Microsoft Is Killing Yammer Enterprise in January 2017, Will Start Integrating Office 365 Groups First (venturebeat.com)

Microsoft today provided new information about how it will be integrating Office 365 Groups into its Yammer enterprise-focused social network. The Yammer Enterprise service tier will be going away on January 1, 2017. But Yammer itself will remain available, and there are many levels of integration with the Office 365 services, reports VentureBeat. From the report: It will be possible for people to make Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents using Office Online within Yammer, and it will be easy to go from Yammer to a shared OneNote notebook or the Microsoft Planner project management tool. Team members will be able to select existing files from OneDrive and SharePoint and share them with colleagues in Yammer, too. And Yammer teams will get their own SharePoint sites, enabling them to build wikis and blogs. Microsoft will be rolling out the integration in phases, with the first phase beginning later this year, the Yammer team said in a blog post. The first Yammer customers to get it are those whose users log in with their Office 365 identity. And Microsoft will initially be targeting organizations with a single Yammer network connected to one Office 365 tenant.

Comments

Yay! Sharepoint!

[Pascoea]

And Yammer teams will get their own SharePoint sites

"I can't wait to use Sharepoint more" -No one, ever.

Re:Yay! Sharepoint!

[bigman2003]

I'm a Microsoft flag waver- for the last 20 years. It's been core to my career.

I absolutely hate Sharepoint, and I hate the way they are integrating it into everything.

Recently I had someone come to me saying that they kept sending out files, and nobody outside of our organization could access them.

Their files were saved to Sharepoint (the default, not their intention) and when they 'attached' the file to an email, Outlook went ahead and sent a link, rather than attaching the file. The link went to our internal Sharepoint, which people on the outside could not access.

I understand all the reasoning for this to happen. But the problem was that this was just a naive user clicking 'Sure, save it there, that is cool' then being stuck in this problem. I told them to save the file elsewhere...but now they had two versions of the file and confusion ensued.

Please, please, please don't make 'further integration with Microsoft products' the default!

And no...nobody has ever wanted to use Sharepoint more. I've been around it for a long time, and I don't understand what the heck it is supposed to be. Ignoring all Sharepoint is a valuable skill.

Re:Yay! Sharepoint!

[swb]

My guess is that MS really wants to kill of basic (SMB) file sharing. The protocol is open enough that world+dog has already implemented in everything, so every file server upgrade faces the prospect of losing out to something else -- shit appliances all the way up to big ticket EMC devices.

Trying to move everyone to Sharepoint has so many layers of lock in I get dizzy just thinking about them. The endless licensing sales for server, SQL and 3 different kinds of CALs. Relentless sunk costs of developer time and migration. Files sequestered away in a database unmigratable to competing file sharing platforms.

It's a perpetual motion machine of IT spending, right up to and including Office365 hosted migrations once the painful costs of adopting and infrastructure become realized.

I've never understood the attraction to it. I work at an IT consulting firm that sells Sharepoint services and our site is a complete joke, used mostly as a way to host OneNote notebooks.

Re:Yay! Sharepoint!

[Grishnakh]

I got a magic way for ms to make fifty bucks per user: sell a decent windows for a change.

Why should they bother? They already get $100 (or so I read somewhere) per user by having a shitty Windows pre-loaded on every computer sold. People aren't going to pay more for a non-shitty Windows (assuming such a thing is possible, which I doubt). And MS can make even more money per use by baking adware and spyware into Windows, without affecting the up-front price. It's an excellent sales strategy. And if people don't like shitty Windows, what are they going to do, buy a Mac? hahaha

Re:Microsoft is killing... what?

[The-Ixian]

It is a good solution for companies who don't want to rely on a public social networking site.

I have worked for a few large companies who have run a Yammer site. It is basically just an internal company Facebook.

It can be used for good purposes. Stuff that doesn't necessarily fall into "official" company communiques or which might fall outside company org structure.

For example, charitable events that company employees participate in might have a Yammer group... stuff like that.

The fact that it incorporates into AD and as well as other MS Office tools and products makes it attractive for organizations already in the MS ecosystem.

Re:Microsoft is killing... what?

[JaredOfEuropa]

It's very well suited for certain work-related stuff as well. Virtual town hall sessions. Community-based support, especially for services where a lot of new things are happening (so users will want to subscribe to the group and remain informed). Virtual, cross-departmental team spaces. Communities of Practice. I've been involved in setting up Yammer and coaching community managers at my last client, and we've experimented with a great many use cases. Most successful cases were in the category of fast-paced, low threshold, opt-in, geographically spread out communities sharing information of temporary value. The low-threshold aspect is a definite plus in some cases, especially people new to the company find Yammer a lot less scary to contribute to than, say, message boards.

The challenges: you need active community management to keep people engaged, and when I was using it there were little or no curation tools, poor search, poor statistics to help community managers (there was a paid 3rd party option which was ridiculously overpriced), and no way to extract valuable information for storage in longer-term media (Wikis, Sharepoint or whatever)

Yammer can add real business value (in addition to the not to be underestimated value of the watercooler effect, i.e. non-business related groups) but it is not free either; don't expect anything to happen if you just roll out the tool and walk away.