10 Reasons Why SharePoint and Yammer Really Make Sense

Have you heard the news? Microsoft to Aquire Yammer – How could Steve Ballmer, CEO, Microsoft say: "Yammer adds a best-in-class enterprise social networking service to Microsoft’s growing portfolio of complementary cloud services."

When Yammer was announced as a possible acquisition for Microsoft, I smiled and giggled inside. I’ve known for over a year that Yammer was more than a few SharePoint web parts, it has real enterprise momentum and a social community that reminds me of what happened with SharePoint Team Services in the first version. I’ve seen them both go from under the radar apps to departmental apps to enterprise endorsed applications with serious potential for changing the enterprise culture… and they have. Smart Purchase MS!

Here’s 10 Reasons Why SharePoint & Yammer is a Good Match and Really Does Make a Lot of Sense:

1. Cloud – Microsoft has been pushing for cloud, and Yammer as a cloud only app fully embraces that mentality with 85% Fortune 100 participation
2. Social Intranets – SharePoint is the most popular enterprise social strategy, and Yammer integrates very well to enhance that story around profiles, search, and rich microblogging
3. Yammer Needs SharePoint – Yammer was getting pushed into file storage & collaboration and they could much better serve users by leveraging existing document repositories in SharePoint
4. Social CRM – Dynamics CRM really was missing what Chatter was providing for SalesForce, SharePoint and Yammer are excellent integrations with CRM… a killer TRIO.
5. SharePoint Discussions – Discussions in SharePoint are just really bad. Yammer will bring a much more dynamic near real time conversation to the platform
6. Search – (Yammer Web part for SharePoint) Being able to search conversations and see what engagement looks like is very important for Intranets… What’s going on?
7. Profiles – (Yammer Web part) If you want to get to know someone better it’s better to read and see what they care about, with recent conversations you can much better get to know someone
8. Feedback – No matter how much you ask for feedback it doesn’t get very candid until you give your users a megaphone. Our most popular post for nearly a year was when I asked the crowd on Yammer what I could do to improve the Intranet.
9. Status – Facebook thought that Twitter would never rise and they could kill it by evolving status. When the community took hold of twitter it became not about status, but a communication mechanism. I’ve seen the same thing happen with enterprise microblogs. They aren’t about status of talking to the wall and saying you’re working on a project, but instead it’s an engagement layer. Yammer has nailed that engagement layer for the enterprise, and it fits very well with SharePoint.
10. Yammer plus SharePoint Online and Office 365 will make for some great small and medium business integration. As well… It would be naive of me to think that Yammer will only be for enterprises. I think there’s a consumer option here for the Live service, but going into the Office family Yammer will find a lot of LOVE, and it will continue flourish in the enterprise. I do hope the Bing/Live guys do come knocking at some point, but I think the Yammer and SharePoint story is a great match.

 

Love this new Infographic shared by both Microsoft and Yammer around the announcement…. Notice the mention of SharePoint, Skype, Office365 and wait for it… Dynamics CRM… Sounds like a very powerful match!