ya-what?

Slack is where it's at.

We had chatter at my old place, same deal and part of CRM.

Yammer "it's like FaceBook for work"

Yermaw - "It's like Facebook for insulting Weegies"

Yammers are from Tipton

Do yo work for severn?

just looking at it here.......

Work got bought by SAP and I've since had several Yammer requests.

Prior to that was Chatter (Salesforce?)

One did not partake.

Actually getting on well with slack as you can see the discussion and keep tabs without being involved and the bit where somebody doesn't cc an email, we have it working with 6 groups of remote people, much more powerful and collaborative than email for a lot of stuff.

Even Microsoft employees hate yammer.

Yammer does look suspiciously facebook-esque in appearance. Slack is great, I like it for talking for people who are even just a couple of desks away, it allows people to reply when they're ready. If I'm in the middle of working through some complex issue then I don't want people trying to ask me questions breaking my flow, with Slack I can see a question has been asked and I can view/respond when I'm ready.

I like it for talking for people who are even just a couple of desks away, it allows people to reply when they're ready. If I'm in the middle of working through some complex issue then I don't want people trying to ask me questions breaking my flow, with Slack I can see a question has been asked and I can view/respond when I'm ready.

It's almost like getting a letter, or a fax, or even an email.

Isn't technology marvellous. 🙂

Facebook at work exists by the way, we have it here, but we are a 'fashion' brand, so need to keep up wiv da kidz.

Yammer is utter trash though.

It's almost like getting a letter, or a fax, or even an email.

Isn't technology marvellous

I previously worked at Salesforce so had to use chatter. It was ok but yammer at my current employer is just utter tat.
The people who use it want to be seen to use it. The people who actually get work done and are effective avoid it like SARS.

Large Engineering Consultancy here using Yammer. It can be useful but its the being encouraged to embrace it wholeheartedly that I don't like.

We rolled out Yammer to great fanfare a couple of years back. I think in total there's been three posts on it. Similarly, one department went "hey, Slack" and it's equally dead.

I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with either; rather, it takes a small crowd to draw a large one, no-one uses them because no-one else uses them. We've already got Lync on every desktop, why would anyone want to use another messaging system?

Slack is where it's at.

Or Spark...

Jive here, rather than Yammer.

IRC, obviously... 🙄

Rachel

We've already got Lync on every desktop, why would anyone want to use another messaging system?

We've already got Lync on every desktop, why would anyone want to use another messaging system?

Indeed, assuming that Lync allows group conversations that aren't just meetings, more like department/team "rooms" for discussion. I think Slack is pretty great for unstructured organisations, like open source projects where anyone can just jump in and join the chat. Much like a more accessible IRC I guess, more about the group and less about the one to one (although that's very much still there)

I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with either

I think you're right, but the problem is every company asks itself "how can we improve communication, because communication is always difficult", which is a valid question. However, the answer they nearly always come to is "let's install whatever the latest jazzy communetworkollaboration tool is". That'll limp along for about a year, when they'll ask themselves ""how can we improve communication, because communication is always difficult" and the cycle begins again.

The problem with communication is never (well, hardly ever) the toolset, it's much more complicated and subtle. However, complicated and subtle problems are by their nature difficult to solve, and whacking in a new tool is simple.

Yammer's alright when it remembers my ****ing login.

I use it as part of a remote-working organisation, so it's nice to engage a bit with colleagues without having to "friend" them on FB.

[quote=allthegear ]IRC, obviously...
Rachel

is this you?

[img] [/img]

Yammer's great if you want to put self congratulatory posts about your position following the restructure, or brown-nose those who have.

I prefer to do my brown-nosing face to face (cheek to cheek?), so I don't see the point in Yammer.

Yeah, using it here too, its almost a disciplinary offence not to 🙁

Its awful. No editing of posts, I noted (unless I missed something)

Slack here. Works very well for us because we are a team but spread out over many clients, so we often don't see each other face to face for months.

got it at work (local authority) used by the want wits of the management team to patronise the staff and pat themselves/each other on the back .....

[i]Slack here. Works very well for us because we are a team but spread out over many clients, so we often don't see each other face to face for months. [/I]

Except it's yet another form of communication (and unlike email) no one can ever find what it was they (half) remembered.

Just more 'noise' IMO.

We had Yammer here for about a year. Nobody but a select few people who don't actually do any proper work anyway used it and towards the end of last year it was turned off for "an indefinite time". Ie, its been a total waste of money and we've got rid.

Having used both they are completely different systems, slack is best for project discussions and communication especially the history and logs

I didn't explain myself very well I don't think - I'm not saying that other systems are without merit, rather that people's perception will be that it's "just another" messaging system and they already have one that works.

Lync (or Skype for Business as it is now) is okay for instant messaging and meetings, but rubbish for threaded conversations.

Slack/Yammer/Hipchat and now Microsoft Teams, have more FB/twitter or IRC style features and you can have topics for discussion that teams can chat in about particular projects or features, plus support for pasting code snippets with nice formatting and other media, integration with issue tracking systems, source control, etc.

Very handy for software teams.

No one I work with though wants to use this kind of stuff and we rely on psychic communication (or god forbid, actually talking to each other). That and Skype and some want to use it for voice, and I don't do voice (or phones).

Email is the worst form of communication in a company. They get filed away, forgotten, archived or deleted and trying to search for a conversation you had months ago is a nightmare. Many email clients are poor at threading the whole conversation and get screwed up by different ways people reply or subject changes mid conversation. Unless you are very organised enough to file things into folders, but then some email systems will stick the non inbox folders locally on your PC instead of on server and PC dies... bye bye emails.

Yammer - this years "collaboration medium".

Except all the actual day to day collaboration is done by, you know, sitting next to the people you're collaborating with.

I just realised I'm the IRC guy.

Except it's yet another form of communication (and unlike email) no one can ever find what it was they (half) remembered.

Depends what it's for.

We use it in the same way you'd chat over lunch. Actual project work goes via email.

We have both. Neither get used, though I see the new Head of Staff Engagement has just joined Yammer (last post, two weeks ago)

Yeah Yammer has gone down about as well as 'Teams' here.

MS could make life a lot easier if they could just stop spouting nonsensical vague buzzwords and actualy explain in simple terms what their various platforms and products do.

Doesn't it drive employee engagement through virtual collaboration spaces?

Or was that the last one?

It's like STW, but for work, think of it that way.

Look at my new bike = look at my new promotion

Does anyone know how to ...... = what tyres for ...........

If your company values words like "diversity" over "actually doing some f****** work with the people you have" then expect a lot of that.

And there will be a circle of big hitters, except they will probably end up being promoted to a position of incompetence due to their loudness.

Hey!

The company I'm with are on Twitter, Farcebook, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube and for internal comms, use Skype and last year introduced Yammer.
All of these are perfect if you don't have any client deadlines or actual fee earning work.

The company I'm with are on Twitter, Farcebook, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube

and for internal comms, use Skype

and last year introduced Yammer.

I can see the point of Yammer, if it was more like linkedin and less like a forum or facebook.

What I need is a way of quickly searching for some obscure piece of engineering to see if anyone else has done it before in the company. So if it had everyone's CV on it that would be usefull.

What yammer gives me is a way of shouting my niche question at all 20,000 employees (or at best, a group thereof) who after the 3rd person has done this, disable notifications leaving only the people who don't actually do any work, and the self promoters.

Jam bo - oh it so is. Connected to 3 Slack accounts right now via IRC.

(Though, to be fair, I can't be bothered to set up an IRC client and just use irccloud.com)

Rachel

I hang around on our team slack endlessly wasting time chatting about stuff other than what I'm meant to be doing. In my yearly assessment I got praised for 'helping build the team'.

Lolz 🙂

I'm 99% sure it was Yammer we were encouraged to try in 2015, probably as part of some social media training I had to do to be allowed to look after our department's twitter account. Anyway, most people set themselves a profile up, it got used for novelty for about a week, but no real purpose, and that was the end of that. Most of the posts I saw from people in other departments were just self congratulatory crap and brown nosing.

But, we do use Cisco Jabber, which is basically a rip off of MSN messenger from back in the day. It shows everyone's status, though not always accurately, and as I work remotely I use it a lot, it's ideal for me for when I just need basic info and don't want a string of emails or can't get through on the phone.

They had it at my last place. Utter shit. Nobody used it once the novelty had worn off.

It was known as Spammer because of the begging emails that IT would send out pleading for people to use it.

It is fantastic selling scheme for Slack that it is easy to set-up and yet the history and logs are only on paid for enterprise version. 😀
Also who wouldn't want to have their business-related discussions stored on US company's servers... Bots are great though, "chuck"

Usually the problem with these things is that either they arrive too late or there are just too many similar tools. Follow FB, Twitter, LinkedIn, Yammer, Slack, Lync(SfB) chats, e-mail, intranet, old intranet where all files still are and try find time to do the actual work.

We have Jabber, Yammer, Colab, SFDC (with a custom "Deal Machine" front end, which robs it of useful functionality) and probably more besides.

I just use SFDC (because I have to) and Jabber for chatting to my mates.

Yammer works pretty well for us, about 150 people spread all over the place, and have been using it for years (the Microsoft acquisition was 2012ish? not long after that). Email DLs don't get used for discussion any more, all the "hey, has anyone else seen this issue before?" or "what would be the best way to do x?" type threads happens on Yammer. Then it's all there and searchable when new people join.

I like that it's more free-form and less urgent or immediate than IM or email, something I dip into a couple of times a day rather than interrupting. The concept of groups you follow is nice too, there's parts of the company that I don't work within but it can be interesting to see what other teams are discussing - I certainly wouldn't be part of their DLs back when those were the usual way.

Does seem to need a decent push to get enough people on board for it to get its own momentum. Although god knows what I'd choose for an org today - Yammer hasn't had a lot of love from Microsoft, doesn't integrate that well with other O365 stuff, but Teams is still a bit rough around the edges.

I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with either; [b]rather, it takes a small crowd to draw a large one, no-one uses them because no-one else uses them.[/b] We've already got Lync on every desktop, why would anyone want to use another messaging system?

We have Yammer at Treblinsk Rubbish Tractor production facility No.1, I used it to question why we were being overcharged for some parts on the internal procurement system (£67 instead of 60p in the real world). Oh my, what a can of worms I opened, No.2 of state organisation worth Billions got involved and it ended up with me receiving a thinly veiled threat to keep my ignorant nose out of procurements business from the director of procurement otherwise it'd be a trip to the Gulag.

I now use it to post the occasional nice photo of a Tractor.

Our hierarchy are all regular users, probably so they can write about it in their performance appraisals and appear trendy and engaging with their staff. Lots of hashtags appear - I presume that these are utterly pointless in Yammer?

The most frustrating thing is when a senior manager sends al all user email saying 'I've just put loads on Yammer about the restructuring / paper clips / vending machines / whatever - why don't you log in and have a look?' Well here's a f***ing idea - why don't you just copy and paste into this email, instead of forcing me to log into a system that demands my full email address and password (46 characters, btw) every time I want an update about the paper clips?

Previous organisation used Yammer. It was like Facebook - used by people for sharing pictures of their cats and having pointless discussions. Good for idiots.

New organisation had Lync, then Skype, then Slack, then HipChat, which are used only by the tech teams but are far more useful than Yammer ever was. Lots of proper collaborative discussion in a quickfire way that's far more efficient than email. Good for work.

But, we do use Cisco Jabber, which is basically a rip off of MSN messenger from back in the day.

It's not, y'know, they came about around the same time. I [i]think[/i] Jabber actually predates Messenger, in any case it's certainly one of the oldest. It's the same protocol Google Talk was based on (XMPP).

The oldest I remember using was ICQ, which was 1998 or earlier (I remember had an installer named icq98.exe and I think there was 1cq.exe before it). It ended up getting sold to a Russian company, it's still very popular over there I believe. I was an early adopter - the user ID ("UIN") was a number issued sequentially, and I've never seen a lower one than mine. It made me a bit of a target for Russian hackers for a while, a low UIN is considered a bit of a status symbol in such circles it'd seem.

I remember Jabber at the employer before last, really annoying as when a message arrived it would take some but not all focus from whatever you were doing so it wouldn't be visible but you would accidentally paste and send text. Disabled it as it was getting in the way of work.

Current employer uses Skype but it's very low key, usually just short snippets like terminal commands or links to documents that an email would be a bit much for. If my boss wants to tell me anything he turns round and has a chat.

Sounds like you lot work for some shit companies.

We have Yam Jams every month and evfink.

FFS!

Yeah, the self promoters love it.

Correct

Sounds remarkably like Google+. Does anybody still use that, or is a howling wasteland occupied by the shuffling husks of first adopters who refuse to let it die in peace?

It's a howling wasteland occupied by the shuffling husks of first adopters who refuse to let it die in peace. Which is a pity, as in some ways it's better than FB or Twitter.

[url= https://twitter.com/pburtchaell/status/750494339860615169 ]Toe curling MS tweet about Yammer.[/url]. WTF is a yam jam by the way?

Yam Jams!

The CEO, various wacky ****ers and ass kissers from head office and a couple of desperate IT guys.

Last year the CEO moved head office to Germany and fired the lot of them

I signed up to Yammer at work the other month. Looked at it a couple of times and that was it, but then again I don't look at our Facebook or Twitter either. I'm also signed up to Jabber and don't use that either.

Slack at the place I work. Would be good except half of the team have trouble distinguishing between private/public channels, or notifications fail or it crashes during start up. Or it's burried below thirty thousand chrome/excel/word/outlook windows. Morons.

The company I used to work for had Yammer a few years ago. Never took off. I would get regular emails recommending people to hook up with on Yammer, but said people had left the company years before.
Chatter never took off either.

I prefer talking to people 🙂

Been through - chatter or whatever they called the Salesforce guff.

Yammer - only the marketing manager used it to tell employees the kind of crap you expect marketing to be telling prospective customers.

Teams - Tumbleweed

Slack - Here we go again.

Had a conversation with another techie and we were in agreement, profile pictures for the next one will be the Picard Facepalm one.

Yammer - only the marketing manager used it to tell employees the kind of crap you expect marketing to be telling prospective customers

Yep, work with another organisation who didn't seem to realise Yammer was closed and therefore we couldn't see anything they put on there.

It's like Facebook for cringe worthy, brown nosing, boss rimmers.

"how can we improve communication, because communication is always difficult?"

That was exactly the question we had and the answer was apparently Trello.

Why people working in the same building would need any of these IM tools is completely beyond me and I'm a total geek. Get up and talk.

I use them because I work remotely.

Rachel

I must confess I don't really understand all the love for Slack. I use it occasionally but I can't figure out what it offers that is notably better than email. Is it simply that it *isn't* email and that people can "collaborate" internally without external distractions?

Why people working in the same building would need any of these IM tools is completely beyond me and I'm a total geek. Get up and talk.

Is it simply that it *isn't* email and that people can "collaborate" internally without external distractions?

Signed up to Yammer at work, just to turn off the requests to join from people who invite everyone in the organisation mail list. Not looked at it since. Not heard anything of it since.

is there a corporate chatroulette yet ?

I keep getting told off for my allstaff emails saying that I'm wearing nothing below desk level

There's a Yammer for teachers and pupils in Scotland. It currently consists of a few pupils posting crap and one increasingly irate teacher telling them off.

Email always drops people from the list as it moves along and before long what was a group thing becomes a 2 person chat.

Really? I only ever really see the opposite, a simple question snowballs into a massive chain with half the company CC:ed in.

I only ever really see the opposite, a simple question snowballs into a massive chain with half the company CC:ed in.

Is it Yammer in particular you guys don't like, or just these messaging/collaboration apps in general?

Part of my job is to look at how my work uses technology etc.

I was planning on giving Yammer a trial internally. We've got two offices (Fife and Glasgow) and loads of part time staff so people don't see each other a lot. 30 folk in the organisation and a couple of times a year we work with a lot of external freelance assessors. We only have email to communicate electronically.
I can see a lot of benefits for having conversations in threads/boards as opposed to emails, especially for the social side of things as well as the work.

Since we have Office 365 I was leaning towards Yammer for integration. Have used Slack previously and it worked well for a project with a small team of remote freelance workers and salaried staff at two separate organisations...

My plan wasn't just to set it up an email it out to everyone, but to do a little info session/demo at the next all staff meeting - to try and get people to use it.

Are the problems more from a lack of adoption as opposed to Yammer/Slack themselves?

Are the problems more from a lack of adoption as opposed to Yammer/Slack themselves?

I'd say so, TBH. People will only use it if people use it.

A while ago, I built a forum to try and cut down on the amount of office-wide / company-wide emails. The problem was catch-22: when people visited it there was no content, and because there was no content no-one visited.

Yammer died here for much the same reason. There's an initiative to get Slack up and running but as I said before, we already have Lync so the perception is "why would I need another messaging system?"

Slack's pretty good in that you can have channels for projects, save files to it and so on. But for it to gain traction people have to use it. If it were my pet project I'd get together a core of people who commit to using it. As I said earlier, the best way to draw a large crowd is to start with a small one.

Are the problems more from a lack of adoption as opposed to Yammer/Slack themselves?

Of course. All slack does is display text other people have typed. You have to have a reason for these things, you cannot simply install it and expect a benefit if it's not solving an actual problem.

For us, it did solve a problem, so it's gone down well.

If you want to use a collaborative tool to change your working practices then you need a proper plan to do this, with new processes and training on getting the benefits. Again you can't simply install it and then tell people to simply use it.

Yeah, I've been trialling it with a couple of small groups and it's going OK. Having an info session/demo at the end of the month and then will follow up by going round everyone and talking them through it individually or in small groups over a few days after, to try and get that initial critical mass

If you want to use a collaborative tool to change your working practices then you need a proper plan to do this, with new processes and training on getting the benefits. Again you can't simply install it and then tell people to simply use it.

This. But before you even get that far, you have to ask yourself "what is the problem we're trying to solve?" and be VERY clear on the answer before you start introducing tools to solve it.

If your answer is "communication", then a) you need to work harder to find a more specific answer and b) you're probably looking to solve a cultural, not technological, problem, so new technology is unlikely to be the solution.

Cougar - Moderator 
There's an initiative to get Slack up and running but as I said before, we already have Lync so the perception is "why would I need another messaging system?"

That's the annoyance I get. People used to Lync/Skype and would prefer to just stick with that, bit it's so rubbish especially for keeping a history of a conversation. Sure there's email but as I say that's a pain to find the conversation, and then things get archived or deleted. So many times I have to resend something having reminded them that I sent it before, but they just say they can't find it. To be honest I have the same problem.

Slack etc is more like a forum* with conversations split into topics. The integration with other systems like bug tracking is also useful as is being able to post code snippets that come out nicely formatted (email is terrible for that).

* - except STW, which is more like email with just two topics (not counting classified) and it's difficult to find something older than a day 😀