Yammer Reviews

This product was intended to be a corporate social network, but it serves many purposes to different people.

• In our organization, we have groups dedicated to outside interests like Formula 1, exciting innovations, internal projects, client projects, and knowledge sharing communities of practice.
• The groups enable group discussion on a large scale without polluting my email inbox. I can access it at my own pace, in my own time. 
• I use Yammer to learn from others and to get access to the wealth of knowledge in our organization.
• Primarily, the group conversations and document sharing capabilities are what we use. Some people have not adopted it, so it is only as useful as the information available, based on the user base.
• It can be a really useful tool to avoid duplication of effort where others share things that they have done before.
• I would say the network and reach you get with this tool is what makes it great. I get answers from people I don't know and have never met. However, I get to learn from them and 'virtually' meet them, broadening my own network.

Productivity can be increased as colleagues from across the world share their knowledge and experiences, reducing the need to create deliverables that may have been previously created.

It also broadens the network of an employee and gives them opportunities to learn from people in the same field. Those people would not normally be known to them and they would not have met them or gained that knowledge, without a collaborative conversation tool like Yammer.

The product itself is fine, in that it serves a purpose. The issue is in the adoption.

• Employees need to be trained on how to use it, and to understand its benefits to encourage more adoption.
• Without people using the tool, email traffic increases. The knowledge sharing is limited to people who they know in their local communities.
• In addition, Yammer is just one of many tools Microsoft has for collaboration. Knowing which tool to use can be daunting.
• With the release of teams and groups, Yammer is losing its purpose slightly.
• I think that my rating is really around the usefulness of the product.
• In terms of how it works as a collaborative tool, it is probably a 4. My issues with Yammer are mostly around the fact that Microsoft has included it with Office 365, but they haven't integrated it with all of their other tools.
• The user profile is separate to the one on Delve and it has to be maintained separately.
• When documents are uploaded to Yammer, there is no way to add metadata to it.
• Documents are not stored in an associated SharePoint site, so it is separate to the document management solutions we have with SharePoint.
• It is disjointed and Microsoft doesn't seem to be doing much more to integrate it. They are spending more time integrating teams instead.

I have used Yammer since 2011/2012.

We have not had any stability issues.

We have not had scalability issues. However, the larger the organization and the less the adoption, the less value you get out of the tool.

There was no tool that I used which served the same purpose. I think SharePoint had a social wall feed, which was similar on team sites, but this wasn't well adopted. Some more technical teams used Slack.

There was no setup required when it came about. It was a case of going onto the website and signing up with your corporate email and creating a password.

Initial issues stemmed from the first person in the organization signing up, thereby becoming the network admin. This has changed now with Microsoft acquiring Yammer. It has become part of the Office 365 offering and security is much more managed.

All users get access through their corporation if they use Office 365.

We didn’t look at alternatives. It was a free tool initially and now forms part of the Office 365 offering at all licensing levels.

• It is all about creating a strong culture from the leadership down, where collaborating and sharing on Yammer is encouraged.
• Adoption will be the key between success and failure of the Yammer network uptake and usefulness.
• It also needs someone to manage it and encourage positive sharing, whilst monitoring usage.

I did not really find many valuable features. It was a tool to develop communities wherein we could carry out some good discussions within defined groups.

Otherwise, it was meant to act as more of a social media communication tool. It never achieved good adoption globally. Most of the functionality lay dormant for most of my tenure there.

It was reasonably good at creating online communities of interest. There were some super users who enjoyed having that space to share details of various projects. However, it was mostly slow, clunky, and frustrating to use.

The user experience could be improved. It needs more speed and interaction to drive its utility when streaming videos or performing uploads.

I used this solution at Kantar, the market research arm of WPP, for three and a half years.

There were no stability issues other than the generally slow speed of the tool.

There were no scalability issues.

I never used technical support.

I did not use a previous solution. I think that Facebook's Workplace or StaffConnect would have done the job in a more engaging and user-friendly manner. They would have driven more interaction between staff members.

The initial setup was pretty simple using a cloud-based interface. Administrator privileges were determined to manage, add, delete, and to do some monitoring.

Initially, Kantar was able to negotiate an incredible rate of £0.73 per user/per month prior to their acquisition by Microsoft. The price then escalated to £3.00 per user/ per month!!

We evaluated Jive. Based on the difference in price, we decided not to proceed.

Research the market. There are more interesting products out there that have better UX and are more interactive and engaging.

Streamlining departmental workflow with built in QC. Here are only a few use cases:

for Human Resources:

Company wide announcements

Company FAQ / Policy and Procedures

Company Polling

Forms Repository

New Hire Orientation – Group Communication/Documentation

Training Videos

for IT departments:

Very useful client side, remote site, managing projects/rollouts or in the server room.

Yammer can be accessed from hand held devices as a traveling KB for staff.

Help Desk personnel and Engineers can access software in remote locations.

Personnel can update projects directly from their mobile devices providing real time status updates.

Tenant disk space is not effected - archiving files

Software Deployment / File storage

Help Desk FAQs – Rapid Response

Real time project tracking,

Managers can look into conversations and see employees pain points.

Built in Quality control and some Lean Enterprise tact

Users can self organize and collaborate quickly

Document control - Used as a doc repository..

I can go on and on with valuable uses.

going on 2 years

No

No

No

6

6

No

Straightforward. But to understand all options in the portal a little bit of reading is required..

I Implemented for numerous orgs.

Ongoing.

Here are just a few benefits of Yammer

Closes Gap between Management and Customer facing employees

Lean process improvements and quality control are built into Yammer

Instant process improvements

Built in quality controls

Removes redundancy in daily workflows

Continuous improvement is built in

Every user streamlines daily workflows with specific people/orgs they interact with. Users adapt and change dynamically as initiatives and daily work flows change.

We use the solution for organizational communication.

Its most valuable features are the storyline and communities.

The solution's feature for sharing could be better.

We have been using the solution for one and a half years.

It is a stable solution.

We have approximately 1,50,000 solution users in our organization. I rate its scalability an eight out of ten.

We have the solution deployed on the cloud as well as on-premises.

Our IT team takes care of the solution's maintenance.

The solution's cost is included in the license bundle for Microsoft.

Compared to Facebook, the solution displays fewer advertisements.

I recommend the solution to others and rate it a seven out of ten. It has good UI and UX features.

I used Yammer for crowdsourcing and group discussions. If we want to volunteer ourselves to be a part of certain groups that the company wants to discuss with, for, let's say, some volunteering activities or to share some complaints.

The benefits I experienced using Yammer stemmed from the ease of communication since everyone in the company used to get notifications. The overall communication within the organization was easy with Yammer. The group creations and such related stuff were easy to maneuver and use.

There is not much to choose from when it comes to the verification part of Yammer, especially if the clear instruction documentation is clear. If the instruction document is unclear it could be an issue. Fortunately, the technical team in our company was very clear on the instructions on how to use the tool. Even if we had an issue, it was only once when it came to the authentication part, but Yammer was very prompt in resolving the issues related to authentication and the mobile app. There wasn't much of an issue for me with Yammer.

In Yammer, mobile app onboarding has certain shortcomings and can be improved. I faced some issues with Yammer's mobile app when I shifted from Android to iPhone, and it got a little bit tricky to use it on an iPhone, which took away some of my time. The aforementioned area can be improved. Though the resolution for the issue related to the tool took some time, it got resolved.

I have experience with Yammer. I used Yammer six months ago.

It was a stable solution.

It was a highly scalable solution considering it was used in a very big company.

More than 10,000 users were there for Yammer in my previous company.

I previously worked with BambooHR. There was one more tool that I worked with, but I can't recall its name.

I prefer Yammer over BambooHR. Yammer has a much better interface than BambooHR, making it easy for me to do certain searches easily. With Yammer, it's much easier when it comes to doing a task, group creations, and group discussions.

The company did the initial setup, so I didn't have an issue accessing the tool.

The solution is deployed on the cloud.

There wasn't any maintenance required for Yammer from my end.

To those planning to use Yammer, I can say that it is fun to work with because it's easy to maneuver while being quite understandable for a layman who hasn't used any enterprise applications. It's quite easy to understand, considering that it provides indications to users on where to go and where to find something.

There are some features that I don't recall but feel could be improved.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

We use it for communication and collaboration on specific topics.

Yammer is an enterprise social software. We have it in our company for five years, but it is not well socialized. A few people in our company use it. We are using Microsoft Teams more.
It is a product that is fading away for us. We may or may not use it in the future.

The user interface and the way we can share and search information are the most valuable. It is very easy to use. 

The way you want to control the communication could be an issue. It depends on what kind of company you are. We are a public company, and there are some regulations that we need to comply with. Its ease of use can be an issue for a company because anybody can subscribe and use it.

There are many competitors that are overlapping. Since Microsoft bought Yammer, it tends to be in the shadow. It is not put in the front from the service perspective.

I have been using Yammer for five years.

It is stable.

It is scalable.

We didn't have to contact them for support. We had a call with them from a security standpoint to see if they can improve the way to control communication with external companies.

The initial setup was straightforward.

I don't know about the pricing. Now that Microsoft has bought Yammer, it should be a part of our subscriptions for Office 365.

I would recommend this solution if it fits the purpose. It is a great tool, but you need to look at whether it overlaps with other tools. 

I would rate Yammer a seven out of ten.

Primary use is for workgroups. We already have some in place. Yammer is quite good.

Users can access their own workgroups and it improves the communication among people, particularly people who have the same task to perform in different locations, in different countries.

The integration with Microsoft Office and the fact that it is in the cloud. Also, it's quite easy to use.

I would like to see a fancier user interface. That is one of the weak points of Yammer.

I haven't had any complaints from users about the availability of the system.

Scalability is good. The only point of concern we have is that you need to be registered in Active Directory, and that can limit usage. But apart from that, I think that we can grow with no particular issues.

As far as I know, we have not had any requests for support. We are able to manage it internally. I don't have any open requests for external support. However, I'm not the person who manages it.

We didn't use any workgroup tool before Yammer. We adopted Yammer because it was included in the Office 365 toolset.

Our most important criteria when selecting a vendor, apart from the product being easy to use, accessible, cloud-based, include security - that is another big and important criterion for us - and, finally, the ability to reach people who are not in our Active Directory domain.

The initial setup was not that easy because of managing the tenant in Office 365. The migration to that tenant for countries that are not in the same domain was not easy, the domain synchronization. Managing the forest of different domains was not as simple as expected.

Specifically, my search was related to a tool for employees to communicate to all employees; not really for work-grouping, but more related to one-way communication, top-down, from the HR people to the employees. The point is how to reach people which are not IT or IS users. Not all our employees are IT users and we need to communicate with them through their own devices, typically their smartphones.

Yammer and Facebook were the only choices on our shortlist.

Look closely at the Office 365 context you are in, and be sure that the accessibility or the availability of the system will be spread as much as possible throughout the organization.

I would rate Yammer at eight out of 10 because it's good, it works, it's reasonably easy to use. But, again, the weak point would be that the user interface is not as fancy as people are used to having, like when using social networks. It is less social network-oriented than Facebook, for instance, in terms of ease of use and user interface. And again, there is the point that users need to be in the Acting Directory to exploit the features.

Being able to tag another user is valuable when you want them to see your post. As a developer, I have to work and coordinate with various other teams and business areas. Being able to tag another user from those areas allows me to provide transparency with my work.

Yammer has allowed the entire company to be able to communicate with each other when the company has internal employees from all over the world. It allows us to provide transparency on projects and everyday happenings.

There needs to be an "Edit" functionality for posts and replies because grammar and spelling mistakes do happen. Sometimes they aren't caught until after posting.

I have been using this solution since I started my current position as a software engineer about two years ago.

Yammer has been fairly stable. I've only experienced a few downtimes in all the time I've been using it.

Since we use this through Office 365, scalability doesn't apply on our end.

Our Help Desk is the contact point with their technical support. The tech support does seem to be fairly responsive to our questions and downtimes.

This was implemented before I arrived at the company.

Most of the development teams have been moved to Confluence and Slack, but they still use Yammer.

Split your functional teams into Yammer groups. If those teams have small groups within them, then give them their own Yammer group too.