Why has this support site moved away from Yammer?

[Ruven Gotz]

You may think: Proof! Microsoft has lost confidence in Yammer. This is not at all correct. When you look at the use-case of Yammer vs. Lithium (the platform used for this community) there are a couple of key reasons for moving this community support site away from Yammer.

Yammer is a platform for Enterprise Social Neworking within an organization (and extending to that org's partners). It was not meant to handle this type of public social platform supporting multiple millions of users. Also, the requirement that you log in before you can see or search posts was a limitation of Yammer for this use-case.

Yammer continues to be Microsoft's Enterprise Social Network. I applaud Microsoft for shifting platforms to serve users better, knowing they'd be taking the inevitable "Yammer is dead" backlash.

[#2]

Yammer IS NOT dead yet! Some customers are still using it. Please, stop only thinking in the future even if is always very exciting. Most of the customers are not ready to live in the future. They need to address correctly some current business req.

[#3]

Naomi,

Yes, I count all those as minor tweaks. Ask a typical Yammer user if his/her pulse picks up at all when hearing that list. Minor tweaks.

The core capabilities and use cases for Yammer have not changed in the 4+ years since MS bought it. In fact, they've shrunk. In the tech world that is d.e.a.d. Compare it to SharePoint and Office 365. There was once a time, before the acquisition, when people would talk about Yammer being a SharePoint killer. Been a while since I heard that one.

You say the underlying architectural stuff has to happen first before MS can do the fun stuff. Okay, granted. MS has had four years to get that finished. They've moved faster in Office 365 and Azure in that period of time. Yammer today is a tiny service with a very limited use case, and it's getting more limited as time goes on and Office 365 encroaches on more and more of its territory.

One final thought. No one ever claims that healthy apps and services are dead. The fact we're even having this conversation is very telling.

[#4]

This is great.  Yammer was very close to being accessible but this is fully accessible for disabled Office365 experts like myselft. 

THanks for this network choice. 

Christopher McMillan

MSPartner for Accesssibility

[#5]

The page layout of this new network is very inefficient. There is a entirely too much white space, the tiles are too big and excessive scrolling is required when compared to other forums.

[#6]

Takes me about 3 days to scroll down and read a simple discussion now...

[#7]

You didn't see this one coming??? :)

[#8]

Thanks for the feedback, we will continue to work through preview to make the experience better!

[#9]

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@Christopher McMillan wrote:

This is great.  Yammer was very close to being accessible but this is fully accessible for disabled Office365 experts like myselft. 

THanks for this network choice. 

Christopher McMillan

MSPartner for Accesssibility

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@Christopher McMillan Thanks so much for the feedback!  Really great to get your perspective.

[#10]

This is my very favorite Yammer is Dead article.  It's by the CEO of Jive, from 3 years ago.  For something that was a corpse 3 years ago, there sure are a lot of people using Yammer.  Meanwhile in the same 3 years Jive has gone from $1.15B market cap to under $300M.  Just saying. 

Like I mentioned in my article earlier today, any time Microsoft retools purchased software from what it was to something ready to integrate with its other products, the short term result is somewhere between boring and awful.  The fact people are complaing that they've done nothing is a pretty big accomplishment, because a great deal of the underlying infrastructure has been changed.

It's kind of like your house being converted from wooden studs to steel and then complaining that the paint is the same color. 

[#11]

Good feedback. We're definitely working on this.

[#12]

Where did you get the idea that Slack's market cap has gone to under $300M?

Oh, and their market value just grown up again, see http://www.wired.com/2016/04/slack-raises-200-million-now-quadricorn/

[#13]

Four years is not short term in the tech landscape. I could go buy a casino in Atlantic City, redo the plumbing, and open the doors four years later, but the market has moved on. Microsoft is capable of moving faster. They've demonstrated it time and again. But they haven't with Yammer.

Anyway, now that the O365 network has moved here, can we have the YCN back in Yammer?

[#14]

I think this forum is a good way to show how much better Yammer is :) Yammer has spent years iterating their user experience, all the small changes to spacing, text, button shapes, colours, icons etc. Each of these being carefully measured to see the impact on the behaviour and engagement of millions of users. While the sharepoint development we've seen has been a little subdued while some major platform capabilities were managed there's lots of good stuff getting onto the roadmap now.

There are many bad design elements to this forum, as I type this message I can no longer see the 'people' I'm interacting with, it's a blind act of faith of posting into a blank slot. This is going to change the formula, break that ephemeral magic that was fostering a community. That's just one example, the rich text will soon annoy, the excessive white space, the inexplicable opening conversations.

Just having technical features isn't enough, we learnt that from SharePoint 2013 Communities, they had so much stuff but not the 'stuff' that makes people use it. 

[#15]

Drat! Why can't I remove a like? The interface was so slow to react that it ended up in the wrong place and yet still took the mouse click.

[#16]

I also agree with others that the layout is ... "interesting" - but not in a good way. When you are presenting a forum that will be highly active and fast moving, you need an interface that follows. Whilst there are many issues with Yammer, the one thing it does do OK is respond very quickly.

Not only is there vastly too much white-space in this layout, if I want to check who has liked something, I have to go to a page away from the text and then when I return, I am not put back where I started but rather at the top of the page.

Though at least it seems to have stopped crashing.

[#17]

Oh dear! I used my first Quick Reply and it didn't even dynamically update the page! SPA 101 folks. This is like going back 5 years in terms of web UX.

It would also be nice if you fixed the great big blue arrow that is blocking out some of the text on the right-hand side of the page.

[#18]

Good feedback. Thank you Julian.

[#19]

Sorry, meant to say that the "success" box you get after the quick reply has a link in it that also takes you to the top of the discussion not back to where you started. In a busy discussion like this, these issues waste large amounts of time trying to navigate back to the right place all the time.

PLEASE try to find a way to track where we are in a discussion and always take us back there unless we say otherwise. This should even be true across visits. This was also a problem in Yammer in that you never could easily get back to the last post you had read but had to manually try and find it each time.

[#20]

Also, hear everyone loud and clear on the issues with the confusing threading and white space. It's something we're working on.

[#21]

Hi Lana, probably the wrong place to ask but it isn't clear what some of the elipsis menu items do - what does "Highlight" do, it didn't appear to do anything.