Been looking at this for a client. Any comments / experiences / rants?

Ta

Only experience I have is our company trying to introduce it as a “collaboration” type website. Soon as it was lauched it turned into company Facebook. “Morning everyone. May God shine down on you on this wonderful Tuesday” type crap.
Needs regulating and moderating if it is going to be used.

We had it rolled out here. It was popular for an afternoon, I don’t think anyone’s touched it in months now.

Seems ok as a platform, “corporate Fabebook” is about right. But it requires people to use it for, well, people to use it. You can take a horse to water but a pencil must be lead, or something.

I was the first Yammer member in my company. Now…

“46,276 Members were engaged. 698 New Members, 82,416 Total Members (All Time)”
5,938 Messages were posted. 5,938 New Messages in Groups, 879,881 Total Messages (All Time)”
(stats from the Yammer analytics app for the last 7 days).

It’s easy for Microsoft to spin that as a great success, but I would temper that slightly. If you don’t have an organisational culture of collaboration and sharing, Yammer isn’t going to create one overnight. We’ve put a lot of effort into driving more adoption because there are clear benefits to us as a global company that depends on the knowledge of its employees, but it’s been really hard and if I’m honest I’m disappointed that we haven’t done better. But I am fairly certain that having Yammer is better that not having it. Just don’t expect to get results for free.

Thanks guys – useful comments as always.

It’s just being rolled out at work, so at the moment has a few early adopters and not much traffic. At the moment most of the users seem to be in the department that are looking after it with a few others having logged on to see what they’re up to. It’ll be interesting to see how it gets used in a generally non technical business.

We have it and no one really uses it.

We use Yammer quite extensively.

We have hundred of groups set up now (big company) so it kind of loses its point then – I can’t get emails from all the groups I really need to keep my eye on – I’d just fill up my inbox in a day with notifications, so in that respect you actually have to go in and proactively look for things, which defeats some of the purpose.

When it works – small groups sharing files/conversations etc. it can be quite useful. Especially if you are over a number of sites.

It is quietly dying on its arse at my place.

Just logged on to ours.

There’s one post this year, a link to some news article or other; one last year which was a poll asking “is anyone still using this?” and before that the most recent post is October 2012. The site looks to have been set up mid 2011, so it died in just over a year.

Nothing draws a big crowd like a small crowd. Facebook is popular these days because “everyone is on Facebook.” Getting the ball rolling is difficult; people will take a look at it, go “hmm, there’s no-one here” and leave never to return. I’d hazard that if you got a task force of Yammer Champions from different departments who were tasked with posting interesting stuff, it might well be a different story.

When it works – small groups sharing files/conversations etc. it can be quite useful. Especially if you are over a number of sites.

I’d hazard that if you got a task force of Yammer Champions ….who were tasked with posting interesting stuff, it might well be a different story.

Its a peculiar setup here, but the mix of office and remote workers with the need to work on discrete projects in different teams may make it work.

OR as one of the guys here said, if it’s not in my inbox it aint getting done! 😀

We use it at work, the technology is fine, the issue is getting people to use it and keep using it.

If they don’t use it then there is no interesting content and if there is no content then people wont use it…