it_user621045 - PeerSpot reviewer
Communications Specialist at a non-profit with 501-1,000 employees
Real User
Enables knowledge sharing, internal communication, and collaboration between teams.

What is most valuable?

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.

How has it helped my organization?

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.

What needs improvement?

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.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have used this solution for six years.

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April 2024
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What do I think about the stability of the solution?

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.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

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.

How are customer service and support?

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.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

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

How was the initial setup?

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.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

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.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

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

What other advice do I have?

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.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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it_user651534 - PeerSpot reviewer
PM - Management Consultant at a consultancy with 501-1,000 employees
Consultant
Has the ability to collaborate via group pages/sites. It needs better integration with other products.

What is most valuable?

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

How has it helped my organization?

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.

What needs improvement?

  • 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.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Yammer for one year.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

We did not have any stability issues.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

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.

How are customer service and technical support?

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

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We didn’t have anything previous to this solution.

How was the initial setup?

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.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

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.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

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

What other advice do I have?

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

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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Buyer's Guide
Yammer
April 2024
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it_user653547 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Lead at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees
Real User
The most valuable feature is the mobile app. Integration with other products is still weak.

What is most valuable?

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

How has it helped my organization?

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.

What needs improvement?

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

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Yammer for three years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

We have not had stability issues.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

We have not had scalability issues.

How are customer service and technical support?

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

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

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.

How was the initial setup?

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.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

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.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

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

What other advice do I have?

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

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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PeerSpot user
Consultant at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees
Consultant
Empowering environment, which needs a strategy. A sponsor, time and tenacity to transform the way we work successfully.

What is most valuable?

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.

How has it helped my organization?

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

What needs improvement?

Manageability and customization

For how long have I used the solution?

1 year

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

Governance issues

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Light bug and one outage.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

No

How are customer service and technical support?

Customer Service:

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

Technical Support:

Didn't need it yet.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

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

How was the initial setup?

Very simple

What about the implementation team?

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

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

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.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

SharePoint 2013

What other advice do I have?

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.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Program Manager Change & Communication at a insurance company with 501-1,000 employees
Real User
Stable and scalable, but doesn't integrate well with SharePoint
Pros and Cons
  • "It's really easy to use the solution."
  • "We tried to integrate into SharePoint, but it was not really efficient."

What is our primary use case?

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

What is most valuable?

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.

What needs improvement?

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.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've been using the solution for three years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The solution is stable.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

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

How are customer service and technical support?

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

How was the initial setup?

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

What other advice do I have?

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.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
PeerSpot user
Enterprise Social Consultant, Collaboration Services at a insurance company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
The public sharing of knowledge and answers to questions has been the most valuable feature.

What is most valuable?

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.

How has it helped my organization?

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.

What needs improvement?

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

For how long have I used the solution?

I have used it for 6 years.

How is customer service and technical support?

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.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
it_user613557 - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of IS/IT Communication, Global Information Technology at a pharma/biotech company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Vendor
Enables you to create a group or community. It is hard to search for a specific group relevant to my interest.

What is most valuable?

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.

How has it helped my organization?

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.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have used this product for about six months.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

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

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

I did not encounter any scalability issues.

How is customer service and technical support?

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

How was the initial setup?

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

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

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.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

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

What other advice do I have?

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.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
it_user9720 - PeerSpot reviewer
Owner with 51-200 employees
Consultant
Lync and Yammer

Over the past couple of years I’ve been working with SharePoint at various sites, and more recently with Lync and Yammer. Now these are two products that mainframers may not be that familiar with and I thought people might be interested to know more.

Microsoft Lync was called Microsoft Office Communicator. It’s an Instant Messaging client – like MSN Messenger or Yahoo! Messenger – that can be used either with Microsoft Lync Server or Lync Online, which is available with Microsoft Office 365. In fact it is an up-to-date version of Windows Messenger which was used with Microsoft Exchange Server.

As well as running on PCs, Lync 2010 has Windows Phone, Android, and iOS apps. Lync provides instant messaging, Voice Over IP, and video conferencing facilities, and uses Microsoft Outlook contacts stored in a Microsoft Exchange Server. Office can show whether other people are working on the same document, and Lync allows file sharing.

What makes it so useful is those really unimportant e-mails that you don’t need an audit trail for can be replaced by Instant Messaging conversations. That cuts down on the number of e-mails that need to be backed up each evening and eventually stored on the off-chance they’re important. And, of course, you can type or you can talk. And you can set up meetings with people in offices around the country and video conference – assuming your organization has the bandwidth to do so.

Lync and Sharepoint integrate to an extent – they’re both from Microsoft. For example, there’s an “online presence indicator next to an individual’s name wherever their name appears in a site collection in SharePoint”. “Assist in providing colleague suggestions for use in My Sites, My Profiles, and People Search”. And “through Lync, provide access to SharePoint people and skills search including names and skills and a link to the user’s My Site”. Thank you to J D Wade, who’s blog at http://wadingthrough.com/2012/04/04/lync-and-sharepoint-integration-more-than-presence-information/ was the source for these examples.

Yammer is described as an enterprise social network service. It was launched in 2008, but, more importantly, Microsoft bought it last year. Yammer acts like a corporate Facebook service. It allows people to send message to other individuals or to groups. Only people with the same domain name in their e-mail address can access the corporate Yammer network. As well as access from a PC, there’s Android Windows Phone and iPhone apps available.

Chris Wright, in his blog at http://www.cmswire.com/cms/social-business/five-yammer-features-that-sharepoint-users-are-going-to-love-020339.php, lists features of Yammer that SharePoint users will like. Chris says “SharePoint has never really had its own ‘messaging’ system, so the Yammer Inbox fills a real gap”. Chris adds: “Yammer polls are a nice quick way to ask a question of people in your community, and will add a lot to the sense of community SharePoint is trying to foster”. Looking ahead, Chris says that documents held in a Yammer feed can be edited in Office web apps. He says: “This is a great example of a few of the features SharePoint is bringing to the table to improve Yammer (rather than the other way round)”.

We know that Microsoft plans to integrate Yammer with SharePoint and Office 365. It appears that Yammer will eventually replace SharePoint’s newsfeed. It seems there’s a plan to share documents with Yammer using SharePoint. And Yammer users will be able to upload and store documents using SkyDrive Pro. A file preview and edit capability with Yammer will work in conjunction with Office Web Apps. There’s even talk about translation capabilities being added to Yammer. Eventually Yammer and Lync (and Exchange) will be integrated. 

From what I've seen, the integration of Yammer with Office 365 is excellent. You can see your Yammer feed at the same time as, for example, your Outlook e-mails.

The integration of Yammer builds on Open Graph – an open API protocol for following objects external to a social network site used by Facebook. IBMers are perhaps more familiar with OpenSocial 2.0 for IBM Connections. Both provide a way for people to follow things.

What makes Yammer and SharePoint integration so interesting is that staff can use a the type of social media they’re familiar with from home in a business situation. If I can see you’re meeting client A tomorrow, I might ask you to check how he thinks project X is going. Or I might even just want to say hello to someone who is an occasional customer. Yammer is a business tool that is fun and easy to use – certainly compared to the more heavyweight Web parts etc of SharePoint.

The fact that Instant Messaging and social media can be included in a business environment shows that these tools are maturing. And, like BYOD, it shows end users are driving the environment they want to experience at work. I wonder how long it will be, with IBM’s pushing of social media tools, before something like this is available to everyone on z/OS.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
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Updated: April 2024
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