Hi Guy, the move of this community away from Yammer is to allow for unauthenticated viewing and indexing community results via search. This scenario of supporting Internet-public forums is not what the Yammer product is for. We believe there are other, more important investments for Yammer that will benefit customers more. Yammer is for collaborating and communicating in smaller (yet still large – our largest today would be around 500k-600k users) organizations and networks.
As a company we are still very much committed to Yammer as a product. We believe it provides a best-in-class enterprise social solution for our customers and we have millions of Microsoft customers using Yammer. The product team are making many changes to handle this scale.
This community provides tremendous value to our customers through the power of network knowledge and collective experience sharing, which would be highly beneficial if discoverable by Bing and Google search. However today most customers who did not join the previous version of this community on Yammer can’t find that information. We have turned SEO on and can see 68% of our referral traffic is due to search which justifies our decision to move.
For additional context, the GM of Yammer, Kristian Andaker, articulated clear reasons why Yammer is not the product to support public forums at this scale. We've had our MVPs continue to share information that Microsoft is continuing to invest in Yammer as a product and in community. Please continue to provide actionable and constructive feedback in the Community Discussion space in the new Microsoft Tech Community.
We are looking forward to making the new Microsoft Tech Community the most reliable source of knowledge sharing and best practices for IT professionals, tech enthusiasts and product experts. We will continue to make improvements to the community. We listen to your feedback and have a set plan in place to implement fixes and updates (see A Preview to UI Changes). Hope this was informative.
