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by Spooky23 3549 days ago
Too bad.

Yammer was cool in that you could point normal people at it and they got it -- Facebook for work. My team unleashed it in a large organization and got like 90% of the users signed up without announcing it formally, and had a core user community of 20-25% of the workforce engaged for awhile. They self-organized some cool communities and we had less trouble than we thought that we would. Unfortunately, there were some procurement issues that prevented us from moving forward with it.

The O365 tooling around groups, social via Sharepoint, etc is a half-completed, inscrutable mess. Our IT kids have a 6 page manual for signing into Skype for business. All of their new, cool stuff is either just built on mail or is some sort of Sharepoint skin. The only good thing about it is that we don't need to try to run the thing on-prem anymore.

4 comments

    90% of the users signed up without announcing it formally
Considering you can automatically provision accounts and get 100% signup, that's a pretty low number.

They rolled it out at my organization and everyone was automatically signed up and receiving notifications. We put together instructions for deleting your account and passed it around because that was the only way to get out of notifications.

Even still our communications department tried to push it as the primary platform to disseminate information and it was pretty worthless. It was destroyed in the annual survey they sent out and quickly faded into obscurity.

I guess it just depends on how you roll it out. I personally don't see the value in a social network for the office unless you're trying to identify who wastes time in the office not being productive.

We used the standalone free Yammer that requires opt-in.
Well, Yammer is not going away, they are just changing the way they sell (Standalone vs part of O365)
My company signed up for Yammer and it was a complete ghost town, no one used it. I think chat apps like Slack are much more what people want as far as socializing with their work mates.
Fortunately actual Facebook for Work is launching next month.