
Microsoft is killing Yammer Enterprise plan in January 2017 - corbinpage
http://venturebeat.com/2016/09/26/microsoft-is-killing-yammer-enterprise-in-january-2017-will-start-integrating-office-365-groups-first/
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Spooky23
Too bad.

Yammer was cool in that you could point normal people at it and they got it --
Facebook for work. My team unleashed it in a large organization and got like
90% of the users signed up without announcing it formally, and had a core user
community of 20-25% of the workforce engaged for awhile. They self-organized
some cool communities and we had less trouble than we thought that we would.
Unfortunately, there were some procurement issues that prevented us from
moving forward with it.

The O365 tooling around groups, social via Sharepoint, etc is a half-
completed, inscrutable mess. Our IT kids have a 6 page manual for signing into
Skype for business. All of their new, cool stuff is either just built on mail
or is some sort of Sharepoint skin. The only good thing about it is that we
don't need to try to run the thing on-prem anymore.

~~~
cptskippy

        90% of the users signed up without announcing it formally
    

Considering you can automatically provision accounts and get 100% signup,
that's a pretty low number.

They rolled it out at my organization and everyone was automatically signed up
and receiving notifications. We put together instructions for deleting your
account and passed it around because that was the only way to get out of
notifications.

Even still our communications department tried to push it as the primary
platform to disseminate information and it was pretty worthless. It was
destroyed in the annual survey they sent out and quickly faded into obscurity.

I guess it just depends on how you roll it out. I personally don't see the
value in a social network for the office unless you're trying to identify who
wastes time in the office not being productive.

~~~
Spooky23
We used the standalone free Yammer that requires opt-in.

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chris_wot
I used to have to administer Yammer. One of the worst, most pointless and most
time consuming tasks I had to do.

At one point they "upgraded" half of the organizations we had setup, and clean
forgot to upgrade the other half. Despite me repeatedly asking their support
people why a variety of odd things were occurring, it took 3 months before
they noticed and somewhat sheepishly told me what had happened.

Yammer, quite simply, is a pile of crap. They constantly changed the UI, which
meant I'd have to field support calls to help end users because of their brain
dead changes. I not even once got forward notice of these changes, so it was a
giant pain in the arse, and often happened right when I was trying to get more
important revenue generating work completed.

If it's getting killed off, I for one won't be shedding any tears at all.

------
douche
I've never understood the appeal of these business Facebook-clones. I really
don't get what business problem they are supposed to solve, unless it's just
ticking the "social" box.

I've worked with a number of them, mostly doing data extraction and munging
for compliance reasons, and whether it's Lotus Connections, Yammer, Salesforce
Chatter, or the other ones I'm forgetting, they seem like somebody went
through a lot of effort to create something that's anti-productive.

~~~
seren
I am working in a global company (>200K) with people in all timezone. Sure we
are connected at the top by the same executives but at the bottom of hierarchy
we are mostly working in silos, while we are facing the same issues regarding
regulations, suppliers, technologies.

So even if it is superficial it is a way to reach out and connect with people
facing the same challenges. I don't expect someone from another business to
solve my issues but at least I can get some input/ideas/feedback.

This is still a rather poor way to connect, but I don't see any better
solution at this scale. Much better than a mail @all-company "is anyone else
working on X?"

~~~
rubidium
I have to agree. I've found many helpful resources and people through our
corporate yammer (fortune 200 company).

It's the perfect tool for "hey I'm struggling with __, got any
recommendations?" in very large corporations.

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DiabloD3
At my company, we adore O365, but we looked at Yammer honestly didn't
understand what it was for, and didn't understand why you'd want a social
network at work for any company size, small or big.

What we actually needed? A logged chat that isn't inherently tied to any other
service (ie, if O365 problems arise, we can discuss it, etc etc), and we tried
HipChat early on and swapped it out for Slack.

Re: comments about Slack desktop clients being webviews... Slack seems to be
much faster and use less RAM than Hipchat's desktop client which was also a
webview. I can't tell Slack's desktop client is a webview tbh, even though I
know it's one.

Slack also has that killer feature of knowing when you're not at your desktop
and can interact with your phone in certain ways based on that knowledge.

~~~
maxpert
Seems like Microsoft is working on what you want,
[https://mspoweruser.com/microsoft-working-slack-
competitor-s...](https://mspoweruser.com/microsoft-working-slack-competitor-
skype/)

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Swinx43
I am sorry but Yammer has been the single most atrocious thing that has been
unleashed in organisations.

It is normally touted as some form of magic where everyone needs to get
involved and keep everyone up to date. It is simply a waste of productive time
as it tries to recreate a twitter/facebook style social media mess of which
its value is over inflated.

Use Slack or a wiki or any other sort of collaboration tool that allows for
better communication without the hyped hipster propaganda of corporate
twitter. I have never worked in an organisation where Yammer added any real
value to those who had to deliver. It seemed a great way though for those with
too much time and too little output to look busy and impress their often
clueless managers come annual review time.

~~~
lmm
IME There's barely any difference between Yammer and Slack? One is a little
more permanence-oriented than the other, but only slightly. What were the
differences that you saw that make you say Slack is so much better?

~~~
dingo_bat
The fact that slack actually works in a relatively bug free manner and has
proper desktop clients.

~~~
lmm
Slack's desktop clients are just a webview, no more proper than yammer's. I
didn't notice any bugginess on the yammer side.

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win_ini
The popup makes it practically unreadable on mobile

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matdrewin
Title is somewhat misleading. Seems like they are just discontinuing it as a
standalone service and bundling it in with O365. That being said, not sure
where they are going with this as I believe they are also building some sort
of Slack competitor.

~~~
dang
Thanks; we've reverted the title to the original. (Submitted title was
"Microsoft is killing Yammer Jan 2017".)

Submitters: the HN guidelines ask you to _Please use the original title,
unless it is misleading or linkbait._

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

