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]

If there is a Community Manager for this network that happens to be following this thread, would you please let me know if I should have posted my comment about Moving from Yammer to Network.Office.com to a different thread. And if so, where should it have been posted?

A user has requested that I move it but I am afraid I do not see a more appropriate place to move it.

I suppose it is a bother to those who receive all their notices via email rather than logging into the acutal network.  I sometimes forget there are some who still choose to receive these discussions via email.  (I don't and am glad not to be flooded with stuff from Yammer or Network.Office.com.)

[#3]

Hi Dennis, this thread might be better suited in the Community Discussion group as opposed to the Yammer group. Probably to late for that, though we do have the ability to move threads. This time lets let it stay, so folks don't think we deleted it. 

[#4]

Thank you Mike.

[#5]

Julia, chancing the purporse of a tool is not actually fixing it. As they said above, Yammer's main purpose is just not that one.

[#6]

It seems to me that the integration of Yammer (an external system that Microsoft purchased) has proved to be harder than they anticipated. The things you mention are still on the roadmap. The use of Yammer to reinstate conversations about documents kept in SharePoint would be an incredibly good step forward (or rather a step to where we were when we had a similar feature a few years ago!). :sigh:

[#7]

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@Dennis Wilson wrote:

Thank you so very much Lana.  

That list was marvelous and all that have made the transition to Network.Office.com have been "followed" now.  

I was quite surprised how many I was following in Yammer that have not transitioned to here.

Of the 80,000 members to the Yammer IT Pro Network, how many have made the move?

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It isn't just whether they moved, it is how engaged are we on the new network. I've an account here and have tried to give it some hard use but frankly there is too much "friction". Coming back after 2 hrs of "real" work to find out that you've been logged out is a pain. Trying to follow conversation threads is almost impossible (I love the feature in Yammer that lets you see the summary of the post being replied to - hover over the "in reply to"). Even a large screen gets very little information on it, ......

My biggest complaint has always been, apart from the rather rude way in which it was forced on a highly motivated and engaged community, not that there is a new network but that the new network is not fit for purpose as yet and probably wont be for some while yet going by recent standards. This is an ongoing issues still with Microsoft that they retire one set of features before a replacement is actually ready (ref. SharePoint, Word discussions, etc.)

[#8]

Hi Julian,

I'm not getting logged out all the time anymore. So things seems to  have been improved. I'm also getting email alerts coming through. So it looks like things are getting better.

My main concerns are that:

* Paging isn't available in several places ( se my earlier post)

* The groups are still very limited. e.g. A community driven development project like PnP is very popular on the Yammer network. But there isn't a specific group for that on this network.  But then maybe that is what the Message Tags will help with in the longer term.

* Navigating between the groups isn't great, but I expect that paging will resolve that as more discussions are agregated to a single place.

Anyway, I'm sure that with another couple of releases things will fall into place. Maybe it would be an idea to make the Yammer network readonly rather than switching it off.

[#9]

Hi @Pieter Veenstra we investigated making Yammer read-only and that would have been our preference too but unfortunately that functionality isn't available.

Regarding PnP, did you know there was a place for Developers here (https://network.office.com/t5/Developer/bd-p/Developer_Group)?  We want to avoid duplication of similar groups.  Let us know if that works for the needs of the PnP community.

[#10]

Hi @Anna Chu,

I'm aware of the developer area. When looking at the Yammer equivalents the PnP Group is having a lot of PnP Specific activity going on. Development in Office 365 I would consider more things like genral office 365 development.

[#11]

Hey Pieter, we currently have Developer spaces in the Yammer, Office 365, and the SharePoint areas of this network. We've made a PNP label that can be applied to posts there to help organize conversations and drive search results. Hope that helps! 

[#12]

Putting this here, because I don't know where else to put it. The Microsoft Tech Community is not looking right in my IE11. Notice how I don't have icons next to these numbers. I don't see them anywhere in the network. 

 

Is there even a temporary community where we can get help and give feedback on the new network? Given that my participation here is discretionary, it may take a while longer to learn how to get around here.

[#13]

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@Michael Holste wrote:
This is something we are working on.

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What is???

[#14]

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@Pieter Veenstra wrote:

I get the point of this site being searchable etc, but the general Yammer chats were easier to follow. New discussions are easier to find in Yammer. Also the email alerts etc seem to be better in the Yammer network. Next to the community being larger ( I'm sure this will change over time).

In short it just feel like we're going back to the good old forums that I used to use for SharePoint. I guess this is still all preview therefore things are likely to change rapidly. I'm looking forward to some improvements.

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I'm pretty sure the point of this site is to prove to us how awesome Yammer is!

[#15]

Not the first time that a non-Microsoft browser has worked better than IE.
I once attended a SharePoint course and using an iPad running Safari was able to do things people with Windows PC's and IE just couldn't ... quite amusing, but also a little bit embarrassing for the Microsoft people giving the course.

[#16]

Totally agree Julian. Many customers who are using Yammer today would ideally want to start using it to engage THEIR customers en get them into the network.
It's exactly where Slack and Salesforce it hitting it. And I would have loved if Microsoft could extend the Yammer platform for extranl usage and make it searchable.

Such a pitty...

[#17]

One of the nice benefits of this community being on the Yammer platform was that we were exposed to A/B testing a little earlier and could give feedback. I wonder if MS will do something else now?

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@Ruven Gotz wrote:

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...

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[#18]

Yes, there's an External Group you can join to talk more about A/B tests and updates from Yammer Engineering for community managers, please request to join here here https://aka.ms/yamserviceupdatessignup and couple of other actions I had suggested at the end of Yammer will Work Together with Office 365 Groups post to make sure your network is prepped for next phases on the journey.

[#19]

Please fix the white space usability issue. Not easy to read through comments by scrolling down for ages. Search is working good so far.

[#20]

This is definitely something we are working on improving. I think all of our fingers are tired of clicking + scrolling.