Understanding the Differences Between SharePoint Social and Yammer

Microsoft Worldwide Partner ConferenceJuly 2013 – Houston, TexasSocial 101 Sessions

Christian BuckleyDirector, Product Evangelism

(@buckleyplanet)

There is Confusion in the Channel

As Microsoft COO Kevin Turner shared in the Wednesday morning keynote at WPC13 in Houston, over 85% of the Fortune 500 have both SharePoint and Yammer deployed. However, owning the software and understanding how to best take advantage of what you own are two different things.

Organizations are recognizing that they have social adoption issues. Within SharePoint, there is weak usage of taxonomy and templates and other information architecture standards, which has lead to poor collaboration across the enterprise. As a result, many organizations have been slow to realize the benefits of their SharePoint investments.

Unfortunately, many companies have now picked up Yammer as a way to improve internal collaboration, but without understanding why collaboration may have been failing within their SharePoint efforts.

According to Gartner, over 75 percent of Fortune 1000 companies will undertake some kind of online social-networking initiative for marketing or customer relations purposes by 2014.

An Avanade global study of enterprise social collaboration trends, analyzing the habits of 4,000 users and 1,000 IT and business decision-makers in 22 countries, found that

• Facebook is twice as popular as SharePoint – 73% to 39%

• Facebook is also four times more popular that IBM Open connections (17%) and six times more popular than Salesforce’s Chatter (12%)

Of course…

• Although Facebook is used by 74% of organizations surveyed, organizations put SharePoint and Chatter (tied at 23%) at the top of their list of deployments for the coming year

• When asked about priorities, Facebook fell to the end of the listInformationWeek article on Avanade study http://ubm.io/17WDTQs

According to the Avanade study:▫ Social technologies make their jobs more enjoyable (66%)▫ And more productive (62%)▫ And help them get work done faster (57%)▫ Of the businesses using social collaboration tools,

82% want to use them more in the futureInformationWeek article on Avanade study http://ubm.io/17WDTQs

Which Technology Should I Use?

As a SharePoint MVP, this is one of the most common questions I am asked by organizations as I travel around the globe. Most organizations have both SharePoint and Yammer, and want to understand the “best practices” for using one over the other.

First off, what is a “best practice” for one company may not work for others. At the core of any technology decision should be a thorough understanding of both your technical and governance requirements, as well as the cultural needs of your team.

Beyond that, it also helps to have a solid understanding of what both platforms offer. Let’s take a quick look:

Social in SharePointFeatures

• Community• Social tagging• Easily share content

and activities• Follow documents,

people, sites, tags, and activities• Improved activity

streams• Improved My Sites• Save locally

Benefits

• Build more robust metadata• Make content more findable• Link people, teams, content

and activities

Social in YammerFeatures

• Community• Social tagging• Easily share content

and activities• Follow people, groups,

announcement and tags• Activity streams• Profiles

Benefits

• Quickly build community• Internal and external

communication• Powerful search• Integration into O365

Image borrowed from the SharePoint 911 team at Rackspace

SharePoint + Yammer Integration Update

SharePoint + Yammer Integration Update

The overall goal of social is to reach business goals The best-deployed platform in the world, if ends user do not embrace it, will be a failure. Companies are looking to social as a way to drive employee engagement, improve collaboration, and to instill a sense of community. Whether that is done through the structured collaboration model of SharePoint (on premises or in the cloud) or through the unstructured (ad hoc) collaboration of Yammer really depends on what best fits into the way that your team works.

How you move forward with social really depends on what you are trying to achieve. But beginning with an understanding of the technologies is the right first step.

How to move forward:• Understand your organization’s cultural capacity for social

• Experiment with technology, monitor and measure the results, focusing on end user adoption and engagement

• Closely align your social activities with your business objectives

• Extend features as the business is ready for them

Christian BuckleyDirector, Product Evangelismand SharePoint MVPcbuck@axceler.com @buckleyplanetwww.Axceler.comhttp://tiny.cc/buckleypresentationshttp://tiny.cc/buckleybloghttp://tiny.cc/buckleybookhttp://tiny.cc/buckleygovernance4hybrid