SharePoint vs Yammer. What’s the difference?

How does Yammer compare to SharePoint? Does it fit into an organization that

is using SharePoint 2013?

SharePoint 2010’s social features were pretty rudimentary. Organizations that

really embraced social had to turn to third-party vendors or Yammer.

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 version, 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.

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, 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 really impressed with the improvements Microsoft has made to the social

story in SharePoint 2013, 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 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 to 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.

Why did Microsoft buy Yammer?

In my opinion, Microsoft acquired Yammer for three main reasons:

1. Leapfrog perceived social capabilities: Regardless of how good

SharePoint 2013’s social capabilities are (and I think they are great),

Microsoft would constantly be battling a perception of being one step

behind in the enterprise social space (as they have been). Acquiring

Yammer gives Microsoft the instant perception of being a serious

contender in the enterprise social space and signifies to the market that

they are willing to take bold steps to get there.

2. If you can’t beat them, buy them: By buying Yammer, Microsoft takes out

a key competitor and arguably the most established brand in enterprise

social. This turns them from a threat to strength.

3. Shake things up and accelerate innovation culture: It’s clearly not

business as usual for the social team in Redmond. The acquisition of

some relative rock stars in the enterprise social space means that the

thought leadership and opinions for SharePoint social are now coming

from entirely different directions. That includes a shift in focus to rapid

innovation development cycles (90 days or less) and a Silicon Valley start-

up culture.

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

Microsoft Enterprise Agreements.

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 non-existent 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.

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).

What is the future of social with respect to SharePoint vs. Yammer?

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.

Where would Yammer be a good fit? Are there risks to be aware of or things to

consider?

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!

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.