What is Yammer and Its Relation to SharePoint 2013?

What is Yammer and Its Relation to SharePoint 2013?

Posted by Sophina Dillard on Tuesday, 14 January 2014 0

According wiki’s definition Yammer is a freemium enterprise social network service that was launched in 2008 and sold to Microsoft at 1.2 billion in 2012. Yammer is a remote communication mode in between the organization. With a Yammer, you’re always connected to your coworkers, and can take part in the information flow and conversations. Get into your network to find what exactly you need and determine or find out that you didn’t know to make decisions quickly, and later get the work done and keep moving.

Today social media networking is not just making an impact on our day to day life but even organizations are taking big decisions over these enterprise social networking. According to Gartner, over 75% of Fortune 1000 companies will undertake some kind of online social-networking initiative for marketing or customer relations purposes by 2014. In today’s article we will discuss why Microsoft bought Yammer and what is the relation between Yammer and SharePoint 2013.

 When we talk about SharePoint 2010 its features and social networking were pretty elementary. At this point of time many organizations felt embarrassed and had turn to other third party vendors like Yammer and NewsGator for the social networking within the organization. But here buying Yammer gave Microsoft that insight of being a cut-throat competitor in the enterprise of social space and was an indication to the market that they are willing to take any bold steps when it comes to business. Yammer has been adopted by many organizations and brought fortune of experience around this social enterprise. Before that social functionality was almost in a nonexistent state when organizations were using SharePoint 2010 and here Microsoft buying Yammer into the industry showcased an impact and presence where they were desperately needed to make big moves.

But when SharePoint introduced 2013 they actually learnt from their previous mistakes and they came with a portal integrated with fully advance features and social networking. Personally speaking, you won’t find any major difference if you compare Yammer and SharePoint 2013. However, SharePoint 2013 has extended all the social media features which allows you to create community sites, post micro-blogs, use hash tags with #, and mention colleague’s name with @ and communities etc.; but if we compare it with Yammer or NewsGator its still require more of improvements and advancements.

The biggest advantage of Yammer over SharePoint is cost effectiveness. Yammer gives free networking, collaboration. You can access Yammer from anywhere. But with the fall of 2013 it got integrated with SP 2013 to provide more connections and features. Although, there isn’t a much clear story about this integration of Yammer and SharePoint 2013 experience. If I like to contribute in this personally, I can see Yammer, Office 365, and SharePoint Online integrating really well and have lots of potential in becoming a dynamic, collaborative social online environment.

However if we look further deep into this, for the clients who are using on-premise installations of SharePoint, they will either end up with some unrealistic Yammer integration paired with overpowering SharePoint social features, or may be SharePoint social features on their own. For organizations that have yet to dip into any significant enterprise social technologies, SharePoint 2013 will likely be sufficient as they wade into the social enterprise space. Nevertheless, it’s always sensible to go for any technology first looking at your work culture and notion. If it’s fit into the ideology and seems cost effective and have the capabilities to make your system seamless then one should go for such technology without thinking twice. At the end I am just leaving an open ended question for you all; so which will you use? Yammer, or SharePoint 2013 Social?

co-produced with the help of a web app development company that expertise in enterprise application development using SharePoint 2013.