SharePoint & Social Business Community Blog
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March 28, 2013 - 12:01 PM
Just a day after I posted Gartner’s “Go With Yammer” Too Simplistic, Microsoft released an update to its social roadmap. Jared Spataro outlined the next few stages of Yammer integration. His message? “Go Yammer!” The same message two days in a row. There is something important here.
Here is a quick summary of the points from the roadmap:
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Summer: allow customers to replace their SharePoint Online newsfeed with Yammer plus the ability to embed a Yammer group into a SharePoint site.
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Fall: add Single Sign-On between Yammer and Office 365; integrate consistent navigation; add some SharePoint into Yammer, like the ability to co-edit Office documents.
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2014: updates every 90 days to deepen the connection between Yammer and Office 365.
Jared included a “concept mock” that is worth a closer look. Notice how Yammer is up in the navigation bar beside SkyDrive? How the familiar Office logos are embedded in the Yammer interface?
I want to come back to the three reasons Microsoft purchased Yammer, and add some commentary on each point:
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Reason
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Commentary
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Best-in-class enterprise social networking service
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Social rocks in Yammer, and has the key advantage that it isn’t SharePoint, which has a decade of legacy along with its social capability. See my previous post for what Yammer uniquely delivers.
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Experience delivering rapid innovation in the cloud
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To survive in the cloud, continuous innovation is key. Yammer knows how to do this; Microsoft is still learning. Read Bryon Deeter’s post To Grow or Die In The Cloud who notes “best-of-breed cloud applications will lead the next wave on innovation”. Microsoft acquired this capability in Yammer, and they need to make sure to foster and grow it rather than have it consumed by their other products.
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Viral model that appeals directly to end-users
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You don’t need IT approval to use it. A huge advantage, considering that nearly every other Microsoft product is chosen by IT. But one that comes with its own challenges (for IT).
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Taking the roadmap update and connecting it to the reasons Microsoft bought Yammer, I think we can draw a few key conclusions.
Over time, Yammer acquires key SharePoint functionality. Yammer is clearly the product Microsoft is going to market with, and over time it will acquire more and more of the key capability SharePoint currently contains and is great at. That doesn’t mean the features are baked right into Yammer, either. Cloud development and OAuth allows functionality to appear completely integrated, when in fact it is coming from another service, like SharePoint. Add in innovation and frequent releases, and Yammer is like a drag race car at the starting line when the traffic light turns green. That roar? Acceleration. As soon as the race starts in 2014, that is.
Look back at the mockup and consider how simple it is. All of the complexity of SharePoint is removed, leaving a clean interface with key workloads handled over time. Consider the current “Add a Doc/Image” Yammer feature: 
It will be conceivable in 2014 that there is a new option “Add from SharePoint”, which connects seamlessly through to your SharePoint Online environment.
SharePoint is the platform. Does that mean SharePoint is going away? Certainly not. Chris Wright thinks the SharePoint (brand) is dead. Perhaps for end users. I’ve started to think about SharePoint more like SQL Server: yeah, everyone needs it, but few end users ask for it by name. Consider all of the work Microsoft is doing to turn it into a true cloud platform by taking a minute to watch the dazzling demo that Scott Guthrie shared in the SharePoint Conference keynote. He highlights for the first time, SharePoint-as-a-Service providing key knowledge management capability to a solution hosted by Azure and running locally in a browser.
I feel Microsoft missed the opportunity to communicate the significance of SharePoint-as-a-Service concept. A business customer I was sitting beside learned over and said “I knew writing code was easy” as Scott’s Visual Studio macros added code at a furious pace. The IT folks in the room experienced the first time in SharePoint’s history that a deep code demo at the SharePoint Conference didn’t involve writing a web part nor deploying a line of code to the SharePoint Server.
The SharePoint development model and paradigm has shifted. Microsoft is moving to massive innovation in the only place where it can pound out new features to compete quickly: the cloud. According to Jared’s roadmap, we can expect that to start in early 2014. From there, Microsoft can pull together solutions across a huge spectrum of capability to deliver “Connected Experiences”.
Some Yammer integration on-premise is promised in the roadmap, but how much can we expect? It is also safe to assume that Yammer stays cloud based. If you are deploying on-premise solutions only, it is time now to start looking seriously at the Microsoft cloud offerings. “Go Yammer” and “Go Cloud” are very similar messages. There may come a time in the future where you don’t have a choice. I interpret Jared’s messaging as simply this: now is a great time to start with Microsoft’s cloud offerings, and Yammer a simple and powerful tool to start with.
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This post and comment(s) reflect the personal perspectives of community members, and not necessarily those of their employers or of AIIM International
