SharePoint & Social Business Community Blog
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March 18, 2013 - 5:13 PM
It started on June 15th, 2012. The first time a client reached out to ask me if they should stop a SharePoint 2010 social intranet deployment because of the looming Yammer acquisition. Clearly, the platform overlaps with SharePoint and particularly now that SharePoint 2013 is out. My advice then: don’t stop for on-premise social deployments and stay the course with Newsgator; Yammer is cloud-based and will most likely stay that way; deep integration with SharePoint on-premise will take some time to appear.
Since then the messaging from Microsoft hasn’t been much clearer. At the Microsoft SharePoint Conference in November, we learned that Microsoft is working to integrate the two platforms, including unifying identity and blending their currently independent activity feeds, but very little in the way of specifics were available. Certainly no roadmap was presented. When questions came up about which platform to choose, the advice from Microsoft speakers was consistent: pick one based on your needs and we will make sure it converges in the future with the other option. No real details about how that might happen were shared.
Fast forward another four months, and not much has changed from Microsoft in terms of integration details. Gartner, on the other hand, has been busy. Last week Redmond Channel Partner headlined “Skip SharePoint, Go with Yammer” as Gartner advice from a webinar. Larry Cannell from Gartner advised “organizations that are Microsoft shops and trying to decide between Yammer or SharePoint for social networking should choose Yammer”. Gartner justified that rationale as coming directly from Microsoft by quoting Jared Spataro, Senior Director of the Microsoft Office Division as saying organizations should “go hard with Yammer” for social networking. If this tweet is any indication, that quote came from the Microsoft conference launch. I’d have to watch the keynote again to get the context, but I’m pretty sure Jared isn’t recommending users simply choose Yammer.
It’s not that simple. Let’s take a moment to look at where Yammer really differentiates:
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Blend Internal & External Networks– Yammer uniquely allows users to blend separate networks together and interact with them through a single interface. For example, your internal (private) corporate network plus any number of external networks are all visible in one place. For customers that often interact with external partners, this proves a very powerful way to segment networks and yet participate in many from one interface. There has been speculation that LinkedIn would offer a similar product in the opposite direction – taking their strength in public networks and add the ability to run and manage a private company network.
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On-premise Integration– in scenarios where you haven’t deployed SharePoint and need to blend social into existing solutions (say a static intranet on an old platform), the Open Graph API offers a powerful way to quickly add social capability.
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Mobile Access – the set of mobile clients Yammer offers is rich, and given its cloud deployment model they are accessible from anywhere. A great and integrated experience that is still well beyond SharePoint 2013.
These are three strong reasons to push forward with Yammer, but Microsoft shops have more to think about. My advice on this topic 10 months later: consider Yammer if one of the above strengths touch directly on a core business objective. Definitely consider augmenting SharePoint 2010 with Newsgator and/or migrating to SharePoint 2013 as viable options. There isn’t one answer that fits all. Until we get another year (at least) of integration under our belts, or a more prescriptive roadmap from Microsoft, there will be a few different ways for organizations to approach social. Carefully consider your own requirements against the options before picking one.
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