Digital Transformation Today

3 Barriers To Adopting Enterprise Social Networking In The Cloud

From the keynote session at the recent Microsoft SharePoint conference (SPC14) there became no doubt that the social tools in SharePoint 2013, on-premises and in the cloud, are taking a backseat to Yammer’s cloud platform. One of the dominating factors of Yammer’s rise is lack of customization required. As my 4-year-old would say, “You get what you get, and you don’t get upset.”

Building on simplicity, Microsoft has expanded the vision of how enterprise social and Yammer will support the digital workplace of the future. Yammer will be the “newsfeed engine,” but its contents will follow you to any and all productivity tools that you are using. If this seems mysterious, try thinking of a super-charged project email group that follows you out of Outlook, into Word while you’re actively working on a document, and then can also be found within SharePoint when you’re managing all of the project documents.

Amazing, right? Even with the future in sight I’ve seen three common barriers when companies first try to adopt Yammer/enterprise social networking:

  1. Restrictions on cloud computing: The most common barrier to adoption of any cloud solution is the IT department saying “no.” While some business users decide to sign up anyway, I’d recommend they take a step back and ask why. Different organizations have commitments to on-premises solutions, regulatory restrictions, security governance and some plain old fears related to the cloud. A common oversight by both the IT teams and business users alike is to discuss what exact content and conversations will be put into the system. Even in highly compliant organizations there are areas where non-regulated information can be safely harnessed in the cloud.
  2. Determining your actual social goals: This is a really big consideration. Is your company trying to catch up or is there a driving factor to implement enterprise social? Like any other solution, start with the business requirement: Is it for the entire company or just a small group? Using an example, let’s say you have an organization without any intranet at this point and your staff has been asking for better cross-organization communication. If that’s the case, and you have SharePoint 2013 on-premises, start with learning to use that existing infrastructure. Think of it as learning to walk (with SharePoint) before you run (with Yammer).There might be some minor pain at the end when your organization needs to trust third-party companies to migrate content and knowledge from the social database when SharePoint 2013 on-premises goes away.
  3. Where to start, the two versions of Yammer: The final barrier comes to a more sophisticated organization that has successfully used collaboration tools and a group wants to start using enterprise social networking. Depending on your licensing there are two choices from Yammer: a freemium version and an enterprise version. Besides some fancy features that come with the enterprise version, one practical consideration is, “How will your staff handle logging in twice?” If your small group can handle that extra log-in, go for freemium.

There’s one trump card that cuts through a majority of these barriers: If you’re in the cloud and you have an enterprise license, switch to Yammer now. You’re already paying for it, and Microsoft clearly sees Yammer as the future of its social efforts. There’s a level of effort to maintain both your Yammer and SharePoint 2013 sites, but that will get easier and easier over the next few years.

In the end, social enterprise initiatives need to tie back into the business goals you’re trying to accomplish. When you take into account the other factors that are driving where Microsoft is going, Yammer is truly at the cutting edge with its collaboration strategy, and it’s moving faster than we could have imagined. At this point, it’s reasonable to expect better integration between Yammer, Office 365 and SharePoint Online in less than a year, and seamless integration in less than three years.

Learn more about implementing social enterprise by contacting Portal Solutions.

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