With Microsoft’s acquisition of Yammer, you might be wondering how the social enterprise platform will integrate with SharePoint, or if Yammer is the right fit for your organization.
TechRepublic provides a good primer for anyone looking for perspective on what Microsoft’s acquisition of Yammer means for them and their organization.
For starters, organizations need to understand where they’re going in order to decide whether a cloud-based social enterprise platform like Yammer is a good fit. We’ve seen that, for organizations that are cloud-ready, Yammer certainly is flexible and able to provide out-of-the-box social enterprise capabilities for their employees.
Experts in the article agree that acquiring Yammer was a smart move for Microsoft, giving it solid social capabilities and crystallizing its vision of social business tools. While Yammer is the future for any business with a cloud-based model, the social capabilities within SharePoint 2013 provide a solid alternative for companies with on-premises solutions.
While our experts have seen that Yammer is great for conversations and collaboration, it does not integrate with the rest of the platform and does not leverage existing information architecture, which is one of the core strengths of the SharePoint 2013 platform. Yammer does not provide any structure for housing, aligning and classifying content with conversations.
One of the weaknesses in the Yammer/SharePoint integration is that the two platforms don’t completely integrate with one another. In fact, Microsoft may have misread its SharePoint user base, especially in the case of companies that can’t or won’t adopt cloud-based solutions, Christian Buckley says in the TechRepublic article.
“There needs to be consistent experiences in the cloud and on-premises,” explains Buckley, a Microsoft SharePoint MVP and industry analyst.
As a cloud-based solution, Yammer does provide good reach into other applications and systems, providing a slick experience for end users and tying together various CRM, ERP and collaboration platforms. A more technical integration is generally required with SharePoint in order for the platform to integrate with other systems.
In the end, Yammer does sell a very provocative story around social, one that SharePoint still doesn’t fulfill to the same degree. And while it was a good move for Microsoft to acquire Yammer, the bottom line is that it’s clear Microsoft is still trying to figure out exactly what to do with Yammer and how SharePoint fits into that picture.
Source: TechRepublic, August 2013
