Forum Discussion
O365 Groups-based Places - Yammer + Teams + Outlook Groups
2) Comparitive Characteristics
Characteristic | Outlook. | Yammer. | Teams. |
Interaction type | Correspondence | Discussion | Conversation |
Message volume | low | .medium | high |
Replies per message | low | Medium | high |
Formality | High | Moderate | Low |
Audience breadth | Very low | High | Moderate |
Discovery possibility | None | High | Low |
Variability of group membership | Very low | High | low |
Default participant inclusion | Closed | Open | Closed |
Self-selection into group | Very low | Very high | low |
Potential for knowledge re-use | Very low | Very high | moderate |
Time period for knowledge re-use | Short | Longterm | midterm |
Use of group calendar | High | Low | High |
Use of group files | High | Moderate | High |
Use of Planner | Very low | Low | High |
Group Purpose | Organizational connection
| Topic Exploration | Shared Work (project) |
Expected duration of activity | short | long | moderate |
I'm not sure I agree about some of these characteristics as listed in the Outlook column.
1. Message Volume - probably lower than Teams, but it can be as high. I have a large group composed mainly of external guest users and the volume is pretty high, with multiple (> 20) replies per item. Remember, an Outlook group is built on top of an Exchange mailbox and that mailbox is capable of storing more than 100,000 items in the folder where conversations are kept.
2. Formality - depends on the organization.
3. Audience breadth - up to 1,000 users (600 for teams, much higher for Yammer). Remember that Groups are created with public access as default, so users can easily find (Discover) new groups and join them as they want. Teams are created as private by default. Also, both OWA and Outlook offer users suggestions about Groups that they might like to join based on signals gathered in the Office Graph, so these groups are pretty open. I think your assessment of "Discovery possibility" is badly flawed as is "Default participant inclusion" (because groups are designed to be open).
4, Potential for knowledge reuse - depends on how the group is used. If groups are used to generate documents, then the knowledge contained in those documents can be shared.
5. Use of Planner - why is this low for Outlook Groups?
6. Expected duration - I have Groups running since their launch in November 2014 and there's no sign of them going away. Again, it depends on the organization.
7. Group purpose - Groups are very good at projects (shared work). IMHO, they are as good as Teams. The choice between the two might be determined by your communication preference.
One thing you miss is compliance. The information held in Yammer and Teams chat is totally invisible to the standard Office 365 compliance functionality. That's a huge gap for Microsoft to fill. Another you could cite is manageability. PowerShell isn't available for Yammer, so the only things you can do is whatever options are provided by Microsoft; the same is largely true for Teams but some of the underlying cmdlets available for Groups work with Teams too. Data soverignity is a further issue for both Yammer and Teams - Outlook Groups use Exchange and are part of Office 365 core data so are held in all datacenters. This is not true for Yammer, Teams (and Planner).
TR