.

Go for a corporate/enterprise license to give you full admin control of Yammer, rather than the limited free version.

We didn’t look at alternatives, simply because this social network came with the license. Therefore, it was a one-time price.

First consider whether you plan to purchase a license. If not, then I'd look into other software to suit your needs. If, however, you are investing in Microsoft software for your business, then Yammer is a great product.

Really understand what you need in terms of socially connecting your people and teams. If your teams are spread across a country or around the world, this is a great way of connecting everyone together.

Make sure you invest a bit of time to train, guide, and build up a solid and competent community manager network.

• External collaboration with partners: There is a unified way to send updates about departments and the enterprise, rather than sending separate communications.
• Inbox and notification for updates: This helps to manage messaging to stakeholders in a centralized and contextual way, rather than silo information sharing.
• Integration with Microsoft Office feeds: Since the enterprise works with Office, it is easy to use along with those tools.

We have used targeted notifications regarding the outages and maintenance windows to communicate with our stakeholders. This has helped centralized messaging for us.

Yammer can improve the effectiveness of its usage by addressing the metrics that measure user trust and perception. It measures the sentiments of posts using analytics and increases the ease of use.

I have used this solution for three years.

There were no stability issues. The product has been fairly stable.

There were no scalability issues.

I would give technical support a rating of 7/10.

The setup was straightforward.

This is a good option for medium to large-sized business enterprises.

We looked at the Slack solution.

If you are a Microsoft Shop, then Yammer has the potential to tie up with SharePoint and address a lot of the enterprise needs, in terms of messaging and content management.

Yammer's group page functionality is useful for large groups to collaborate instantaneously. It's very easy to set up group pages.

In a prior organization, Yammer was in the process of being piloted across our department. The ability to collaborate via group pages/sites was something people liked.

• Yammer's integration into the Microsoft Office 365 product suite was not yet in place when we were piloting the product.
• It needs better integration with other Office 365 products. They only just released the integration this March.
• They should add more "Slack-like" features. Although they are different products, most people in the development community need Slack and they don't need Yammer.

• For large organizations, Yammer could work well.
• The notification features on the web app were confusing and lacking.
• The mobile app is a much better UI/UX design between the two.

I have been using Yammer for one year.

We did not have any stability issues.

The lack of integration into the Microsoft Office 365 made it difficult to champion throughout the organization. Yammer was being introduced into an environment where collaboration was difficult to find.

The Office 365 Roadmap blog was a good place to find details on what was going to be included in the future releases.

We didn’t have anything previous to this solution.

The initial setup was straightforward. The Yammer web app was simple to log into with Office 365 login credentials. The mobile app was better, but was being rolled out later.

Make sure that you have at least 1000 licenses so you have a large enough user group to pilot the product.

The pricing is reasonable as it's a part of the Microsoft Office 365 product suite.

We evaluated Slack, which had different use cases than Yammer.

Make sure that you have at least 1000 licenses so you have a large enough user group to pilot the product.

Most valuable to me is the simplicity of the Yammer mobile app. I can check notifications and replies on the run

If someone needs to communicate with 50 people at the same and create collaboration about certain topic, he doesn't need to send communication to everyone in his inbox. Rather, he just needs one Yammer post and everyone will see it and interact accordingly.

Integration with other Office 365 products is still weak, because Yammer initially wasn't a Microsoft product. They bought it from a third-party.

I have been using Yammer for three years.

We have not had stability issues.

We have not had scalability issues.

I would give technical support a rating of 8/10. It is Microsoft support.

We were using a different solution named Beezy. It was based on the SharePoint on-premises solution. It wasn't responsive with mobiles and its scalability was weak.

The initial setup was straightforward. Even after we enabled Office 365 Single Sign-on with ADFS to enhance authentication, it was nice and straightforward. Not many complexities.

I consider Yammer to be the best business collaborative tool. If you want to try it, I advise using the free license for around one year and decide if you want to continue with it or not.

We evaluated the new version of Beezy and the social micro-blogging feature in SharePoint 2013. Both are very far from Yammer.

If you are looking for a business collaborative tool, start with Yammer today.

Reaching and engaging with co-workers in a less corporate structure.

Co-workers feel comfortable creating groups for collaboration, communication, and non-work related, personable groups. It has also increased confidence, interpersonal relationships, and overall communication and engagement.

Being able to edit a post after it has posted.

When a user creates a post, it goes into a group or the main global feed. Once that post has been posted, you cannot edit the post to change it. For example, if I wrote, “New Project coming soon” and realized after posting it that I misspelled a word, I cannot edit my post to change it to. “New Project Coming Soon”.

Being able to move a post to a different group after it has posted.

When a user posts something in a group, they cannot change what group it is posted to. For example, if I posted “Check out the new tasks list” in the main global Yammer feed, but then after posting it I realize di meant tp post it into a different Group, I cannot move that post to a different Yammer group.

I have used Yammer for four years.

The only stability issue was in regards to getting the web part to display correctly.

We have had no scalability issues.

Technical support specifically gets a fair rating. Technical support through Yammer groups is good, but you have to do a lot of sorting and sifting.

We did not have a previous solution.

The initial setup of the front-end was straightforward.

We didn’t evaluate other options.

Have a Yam Jam or other type of exciting event to get user adoption rates up with give aways or other special incentives for signing up, posting, and adding information.

The public sharing of knowledge and answers to questions has been the most valuable feature. Many associates can learn the answer to the question or learn something new to help them with their job just by scrolling through posts.

It has improved information sharing across the company which allows for problems to be solved much faster. It really helps to have groups that are monitored by 1-2 admins that can route questions to the right people through tagging. This has helped us solve internal problems very quickly and external problems when our front-line associates post questions from customers.

The biggest area for improvement would be in analytics. There is not much offered today, but there is more coming soon.

I have used it for 6 years.

Technical questions get answered or addressed quickly. If it's something that can't be solved right away, Microsoft keeps you updated on when it might be solved.

Integration into SharePoint is a valuable feature as it provides better exposure and access to users.

It allows users in different teams to interact in real time.

There needs to be access to a channel, without the need to sign-in.

Right now, if you are a Yammer channel owner, then you can ‘invite’ people to join it. That invitation would require the other person to accept the invitation and ‘login’ to Yammer. By logging into the Office 365 Portal, you are not automatically logged into Yammer. Yammer is currently run as a separate portal experience instead of a blended service, i.e., in the use case of ‘channels’.

If I embed my Yammer channel into a SharePoint Web Part and you are not logged into Yammer, your will see a block on the screen that says ‘login’.

I have used this solution for a year.

There were no stability issues.

There were no scalability issues.

The technical support was good.

The setup was straightforward.

It is a part of the enterprise licensing.

• Test with users
• Know your use case
• Get management support for use case

The idea crowdsourcing features are valuable because they show the business benefit of this social tool.

It drives incremental improvement through idea sharing.

It needs more support for third-party apps. Since third-party apps can increase the actual functionality of Yammer, they are very useful. However, when it comes to integration and setup of these apps, it could be easier.

I have used Yammer for nine months.

I have not encountered stability issues.

Onboarding was an issue, but we found a solution which helped us.

Technical support is good. They have a very good customer success program where they handhold you through rollout and any needed technical support.

We didn’t use a previous solution.

We evaluated Facebook at Work, but it wasn’t for us.

Find a core purpose for it so employees know why they are using it.

Knowledge sharing between co-workers is a valuable feature. It helps develop a knowledge-sharing culture. It encourages working together and smooths out work relationships.

In my previous organization, we used Yammer to share what we were working on, be it big or small projects. This brought about innovative ideas from co-workers. This often completely changed the way we work on a project.

The integration with other Office 365 products can be improved to create a smooth interaction with Outlook. The users and their email addresses should be the same across all platforms, as they are owned by one company.

I have used this solution for six years.

No stability issues were experienced. However, it was a steep change from the old days where we had a lot of unstable versions. That made it difficult for us, i.e., the enablers that needed to lobby the staff so that they would change the traditional way of working.

We had some scalability issues. The main challenge was to bring the top management on board. For Yammer to be successful in your organization, you will need buy-in from management.

Management always asks about the added-value, impact, and the results. This is very difficult to measure unless the solution has already been implemented.

The Yammer staff is very quick to help. There is an external network for anyone to join. It is set up for users to ask questions and get help. The level is very professional and quick.

We used our own intranet for collaboration and engagement which was less-functional and buggy at times to fix.

The setup was very straightforward. You can just join by using your company's email address. All your profile information is imported to Yammer and vice versa.

My organization invested a significant amount of money in the Office 365 package. Yammer is a must, if you plan to work on improving the internal communication and collaboration among your staff.

We did not evaluate other options, as it came in the package with Office 365.

You will need a strategy on how to bring people on board. For example, you can use short trainings/webinars to explain the importance of the tool and how to do the basics. Before all of that, the management has to believe in it and agree to use it.

I did not really find many valuable features. It was a tool to develop communities wherein we could carry out some good discussions within defined groups.

Otherwise, it was meant to act as more of a social media communication tool. It never achieved good adoption globally. Most of the functionality lay dormant for most of my tenure there.

It was reasonably good at creating online communities of interest. There were some super users who enjoyed having that space to share details of various projects. However, it was mostly slow, clunky, and frustrating to use.

The user experience could be improved. It needs more speed and interaction to drive its utility when streaming videos or performing uploads.

I used this solution at Kantar, the market research arm of WPP, for three and a half years.

There were no stability issues other than the generally slow speed of the tool.

There were no scalability issues.

I never used technical support.

I did not use a previous solution. I think that Facebook's Workplace or StaffConnect would have done the job in a more engaging and user-friendly manner. They would have driven more interaction between staff members.

The initial setup was pretty simple using a cloud-based interface. Administrator privileges were determined to manage, add, delete, and to do some monitoring.

Initially, Kantar was able to negotiate an incredible rate of £0.73 per user/per month prior to their acquisition by Microsoft. The price then escalated to £3.00 per user/ per month!!

We evaluated Jive. Based on the difference in price, we decided not to proceed.

Research the market. There are more interesting products out there that have better UX and are more interactive and engaging.

• Enables internal communication between different countries and locations.
• Provides easy access and low hierarchy: Everyone is able to comment, ask questions, share knowledge, and get to know colleagues.

• Has brought leaders closer to people: Leaders can share video messages which are more engaging than just faceless email messages.
• People are encouraged to comment on these messages or ask questions
• Leaders/managers can respond back

They need to somehow enable better document sharing features. They need to provide joint drafting of documents.

In regards to the document sharing and modifying feature, currently it does not entirely work together with the mobile devices.

If the documents are saved in OneDrive, then the connection to Yammer is not very easy to use.

I have used this solution for a little over three years.

There were no stability issues.

At first, we did encounter some scalability issues on some mobile devices.

I would give the technical support a rating of 6/10.

It takes a long time before getting a reply. Sometimes there are language barriers in terms of poor English or when no Finnish speakers are available.

We did not have any other tool before this one.

The setup was very easy. It helped a lot that I participated in the Yammer Community Manager training that was organized by Blue Meteorite.

It is good to know that Yammer is now included in the Microsoft Office 365 subscription without any extra fee.

We looked at the WhatsApp business version, but it was not sufficient. Later, we also looked into Slack. However, we still haven't decided whether we should change or not.

You should exchange experiences with other companies who have implemented this solution. You might also participate in the Yammer Community Manager training as well. However, the exact way to launch Yammer depends on the needs of the organization.

You can post content in the “All Company Group” in a more casual way. Members consider the content as "for your information", rather than some serious information that must be read.

It is very easy to create a group/community, but searching for a specific group that is relevant to my interest is quite hard. This is because we do not set any particular policies to describe the "interests" or "objectives" of that group.

It will be better for the vendor to set certain guidelines as to how to create a group name and to provide this information to the other users.

I have used this product for about six months.

We did encounter some stability issues, but they were mainly due to our own system's stability.

I did not encounter any scalability issues.

I would give the technical support a rating of 3/10.

The setup was extremely complex. However, that was because we had heavily customized the project.

We used the trial version before we purchased the Yammer enterprise version. As the feature-set between these two versions is very different, we could not import the contents from the trial version to the official one. This was very inconvenient.

We did not evaluate other options. We needed to use this product along with the installment of Microsoft Office 365.

Yammer is suitable for an organization that has many branches or offices. Most of the users are already familiar with social media communication. The application is useful to virtually make friends and to share information/experiences.

However, the company needs to set and educate the usage policy. This is a system for an organization and not for fun.

• IM
• Groups
• Mobile applications
• Integration with Office
• Notifications

The product has allowed cross-functional discussions across every business group throughout the company. There was very little communication across business units prior to deployment. It is easy to find experts in a particular subject matter with a simple post to a group or to the company-wide group.

• Asynchronous, persistent chats
• Search capability
• Tighter integration with Outlook (i.e., be able to post directly to Yammer groups from Outlook)

I did not encounter any issues with stability.

I did not encounter any issues with scalability.

We previously used Chatter from Salesforce. We switched because the company was deploying Office 365 and it made more sense strategically to fully leverage Yammer instead. There were a smaller number of users on Chatter versus Yammer.

The user account setup is not automatic as a person activates Office 365. I was not involved in the setup of the environment.

This is an excellent choice if you have made the investment into Office 365. Announcement of teams should offer even better functionality. If you are not an Office 365 shop, then there are probably better options (i.e., Slack, Facebook for Work).

• Inline video
• Mobile apps
• Secure collaboration environment for crowdsourcing knowledge
• Translation tool

We have been able to have multi-country project teams where members can interact in their own language.

Ability to edit posts and also rich text would be good. Currently, unlike other social tools like Facebook at Work and Chatter, Yammer does not have the ability to edit posts. Also, the only rich text (bold/italics/bullets) that are supported are in the Announcements.

I know that Microsoft are currently testing the editing feature and it is due to be released in the next couple of months. This is the most requested feature which we receive from our users.

We have been using this solution for eighteen months.

Occasionally we have some stability issues. But that is to be expected in a rapidly developing platform and the A-B testing does give some stability issues sometimes.

I did not encounter any issues with scalability.

Technical support is very good and responsive. We have premier support.

The setup was straightforward but inconsistent. Now that it is fully integrated with Office 365, the consistency is there.

We evaluated Jive and Facebook Business.

Go for it, especially if you are a Microsoft shop.

Communication. We are able to communicate and keep in touch with a global audience.

As a global company, we have IT staff and users around the world. If we need to communicate a message or just make other people aware of an outage or other important information, the easiest way is to post it on yammer. Not only will they get an email about a new post, but if they
have it installed on a mobile device, they will also get a notification.

It only allows for global communication, but that requires people to use it as well

Microsoft has to decide what to do with this product for the business. Without every business committing to 365, Yammer is a separate application and does not tie into Skype for Business or SharePoint 2013 and previous versions.

If MS could somehow incorporate Yammer to SharePoint and Skype for Business, then it would have a lot more uses and be easier for users to take advantage of.

Yammer is very basic. They have made very minor improvements to it. It does not hold up when comparing it to what other social media apps can do. Using it for a business without all of the other functionality really limits what you can do with it.

MS made us plenty of promises for Yammer and have not delivered. There is a good chance we will be done using it before the year is up.

We have been using this solution for about two years.

I did not encounter any issues with stability.

I did not encounter any issues with scalability.

It is typical Microsoft support, i.e, not very helpful.

We currently use SharePoint. However, the two apps are not tied together.

The installation was straightforward.

Read the fine print. That goes for all MS licensing for an enterprise.

It is a great communication tool, but if you have too many ways to communicate, then this may be a burden. It is also difficult with users who are already using Facebook, LinkedIn, Skype for Business, SharePoint, Twitter, etc.

The most valuable feature is the ability to reach all parts of the organisation to share ideas and best practices.

Getting people to first share their ideas, and then for others to then respond and help out has been a key feature of our Yammer usage.

The ability to edit posts can be frustrating for some. The versioning control could also be better. Some of these issues have to do with training and changing entrenched behaviours.

We have been using the product since June 2014.

Stability is pretty good and you can 'optimise' suggested solutions like video size and definition for your own network capabilities.

I have not encountered any scalability issues, except for taxonomy and groups admin but that is a good problem to have.

Technical support is very good; I only require minimal support from my internal team.

We had Jive and switched for a couple of reasons: interoperability with other systems and a switch to a more easy to use and understand system. The translation feature is incredibly useful for a multilingual company like ours, especially with the Asian language coverage.

Setup was relatively straightforward, with normal provisions for single sign on and governance. The complex part was the migration of content from the old system to the new, which required an enormous amount of effort.

Plan carefully and inform your users and power users straightforwardly and openly about the changes.

Pricing as part of the wider deal should be considered, as well as getting value for money when reaching out to external parties.

We are not evaluating other options at this stage; our initial evaluation occurred when we set out on this process in 2011.

Understand the limitations and embrace them.

• Announcements
• Notes
• @mentioning
• How not to follow conversations once your inputs have been received

From the point of view of knowledge sharing, we created a group per project. While we had SharePoint for storing documentation, we were able to link to these and give them content in Yammer.

• @mentioning and the fact that you can't then tidy up the name.
• Linking differing groups, without introducing hierarchy.
• I did a lot of UAT and security both internally to organisations and being a cloud SaaS caused issues. Therefore, I’d like to see more support documentation with regard to this.

I have used it for about three years.

Yammer was embedded in SharePoint. We experienced outages almost every Thursday; assuming this is a scheduled software update.

Technical support wasn't great. Our touch points in Microsoft Ireland were not knowledgeable enough on the product; issue experienced while going from Freemiun to Enterprise.

I did not previously use a different solution; first time using social enterprise.

Initial setup was very straightforward. It was prior to O365 integration. Simply access the Yammer URL, and set up your credentials. The company provisioning was carried out by Microsoft but I believe this was straightforward.

Before choosing this product, I don't believe we evaluated other options, but this was not my call.

Take the time to decide why your organisational culture will benefit from social enterprise. Let your workforce know that it is coming, communicate your organisational vision for it, and have a launch plan, training, champions and encouragement.

It is not about features, it is about empowerment. What I like is the easiness of engaging conversation with colleagues and management to help each other. I particularly like the simplicity to do this with customers and partners on external network in one click.

People share expertise and find solution faster while they are feeling to be part of the same team even if they work in different geo

Manageability and customization

1 year

Governance issues

Light bug and one outage.

No

Good through YCN, but sometimes I got frustrated by translation issue

Didn't need it yet.

Yes, SharePoint. No engagement were done, it was to complex not enough user friendly, to focus on documents and not on people

Very simple

Internal. Our IT especially because it is connected to our O365 environment.

I would say you need a person full time for initialization and governance and training for a month. But we didn't do it that way. It was the job from someone 2h per day during 2 months. We found somebody motivated and with a good spirit who was able to understand people jobs.

SharePoint 2013

Talk to business to understand how it can help them, get an executive sponsor (the higher is the better), be open for discussion as there will be a lot of skepticism and opponents essentially around two subjects: "Email is prime and I don't want a new channel of information" and "I'm not used to social spirit and tools." What is key: find what use they will love.