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.

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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

4. 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

5. 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).

6. 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

7. 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

8. 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.