Yammer - Planner - Tasks - People overlapping functionality and no connection

[Mustafa Riza]

Yammer -  Planner - Tasks- People are all individually nice apps in Office 365, but the problem is that People and Yammer as well as Planner and Tasks have overlapping functionality.  Furthermore, if we decide to use Yammer for keeping the conversation related to projects under one hat, the integration with planner is strongly missing. I think Microsoft should not develop more and more independent apps in their portal, but now work on how to integrate the available ones to foster the usage and of these very nice tools. Otherwise, it will never pass the nice to have status, and these apps will be vanishing. 

[#2]

Soon Yammer will integrate with Office 365 Groups, so your Yammer Group will get a Planner, see the right column of this mock up.

I would strongly recommend watching this session from Ignite where you'll hear much about how Yammer is integrating in Office 365 now the issue of identity has been resolved.

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Microsoft-Ignite-Content/BRK2014-Connect-your-company-with-Ya...

[#3]

The connections especially for Yammer as noted are indeed getting stronger. But, you do point out that generally the approach has been to develop a "new thing" to replace the "old thing" rather than to evolve the old thing (another example you didn't site: Stream). 

We can debate the merits of either approach. And while MS does do a good job communicating things it's certainly a complicated service to follow given all the changes.

[#4]

You also have Wunderlist that is disconnect from everything.  How about some syncing of Planner tasks into Wunderlist...The ability to add Outlook tasks and OneNote tasks into the aformentioend services would also go a long way to help.

I also saw a tidbit the other day about a new Yammer desktop app?  If Yammer is goign to be tied into Groups, and hopefully Teams (although seems like another duplicate feature with Team converations and Yammer Converstions) why not built it into the Teams Desktop app?

There are definitely days I'm very confused about how all of this is going to play together and where I should advise clients to look with so many apparent duplicate services.