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]

In a nutshell, yes. I think Microsoft is finally recognizing that other solutions may be a better fit for public internet-facing needs, and that they'll increase the level of participation if they reduce the technology barriers. 

[#3]

To me Yammer is good enough for discussion today. That's all of what I need. The key success would be the marketing and encouragement of Microsoft. This is not the platform you use, it is how you educate and drive people to use it. I used to discuss about project with my members via Twitter :).

[#4]

Yeap, I think adoption and training are going to be key to the success of this new platform for the Office 365

[#5]

I'm thrilled to be part of the new Office 365 Network!!  The new Network has some huge advantages:

• It's PUBLIC!!! The team behind the Office 365 Network did a great job of growing the community to more than 87,000 users, but there are hundreds of millions of customers of Office 365! Because the content in the network could not be surfaced publicly, through search engines, people couldn't "discover" the community. They had to be pointed to it.  Now the network, its members and its content will be discoverable and there's no friction (logon) to access its value.
• It's SEARCHABLE by [name your favorite search engine]!!! Because it's public!
• It's EASY TO PARTICIPATE! No need for admin approval to join. In the past, if someone learned about the community, and came with a question, they couldn't ask until an admin approved the new member... something our admins did 87,000 times!
• It's RICH! There are lots of capabilities, including idea storming and blogging, that give us more ways to share knowledge and engage each other.

There's a lot more, but these are the things I'm most excited about!

[#6]

Dan, I get the requirements, what I don't get is the need to throw away something that thousands (10's of thousands actuall) of people are actively participating in. Why not make Yammer work better for everyone rather than starting again. Inevitably your customers are going to question the wisdom of committing to a product that might get sidelined by the latest idea. This is the "old" Microsoft, not the "new" that we were liking.

If Yammer is too limiting, fix it!

[#7]

I rely on the O365 Yammer network and love it.  Yammer is searchable and I do not understand why Microsoft would move away from using their own product.  It doesn't send a good message to existing customers. 

[#8]

Just blogged on this since the new network has just gone into Public Preview.

The New Office 365 Community & Why Microsoft is Not Using Yammer for It

[#9]

Agree with @Julian Knight and @Janice Dilworth : 

* WHY not improve Yammer to allow an External Yammer Network to allow READ ONLY access to non-member to allow search engine to crawl and make result visible in search engine ? or anyone read the content without any sign-in ?

* or WHY not allowing someone to create a yammer account using his/her yahoo, google, ... email address, then join the network and/or relay on Yahoo, Google, facebook as identity provider to reuse identity people already have on internet/public part

Lithium or not Lithium, I just feel we are going back to the future : in 2013 and Sharepoint Social features with badging system (that work well by the way)

[#10]

I blogged my response here.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/microsoft-office-365-community-moving-tom-kretzmer-mvp-

[#11]

Hello again Ms. Moneypenny :)  from SPYAM to ITNETWORKPRO to here, we find you wherever ;)  Besides letting you know I am the "first like" in the post (if it does not already show that, dang I need to review this more ...)  I also want to check out my other issue about sharing Rich text stuff so sorry I am sort of using my fan mail to do so .

function likemyfrontend (defitem, butIalso) {

var iLikeIt = "I like my front end ";
var butalso = "but ";
alert (iLikeIt + defitem + butalso + buttIalso);
}

// did this work?  

OMG!  looky its code!

Spoiler

Spoiler tag

Thanks and y'all may return to your regularly scheduled "relevant" feeds :) 

[#12]

In your blog you mentioned integration with O365 Groups...it wasn't clear if you meant Yammer integration with O365 Groups? If so that sounds like great news!

[#13]

Yes - Yammer will soon integrate into Office 365 Groups. We'll post updates to this site as soon as we can. 

[#14]

Yes Suzaane - I think its been poorly communicated but Yammer is under the Office 365 Groups construct, so the services you see there, such as group membership managed in O365 and being able to access to all the other services in Groups, are all part of roadmap. Sooner rather than later :)

[#15]

Great to see you here @Ralph Rivas and honored that I have such loyal fans, amd glad you enjoyed the blog post and playing with the new features in this community :)

https://www.yammer.com/spyam will continue as an independent community as its not sponsored by MSFT.

[#16]

Ah, but Yammer IS dead. And it's not because Microsoft moved the YCN to the Office 365 Network and then will move the kit and kaboodle here. It's because Microsoft since purchasing Yammer has made next to ZERO real improvements to it. You know what I mean, I'm not talking about minor UI tweaks.

This support site has moved away from Yammer because Yammer never evolved and grew after being acquired by Microsoft.

[#17]

#SPYAM!

[#18]

@Janice Dilworth give the search capability in this network a spin.  Let us know what you think, we definitely want to help people find all of the goodness that this community provides.

[#19]

So becoming HIPAA compliant, having EU Model Clauses, integrating Office 365 login across services, searchability of links in Delve and so many other things count as minor tweaks? I think not...

Too many folks see UI as only improvements, when the secret sauce is in fact integrating conversation into where you work, but you must first do all the infrastructure to make that a reality.

[#20]

Does this product is dead or alive was maybe a question when new versions was realeased every 3 years... But now these products are just moving faster. Are we still using SharePoint backend or not? Yammer feed backend or not? Exchange Server backend or not? I don't care cause I'm still using Outlook as a client and I don't have to change my habits if it fits my business needs.

Yammer is a great tool when it fits the business requirements. Let's move and try different things even if we will fail... Fail fast ;)

The Product reference it more a time mark of a set of features. Some part of Yammer, like parts of the corporate graph will stay alive for a long time and probably a new product or a new service will be built on top of it.

Yammer is still good and used in Office 365 as a comment aggregator between services/Applications and these content are already part of the Office Graph.

I was not really efficient in the Yammer network cause I was not capable to follow efficiently a multichannel conversation. Yammer is good when you have only few groups and Network to follow. I'm excited to see how this new portal will make me more efficient. I'm totally agree with @Dan Holme ;)