Yammer instead of mail

[Maiken Østmo Ekström]

Hi,

In my compay (+5000 employees) we encourage people to use a yammer group inbedded in a teamsite as a means of communication and discussions instead of email.  

However, they report back that is is not as easy to find information in yammer as in email.  Eg not possible to organise information, not as easey to search, search-result is difficult to navigate in etc.  So they end up with emails instead. 

Do you have any plans for adjusting Yammer so it will as easy to use as Outlook when it comes to the issues described above? It would have been very helpful and would definately increase our value and use of Yammer. 

Thanks!

Maiken Ekström (project manager Orkla ASA, Norway)

[#2]

Hi, it is difficult to make search in Yammer as its search functionality is poor. We have started using Yammer for internal communications but ended in using Office 365 groups because of its integration with other office services and mainly with Outlook. It works seamlessly with outlook and users now feel great as get works done within outlook. Also you may be aware that Office 365 groups will get sharepoint team site page.

[#3]

Did you organize Yammer into Groups and also tag conversatiosn with Topics?

The thing about email, is that you can only find information that is emailed to you.

In Yammer, you find discussions even when you are not part of the discussion group.

Try to get users to add topics (Hashtags) to the conversations to help contextualize the conversation.

Eg #outstanding #completed #designissues #customerfeedback...etc So you search by topics in future.

[#4]

Search is less important because it's more real-time collaboration rather than a publishing tool.  But the product team is currently working on search to improve it.  You can narrow a search to your own threads using this methodology:

Do a search and focus on your inbox.

The organization is done at data create time, when the creator of the data, the person posting, selects a group in which to post.  

As @Vincent Choy metiones, Yammer allows for what the great @Deleted has coined as "serendipitous discovery".  You can look up her videos on the subject, but basically that's where the real value of Yammer comes in, finding information that is useful you never knew existed, and therefore would never know to look for.

[#5]

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@Tom Kretzmer wrote:

Search is less important because it's more real-time collaboration rather than a publishing tool.  But the product team is currently working on search to improve it.  ...

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 @Tom Kretzmer, we're testing Yammer search integration with our intranet search using the API. I'm getting lots of questions about how Yammer returns results. I've already explained the unique devices they can apply to their criteria. This is more about search order. Can you tell me anything about Yammer search that might be helpful?