For SharePoint 2013:
- My Sites
- News-feed
- Discussions
- Communities
The Office 365 version shows real promise, although the mobile use of Discussions does not work as expected. Newsfeed does though. Not sure about Communities.
For SharePoint 2013:
The Office 365 version shows real promise, although the mobile use of Discussions does not work as expected. Newsfeed does though. Not sure about Communities.
It's providing a social collaboration experience to a culture of heavy email users. They are not used to interacting on our intranet or other internal environments, having a profile to provide others more info about themselves, or searching for experts, information, etc. This is a helpful step to evolve the culture to be more digitally collaborative.
I've used for six to nine months.
We migrated from another company and moved from SP2010 to 2013 during the same time. There were a lot of hurdles, and people have profile problems (most of those issues have not fully migrated).
Stability, even after deployment three months ago, still seems to be an issue. Tagging does not always show up in trending hashtags immediately. When tagging and @mentions work is not consistent from place to place.
We are on two farms so it is not a truly global solution which is frustrating when trying to communicate about global programs and events. Those in the Europe farm cannot follow the majority of our content in the North American farm.
Our SharePoint 2013 platform is hosted at HP and they manage services for us. HP support is getting better just as of the past few weeks. They do not seem to have a great handle on SP2013 social however.
Technical Support:HP has not been great but we've really brought the issues to light over the past few weeks so they are stepping up their game.
This is the first time using it at this company.
IT was not very transparent about providing what the tools can and cannot do. As a user, I had to figure it all out, ask a lot of questions then get them to explain why or why not we could or could not do certain things.
HP does not seem very knowledgeable about SP2013 social.
I believe IT looked at Yammer but felt our culture could just use SP2013 for free first to get our feet wet before investing in another tool. There are no business requirements for an Enterprise Social Network yet so with the pitfalls of using SP2013 out of the box, we are seeing what we actually need vs. what we have.
Perform a controlled pilot first with social advocates in the company first. Nail down the business requirements with management before rolling anything out. Get their buy-in and support. Once that is decided, pilot several other tools to see what else is out there. Yammer isn't the only other solution for SharePoint. Compare costs, etc, select a solution, create a social governance team, train them well, provide guidance templates if needed and create regular training or webinars for people to get on board. Have leaders use the tool to communicate and move away from email.
I have been using SharePoint 2019 and SharePoint Online.
We use SharePoint Online for document management.
The most valuable features of SharePoint Online are content management, document management, and approval processes. Additionally, there are a number of features that provide integration with multiple Office services and external services.
SharePoint Online could improve the user interface and when modifying any of the user interfaces can be challenging. Additionally, there are challenges with the detail in the analytics user interface and the overall customization could improve.
In the next release of the solution, they need to fix the user interface. It is not user-friendly for a generic user. It should be easier because in some of the applications it's quite easy to assign the permission, you only need to use the right click of the mouse and select the permission that we need to assign. However, in SharePoint, it's a bit complex.
I have been using SharePoint Online for approximately six years.
SharePoint Online is stable. We are using the out-of-box options only, and it has been stable.
The scalability of SharePoint Online is good.
We have opened Microsoft support tickets. The learning materials are good for all the solutions from Microsoft, they have multiple videos and documentation available.
The initial setup of SharePoint Online was straightforward.
For a general user, the documentation could improve. The assigning of unique permissions can be difficult for a beginner.
We have joint support for the applications and the SharePoint Online version, Microsoft is managing everything from the cloud and we are supporting it at the application level. There are not many resources that are required for their support and maintenance.
The licensing model for SharePoint Online is based on per user, and it is monthly. The price of the solution overall is good.
There can be additional costs depending on the features that we are going to use. If we are using any third-party integration or third-party connector, then in this scenario we need premium licensing.
My advice is SharePoint Online is good, but Microsoft does not recommend doing a lot of customization management. It is a good document manager, and content management system if they are using the out-of-the-box approach only. The out-of-the-box options are very good, but if we try to customize it a lot, then it's not recommended.
I rate SharePoint Online seven out of ten.
We use SharePoint for intranet purposes.
The most valuable feature is the ability to easily build intranet sites for communicating within teams, storing documentation, product information, pricing policies, updates on product infrastructure, and other related news.
Perhaps it would be possible to add more design tools to improve the platform. While the current design is good, other similar platforms, such as Wix.com, offer better design tools. Wix.com is a website-building site that specializes in this area. Microsoft could take inspiration from them and incorporate similar tools.
The initial setup is complex and has room for improvement.
The documentation is poor and has room for improvement.
I have been using SharePoint for a few years.
I give SharePoint's stability an eight out of ten because of the mobile app integration issues.
I give SharePoint's scalability a ten out of ten.
The technical support is inadequate, and this appears to be a common experience shared by many online.
The initial setup process is complicated, and unfortunately, the available documentation and guidance are inadequate. As a result, we have to resort to watching online tutorials, reading forums, and even asking friends for help. The most challenging aspect of the setup is integrating the website with the mobile app.
I give the initial setup a six out of ten.
My team took two weeks to complete the deployment. We began by collecting the necessary documentation to include on the intranet site. Then, we created four design templates for the pages and utilized them to develop product information, pricing policies, news postings, and the most effective communication menu for our team.
The implementation was completed in-house.
SharePoint is included with our Microsoft license.
SharePoint is more complex and less intuitive than Wix.com, making it harder to design and create templates.
I give SharePoint an eight out of ten.
We have 30 technical people that use SharePoint within our organization.
I recommend that prospective users watch the instructional videos before searching extensively, as this will save them time. While the accompanying documentation may be lacking, many helpful videos can be found on YouTube and other platforms. I believe that investing time in these videos will ultimately result in time saved.
We are a company that provides Microsoft cloud services and data sourcing. Our business involves reselling licenses and equipment.
It is an eDMS. We use it for electronic document management.
The security feature is valuable. We have control over who has access to what and when. We also have the audit trails to review who accessed what at what time. The document versioning is also a valuable feature. We can have multiple versions of the same document. If there is an issue or if there's something that we missed on a document, we can easily roll back to the previous version and get our data the way it was.
The product must provide more automation. We must be able to automate tasks instead of doing them manually. The product must enable customization of features. It must allow integration with other systems. Integrating the tool into databases like Oracle or Microsoft SQL and pulling data from SharePoint would be helpful.
I have been using the solution for close to five years.
I am satisfied with the tool’s stability. I rate the stability a ten out of ten.
The tool is scalable. I rate the scalability a ten out of ten. We have eight users in our organization.
The initial setup is easy. I rate the ease of setup an eight out of ten. It is a cloud solution. A person with some knowledge about the solution can deploy it in four to five hours. One person can do the deployment.
The product is reasonably priced.
I will recommend the solution to others because of its security features. Security is key for any organization. The tool is very scalable and stable. Overall, I rate the product a nine out of ten.
The key features in this product are:
We use the list functionality within SharePoint to create integrated test scripts. This has allowed us to have a Web solution for running integrated test scripts across multiple applications, along with multiple testing resources in numerous physical locations.
The product can be improved in the following aspects:
I have used SharePoint for a total of 14 years; 11 years with my current employer.
Mostly, we have not encountered any stability issues.
I have not encountered any scalability issues.
I cannot comment as I simply use Google to find answers for technical issues.
The initial setup process was fairly straightforward.
My advice is to not hesitate; just plunge in and implement SharePoint.
I used the solution to share the documents on my devices.
The tool’s performance is good. It is also user-friendly, allowing you to download and upload files easily.
SharePoint should not provide frequent updates.
I have been using SharePoint for three to four months.
The product is stable.
The solution is scalable. Around 1,000 users are using this solution.
Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.
Our pre-sales, technical and sales folks use SharePoint to archive files, share configurations and presentations, etc.
Intranet/website publishing tools and features are kludgy and sometimes defy logic.
The ribbon interface is not intuitive. Information rights management is difficult. It is not standards based.
The custom .net usage in fact requires Windows Azure, which takes the complexity to another level. Also, you need to build this into your existing business systems to make full use of the features.
Regarding publishing, there seems to be a gap with HTML 5 publishing tools and/or tools like Dreamweaver and such, which lack strategy, synergy and standards, from my point of view.
Also, searching for information appears based on Bing and that is utterly useless. One needs to bolt a Google search engine onto your solution for optimum results.
SharePoint in either server or cloud offerings is itself very complicated in terms of all the moving parts to consider, which takes time to figure out regarding feature sets and use cases for them.
It would be nice to see a top-notch web-publishing tool that a five year old could use to go with the suite of Office online applications with much better integration with serious 3rd party search tools.
It’s nice to have server or Azure based options, but a hybrid cloud that offers both needs some work. Neither HPE or Dell are competent with their appliance offerings in the CPS space that could be offered as a package, if customized and developed into a single SKU appliance-based platform with all the goodies inside the rack.
Plug, play and connect…customize, develop and deploy. Repeat...
I have used SharePoint for four years at various customers plus my own company.
I have never encountered stability issues.
It has not reached it’s scalability envelope yet.
Outstanding support on SharePoint, in particular from Microsoft.
We used NetMax. The OpenStack Linux stuff is hacked like no other.
Setup is very simple, though all the features take a while to get your arms around (foundation, server, designer, business sync, etc.).
Use volume licensing to get the best pricing from Microsoft for a customer.
We looked at NetMax and various Linux offerings.
Tread slowly and do the basic training.
SharePoint 2010’s social features were pretty rudimentary. Organizations that really embraced social had to turn to third-party vendors, such as NewsGator or Yammer. Although powerful, I always felt NewsGator was a little complicated and the user experience wasn’t ideal. SharePoint 2013’s social features are miles ahead of what was available in SharePoint 2010.
Personally, I don’t understand why an organization would adopt both SharePoint 2013 and Yammer. I would leverage the social tools within SharePoint 2013 as they are fully integrated within an organization’s employee portal. The mobile apps for SharePoint (both Windows Phone and iOS) will also help complete the social story. That said, if a client wanted to stay on SharePoint 2010, Yammer might be a good fit.
While Yammer and SharePoint 2013 share similar social capabilities (discussions, feeds, ratings, individual profiles, etc.), the difference is that Yammer’s social features have been utilized for years and the Yammer team appears to be evolving the social experience more rapidly than the SharePoint team. It is much easier to setup and use Yammer, so fostering collaboration can happen much more quickly. Yammer employees may also tell you that the service was built around people, whereas SharePoint was built around documents.
Yammer spoke about their intended SharePoint integration scenarios at the SharePoint Conference and highlighted concepts such as a Yammer Web Part, embeddable feeds, document and list integration, profile synchronization, and federated search. At this point, I’m only seeing talk about Yammer integrating with SharePoint Online, not the on-premise verion, but that could be coming. I could see organizations using both SharePoint and Yammer when the business case or appetite for social is not yet clear and there would be benefits in piloting Yammer. Agreed though, it would be weird to have a Yammer and SharePoint 2013 mixed social experience.
I have to agree with Ben. SharePoint 2013 has expanded social features allowing you to create community sites, post micro-blogs, use hash tags, and mention colleagues and communities; but it’s still a light social feature set compared to Yammer, NewsGator, and a host of other social products on the market. SharePoint is still the extensible platform that is playing catch-up in the social computing space. That said, I think a lot of organizations will find SharePoint 2013’s out-of-the-box social features sufficient, at least as a first step into this space.
Yammer is completely about conversations in the open. It’s for sharing, collecting company knowledge (especially tacit knowledge), and creating opportunities for connections around work, interests or specializations. Yammer is a social web community experience. We heard over and over again, it exposes the opportunity for serendipitous discovery, and it does this a lot better than SharePoint 2013.
Right now, there isn’t a clear story about an integrated Yammer and SharePoint 2013 experience. For organizations just looking to dip their toes into social, SharePoint 2013 will probably suffice. For organizations looking for rich, social computing capabilities, they will need to look at other options. As for running Yammer and SharePoint 2013 simultaneously, it could be hairy to sync these two experiences for users. It will require a lot of work on the community/portal management side to do the manual integration that is required at this point. With the future of Yammer and SharePoint being so unclear at this point, I think it is going to make any decision regarding which social computing product to purchase very difficult.
I’m also having a hard time visualizing how organizations would utilize Yammer together with the social features of SharePoint 2013. I’m really impressed with the improvements Microsoft has made to the social story in SharePoint 2013, although as Ben mentioned, there was nowhere to go but up from SharePoint 2010. I would agree that Yammer has a more polished social experience, but SharePoint 2013 is definitely closing the gap.
One of the biggest things I was hoping to get out of the SharePoint Conference this year was a better understanding of how Microsoft plans to integrate Yammer into SharePoint and what that unification will actually look like for users, and I have to say I was pretty disappointed. It feels like a question that Microsoft doesn’t yet know the answer to, or they just aren’t ready to share it yet, but either way we’re left wondering. Until we have more clarity it will be hard develop an enterprise social strategy around these technologies, which is disappointing for organizations who have already invested in SharePoint and Yammer, or had been considering them for the future. In the meantime, I think the new social features in SharePoint 2013 are a great starting point for organizations that are looking to introduce social functionality into their portal environment.
In my opinion, Microsoft acquired Yammer for three main reasons:
I suspect Microsoft sees Yammer as a core pillar of their cloud strategy to help customers move to the cloud and break down barriers IT may present. The Free-mium model of Yammer reminds me of Windows SharePoint Service (WSS), where collaboration was given away for free in SharePoint, and as a result was lit up like crazy in North America. Based on the valuation, you have to imagine that a big part of Yammer’s value proposition was modeled around the future potential of cloud-based subscription revenue in the current Micorosft Enterprise Agreements.
Another way of looking at this question is, why did Yammer let themselves be bought by Microsoft? If you suspend belief that the massive valuation was the sole reason, the only other reasons I’ve heard that sound remotely possible are the fact that Microsoft’s partnership allows Yammer to more quickly accomplish their vision, and that Microsoft brings scale both technically and from a market share perspective.
Microsoft’s acquisition of Yammer was a smart move. Yammer has been adopted in many organizations and brings a wealth of experience around enterprise social. Social functionality was almost nonexistent in SharePoint 2010 and Microsoft bringing Yammer into the fold will boost their impact and presence in a space where they desperately needed to make big advances. With over five million corporate users, Yammer is an invaluable addition to Microsoft’s portfolio.
The benefits to Yammer were a little less obvious to me upon initial consideration, and I really like Chris’s idea of approaching this question from the other perspective. If I had been asked to pick two software companies with similar identities, cultures and values, I certainly wouldn’t have chosen Microsoft and Yammer. It seemed like a sell-out by Yammer, but the Yammer team seems genuinely excited about the change. Partnering with Microsoft will extend Yammer’s reach and will give them access to the resources needed to innovate on a much larger and more impactful scale.
I agree with everyone else, although I am not quite as enamored with Yammer as the rest of the group. I think the acquisition was similar to that of Skype. Microsoft saw a best-of-breed technology for an area that was strategically important (and they were under-performing in) and decided to acquire.
It’s interesting because both of these tools don’t look or feel Microsoft-y. I wonder if that will change over time or if they will keep their own identity. It will be an interesting time over the next few years for organizations that are standardized on the Microsoft stack as Microsoft determines how these social tools will all work together (or won’t).
This is the million dollar question! Right now, I think it’s anyone’s guess. The Yammer group and the SharePoint team were adamant at the conference that Yammer will never be an on-premise solution; it will always exist in the cloud. Microsoft and SharePoint are pushing hard for the cloud, but there are many clients that will be on premise for the foreseeable future.
Given this reality, I can see Yammer, Office 365, and SharePoint Online integrating really well and becoming a dynamic collaborative, social online environment. For clients using on-premise installations of SharePoint, they will either end up with some half-baked Yammer integration paired with out-of-the-box (OOTB) SharePoint social features, or OOTB SharePoint social features on their own. For organizations that have yet to dip into any significant enterprise social technologies, SharePoint 2013 OOTB will likely be sufficient as they wade into the social enterprise space.
There’s no way Microsoft can continue to offer such vastly different and competing social directions going forward — they need to communicate a clear and cohesive integration story soon. Microsoft took a fair bit of criticism post conference for not presenting a well thought out vision of integration and left customers in a fairly awkward position when approaching enterprise social on the Microsoft platform. With no explicit integration road map, the vibe at the conference was one of a shift in direction to following Yammer’s new way of doing things. Therefore I would suspect future changes to SharePoint social will be heavily dominated by Yammer capabilities, with the bulk of the thought leadership and influence coming directly from that team.
At the end of the day, I want to see a highly usable set of social features and capabilities that are tightly integrated into SharePoint. The big issues right now with SharePoint and Yammer are the confusion between where one ends and the other begins, and why an organization might use one over the other (or how they could use both). I’m not sure how this will play out for on-premise installations vs. organizations who are leveraging Microsoft’s cloud offerings, but my hope for the future is a seamless and exceptional social experience in SharePoint.
I think the answer is easy. If an organization has an older version of SharePoint (such as SharePoint 2007) or a similar legacy platform and is interested in exploring the benefits of social collaboration in a low-cost, efficient way I’d suggest Yammer! If the organization is on SharePoint 2010 and has already developed a very strong collaboration model or perhaps has had success with some of the social concepts, I’d recommend SharePoint and not complicate the user experience. Setting up an Office 365 trial would be the fastest and easiest way to test-drive the new social capabilities in SharePoint.
Biggest risk point to consider? If your current employee portal has a rich set of social capabilities, I would be careful extending an isolated Yammer solution. The risk is that employees could become confused about what the organizational standard is for managing information, collaborating, and communicating across teams. For years, organizations have tried to simplify the personal information management strategies that employees have to deal with, and adding Yammer without the right change management and communication could make matters worse!
I agree with Chris. I think if an organization is running an older version of SharePoint or is using a non-social portal platform, Yammer could be a good fit, especially as an introduction to the world of enterprise social. In this scenario it’s still important for the organization to provide clarity to employees around the use and benefits of Yammer, what is considered acceptable (and what is not), and how Yammer can be used to supplement the communication and collaboration that is already being delivered through the portal. Without change management and governance an organization is definitely at risk of confusing and alienating users, resulting in poor adoption and continued challenges down the road!
If an organization were likely to move to SharePoint 2013 in the near term, I would recommend adopting the native SharePoint social features, as they are excellent and likely capable enough for most organizations. SharePoint’s social capabilities have finally been extended beyond the My Site and have been blended throughout the platform in a fairly seamless fashion.
If clients were running SharePoint 2010 or a prior version with no immediate plans to upgrade and have a limited enterprise social footprint, then I would certainly take a good look at what Yammer has to offer. While the story has changed recently, earlier versions of SharePoint including 2010 can’t really claim to have competitive enterprise social features with Yammer. Yammer can also be deployed quickly and with relatively little effort.
Risks to consider? As mentioned by the others, introducing Yammer (in its current state of integration with SharePoint) could leave users with some confusion and detract from the use of your existing employee portal and collaboration platforms. Once you rollout a tool like Yammer, there’s no going back! Employees will become accustomed to the social capabilities and they will profoundly influence future directions/options. Even pilot rollouts of Yammer should be planned carefully for this reason.
https://www.habaneroconsulting.com/insights/SharePoint-Yammer
You get what you pay for. Sounds like you are using the freemium version of SharePoint. It has limitations as any free product does. Determining what you are licensed to own from SharePoint is a good starting point. Microsoft has many articles comparing features across SharePoint based on licensing.