Yammer Reviews, Competitors and Pricing

Web and Intranet Content Management Advisor at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jul 23, 2017

You can join networks outside of the organization

What is most valuable?

Ease of use and the ability to join networks outside of the organization. These are valuable to drive adoption and to collaborate, be informed of events, and developments in related organizations.

How has it helped my organization?

We have set Yammer up inside IFrames that appear on our intranet home page, most content pages, and in all-team sites. This has enabled us to cater to large and very small audiences where they interact and not require a separate application or login.

What needs improvement?

The ability to edit replies to previous posts or answers would be useful. Navigation to different Yammer Groups could be improved. Navigation to external groups could be better integrated to reduce clicks. This is a minor annoyance only.

For how long have I used the solution?

We have been using this for four years.

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What do I think about the stability of the solution?

There were no issues with stability.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

There were no issues with scalability.

How are customer service and support?

No external support has been needed from the vendor. Online help and community support has been enough.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

Apart from chat programs and discussion lists (e.g., SharePoint, MS Lync, and IBM Sametime), there hasn't been a similar product I've used at work previously.

How was the initial setup?

The installation was very simple. Just follow the prompts and the setup help.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

I haven't been involved with licensing issues.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

This was installed when I joined this company.

What other advice do I have?

Undertake a small trial before rolling it out to an enterprise. This will help build interest. Don't attempt to control what gets posted, apart from the usual ethical/legal guidelines and rules.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

it_user629934

Sr. Application Analyst at a healthcare company with 501-1,000 employees

Mar 21, 2017

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Allows users in different teams to interact in real time. There needs to be access to a channel, without the need to sign in.

What is most valuable?

Integration into SharePoint is a valuable feature as it provides better exposure and access to users.

How has it helped my organization?

It allows users in different teams to interact in real time.

What needs improvement?

There needs to be access to a channel, without the need to sign-in.

Right now, if you are a Yammer channel owner, then you can ‘invite’ people to join it. That invitation would require the other person to accept the invitation and ‘login’ to Yammer. By logging into the Office 365 Portal, you are not automatically logged into Yammer. Yammer is currently run as a separate portal experience instead of a blended service, i.e., in the use case of ‘channels’.

If I embed my Yammer channel into a SharePoint Web Part and you are not logged into Yammer, your will see a block on the screen that says ‘login’.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have used this solution for a year.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

There were no stability issues.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

There were no scalability issues.

How is customer service and technical support?

The technical support was good.

How was the initial setup?

The setup was straightforward.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

It is a part of the enterprise licensing.

What other advice do I have?

Test with users
Know your use case
Get management support for use case

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

Buyer's Guide

Yammer

January 2025

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it_user616521

Head of People Operations at a manufacturing company with 51-200 employees

Feb 28, 2017

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Enables internal communication between different countries and locations.

What is most valuable?

Enables internal communication between different countries and locations.
Provides easy access and low hierarchy: Everyone is able to comment, ask questions, share knowledge, and get to know colleagues.

How has it helped my organization?

Has brought leaders closer to people: Leaders can share video messages which are more engaging than just faceless email messages.
People are encouraged to comment on these messages or ask questions
Leaders/managers can respond back

What needs improvement?

They need to somehow enable better document sharing features. They need to provide joint drafting of documents.

In regards to the document sharing and modifying feature, currently it does not entirely work together with the mobile devices.

If the documents are saved in OneDrive, then the connection to Yammer is not very easy to use.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have used this solution for a little over three years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

There were no stability issues.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

At first, we did encounter some scalability issues on some mobile devices.

How are customer service and technical support?

I would give the technical support a rating of 6/10.

It takes a long time before getting a reply. Sometimes there are language barriers in terms of poor English or when no Finnish speakers are available.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We did not have any other tool before this one.

How was the initial setup?

The setup was very easy. It helped a lot that I participated in the Yammer Community Manager training that was organized by Blue Meteorite.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

It is good to know that Yammer is now included in the Microsoft Office 365 subscription without any extra fee.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We looked at the WhatsApp business version, but it was not sufficient. Later, we also looked into Slack. However, we still haven't decided whether we should change or not.

What other advice do I have?

You should exchange experiences with other companies who have implemented this solution. You might also participate in the Yammer Community Manager training as well. However, the exact way to launch Yammer depends on the needs of the organization.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

it_user68022

Business Consultant with 1,001-5,000 employees

Nov 3, 2013

To Yammer or not to Yammer – can we guarantee success with enterprise social tools?

I’m very keen on the idea of the enterprise social network Yammer and what it could mean for internal business communication.

I visualise a time when our interstate frontline staff are discussing the pros and cons of a new business initiative with our senior managers at Head Office. When the CEO spots a game-changing idea from a new employee during his daily check of the site. When our sales teams are reporting back from the field, creating excitement about wins as they happen.

But enterprise social tools like Yammer are not like our traditional internal communication tools:

- We don’t control the message.

- We can’t force people to get involved - and success relies on interaction.

- We can’t guarantee success.

It’s actually pretty scary. I know of plenty of organisations that have experimented with Yammer and it failed. People didn’t see the value, they didn’t find the time and it fizzled out.

At this moment in time, the success of Yammer within my own organisation is at make or break point. Over one-sixth of our workforce signed up within the first few weeks of my soft launch, simply via word of mouth. I invited those people I could rely on to join first. That worked well. A key group of about half a dozen people from across the business were very keen and began posting updates, asking questions, replying to threads and creating groups.

Next, with a good proportion of staff onboard I sent an email to our Senior Management Team, outlining the benefits and asking for their commitment to the network – just five minutes a day, twice a week to begin with.

I also spoke face-to-face with a number of staff: if they were working on an interesting project I suggested a Yammer post. If I was writing an intranet news story on behalf of a business unit, I suggested that they could also promote their work in a status update.

I’ve nudged conversations along, introduced talking points, asked questions and tried to encourage the lurkers.

Now, we’re six weeks in. The initial excitement has died off. There are other business priorities. Less people are joining. Those who signed-up haven’t revisited the site. The goodwill of our Senior Managers is there, but they just haven’t found the time.

So, I’m asking myself some key questions and I’d be interested to hear your thoughts:

- do we just ‘experiment’ with enterprise social tools such as Yammer, or do we strategise the roll-out as we do with all other internal comms channels?

- by creating a strategy for success, can we ever guarantee a social tool like Yammer is a success?

- what does success look like on these tools anyway?

- finally, what can we learn about our employee engagement if there is low interaction through Yammer. How can we use this to influence the rest of our internal communications strategy?

These are the questions I’ll be working through over the coming months…..I’ll keep you updated.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

it_user96480‎Social business consultant at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

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Jan 10, 2017

Allthough the article is a couple of years old, some statements keep nagging as I keep hearing them. They can be summarized by the following quote:
"But enterprise social tools like Yammer are not like our traditional internal communication tools:
- We don’t control the message.
- We can’t force people to get involved - and success relies on interaction.
- We can’t guarantee success."
Starting with the third item: Can you name any tool that actually does guarantee success?
And the first: when your goal is to control the message, don't use a collaboration tool. Use a send to all mechanism, preferably with a 'do-not-reply' from address. ;-) You then automatically arrive at your second point: if you want involvement, let go of the control issues....

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it_user8916

Owner with 51-200 employees

May 1, 2014

Do You Use Yammer at Work? And Why Not SharePoint?

There was a question a while back on the Microsoft MVPs LinkedIn group (YAFSN! – see below) wondering “Do you use Yammer at work?” I’m still trying to figure out how much I want to use Yammer. As when Google+ came out, I’m trying it. I pretty much abandoned G+, and Yammer may well go the same way for most things. I got into Yammer via an invitation into SPYam from Bjørn Furuknap with my USPJA email address. Now I’m trapped into that identity for SPYam (the network for SharePoint discussions that Joel Oleson set up – ping me if you’d like an invitation) but have to use my work email address to access the SharePoint MVP network into which Microsoft has seemingly decided to move all communications. That tying of one’s identity to a single email domain (it seems you can’t combine domains into one über identity) is my biggest beef with the Yammer platform. I’m sure they will work that out, though. (Yammer probably could have done it in a few weeks. Now that it’s a Microsoft product, maybe in Yammer 2016, and you’ll only need to add a three server farm to enable it.) I read a constant stream of complaints about other aspects of how Yammer works in – natch – Yammer. Sure, there are some true annoyances (no Shift-Enter in post entry, no parity between clients, Adobe Air!) but I could give you a litany of similar annoyances for every single YAFSN. User interfaces seem to always have annoyances. The important thing is how fast the people who develop the platform can react to consistent complaints and improve. Everyone seems to think we need YAFSN (Yet Another Fantastic Social Network), but each new one that comes along simply fragments the landscape further. Who has the time to check dozens of these damn things? Social in the workplace must be a performance improvement, not a detriment. (I’d argue we should hold our personal social network use to the same standard. LOL catz!) if I have to check four or five social networks constantly in order to be well-informed, that drags down my efficiency. I’ll keep using Yammer for the MVP stuff because I don’t have any choice, of course. Gotta get all those “secrets” somehow. It really makes me wonder, though, why we don’t use SharePoint to talk about SharePoint. It seems that in the vast majority of cases, SharePointilists prefer to use a different technology to communicate about SharePoint. That, to me, raises a far more important question: “Do you use SharePoint at work?”

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

it_user9204

Marketing at a local government with 1,001-5,000 employees

Aug 29, 2013

Yammer – don’t worry about it, just do it

About three months ago we took the decision to introduce Yammer across Wakefield Council. A few of us had tried it out for a while, and once we’d convinced colleagues that there were genuine benefits and that using it wouldn’t lead to widespread negativity it was launched to the rest of the staff with online access.

For those who haven’t used it, Yammer is a free to use internal social network, that in our case only those whose email address ends in @wakefield.gov.uk can use. If you research it you’ll be told of numerous professional benefits, including sharing links, requesting answers to work issues, and bringing people together who don’t normally get to see each other.

These are all true, but so far it is probably the latter that has been most prominent on a professional level, with almost 800 people signing up and joining numerous groups on the network set up by colleagues. The groups have included communications, leisure, public health, and libraries, in other words mostly following service area lines, as you might expect at first.

Whilst an impressive number have joined, I think many have subscribed out of curiosity and are still waiting to see how it might benefit them. We have deliberately offered limited guidance on how to use Yammer, just enough to get people started, as we wanted to see what people would do themselves once they’d signed up.

The results have been fascinating, and with each passing week more varied posts are appearing. But although there have been many topics and events discussed in impressive depth, including public health, car parking, Christmas lights, joining the new library and much more, it is the social element that has most caught my eye.

In the short time that we’ve had Yammer, the most used discussion group has been around cycling, both cycling to work and in people’s own time, and a work based running club has also emerged. Born from Yammer, runners who are mostly based in our new building Wakefield One, now meet once a week after work to go for a run, which is just fantastic.

Bringing 1,100 staff into a new building where previously they had been in different buildings has helped, but the fact that Yammer is bringing people together both virtually and in person is a real benefit.

We’re still new to Yammer so no doubt there’s much more we will learn from each other, but I think we’ve made a good start. Hopefully people will continue to join and find what they are looking for, and hopefully they’ll be even more interaction.

If you haven’t yet tried Yammer because you’re worried it might lead to one big online argument or a barrage of critical comments, give it a go. It doesn’t work out like that at all. It is a simple yet effective way of bringing people together to help each other out through an online conversation, and in some cases bringing them together face to face to socialise. You can’t argue with either of those.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

it_user8913

Developer with 51-200 employees

Aug 22, 2013

Yammer vs. SP Social in 2013

There are several discussions on SharePoint’s social strategy going on at the moment. I had some great discussions with my MVP mate Adis during Summit last week. Since #SPC12 almost every SharePoint addicted developer, it-pro, power user has reviewed Yammer.

If you don’t know what Yammer is, here a short introduction.

Yammer is an enterprise social network, which allows you and your coworkers to communicate in a modern way as on Facebook. The huge difference between Facebook and Yammer is, Yammer is private. That means only people from your organization or the people you’ve invited to join your network can see and take part of the conversation which is going on in your Yammer network.

With the common understanding of Yammer, you should be able to follow up the ongoing discussions. Adis wrote a great post, summarizing his thoughts on SharePoint and Yammer integration and the upcoming social future. I totally agree with Adis, there are a lot of things missing at the moment. But here my thoughts on Yammer vs. SPSocial

Leak of integration

In my eyes there is still too much missing, of course you can integrate yammer into your SharePoint, but key features are missing such as SSO, seamless look ‘n feel integration. Prebuild views on Yammer depending on the current SharePoint context or the mobile story. Microsoft shipped mobile Apps for SharePoint 2013 OnDemand and OnPrem. AFAIK are these apps currently available in preview, but each of them is based on SPSocial.

SharePoint Newsfeed

The Newsfeed in SharePoint 2013 is one of the best dashboards I’ve ever seen in the product. In my eyes it’s boosting the productivity because you can get an overview within no time. You got all the information you’re interested in, documents, people, sites, tags you’re following. That’s exactly what I’m looking for when I should move on to Yammer. Because I don’t like to decrease the productivity just because I use Yammer.

OnPrem story

Adis mentioned the OnPrem story also in his post. For a lot of German customers its necessary that all information is stored OnPrem. I ran into various situations where management raised the red flag because they are not going to move business critical data into the cloud. Unfortunately these kinds of customers don’t hear our arguments for moving into the cloud.

User adoption

While #SPC12 we launched our corporate Yammer, in order to structure the entire conversation from our company. The adoption within the first four weeks was really good. A lot of employees joined the Yammer network in order to see what Yammer actually is. They followed the invitations from other employees. There was no official announcement form the company, some key users started inviting their co-workers and within 2 weeks almost 85% of the company were registered to the corporate Yammer network. People started creating their own groups depending on the divisions they’re working for or the topics they’re currently on. In summary I’d say the adoption within the first month was great. We’d good conversation on Yammer about problems within different teams, which was a little bit surprising to me, normally most of the employees aren’t participating to new technologies that much. But Yammer had a better start. Unfortunately the good start doesn’t mean a good every-day usage. Right now 4 months after launching Yammer, only a few (mostly technical enthusiasts) keep on using Yammer every day. The crowd hasn’t signed on for the last 2 months… They are again writing emails, doing Lync chats or discuss important things on the floor.

And this is exactly the worst point for a new platform, we did this learning curve with the adoption of SharePoint as centralized communication and collaboration platform a decade ago, users are falling back to their old-fashioned habits, without teaching them actively (let’s say 1hr per week) the adoption of a new social network will not work. (At least for the company I currently work for) This drives me crazy, it’s not Yammers fault, it’s a human fault. But Yammer will be faced with this problem. Enabling SharePoint’s OOB Social features within this company is easier, because they use SharePoint for everything.

Summary

The ‘user adoption’ is unfortunately the biggest problem for Yammer, I like the idea of Yammer, but until Yammer isn’t fluently integrated into SharePoint / SharePoint Online, it’s a hard way for us – SharePoint enthusiasts – to move customers, friends, co-workers on the Yammer train.

Disclosure: The company I work for is a Microsoft Partner - https://www.experts-inside.com

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

it_user111573Industry Analyst at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees

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May 8, 2014

Need:
Yammer integrated in SharePoint Online. Multiple customers request it. So this must be a priority one for Microsoft online team.

it_user651825

IT Director at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees

May 12, 2017

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We use targeted notifications to communicate outages and maintenance windows.

What is most valuable?

External collaboration with partners: There is a unified way to send updates about departments and the enterprise, rather than sending separate communications.
Inbox and notification for updates: This helps to manage messaging to stakeholders in a centralized and contextual way, rather than silo information sharing.
Integration with Microsoft Office feeds: Since the enterprise works with Office, it is easy to use along with those tools.

How has it helped my organization?

We have used targeted notifications regarding the outages and maintenance windows to communicate with our stakeholders. This has helped centralized messaging for us.

What needs improvement?

Yammer can improve the effectiveness of its usage by addressing the metrics that measure user trust and perception. It measures the sentiments of posts using analytics and increases the ease of use.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have used this solution for three years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

There were no stability issues. The product has been fairly stable.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

There were no scalability issues.

How is customer service and technical support?

I would give technical support a rating of 7/10.

How was the initial setup?

The setup was straightforward.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

This is a good option for medium to large-sized business enterprises.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We looked at the Slack solution.

What other advice do I have?

If you are a Microsoft Shop, then Yammer has the potential to tie up with SharePoint and address a lot of the enterprise needs, in terms of messaging and content management.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.