Yammer Reviews

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.

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

• 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.

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.

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.