Yammer was cool in that you could point normal people at it and they got it -- Facebook for work. My team unleashed it in a large organization and got like 90% of the users signed up without announcing it formally, and had a core user community of 20-25% of the workforce engaged for awhile. They self-organized some cool communities and we had less trouble than we thought that we would. Unfortunately, there were some procurement issues that prevented us from moving forward with it.
The O365 tooling around groups, social via Sharepoint, etc is a half-completed, inscrutable mess. Our IT kids have a 6 page manual for signing into Skype for business. All of their new, cool stuff is either just built on mail or is some sort of Sharepoint skin. The only good thing about it is that we don't need to try to run the thing on-prem anymore.
90% of the users signed up without announcing it formally
They rolled it out at my organization and everyone was automatically signed up and receiving notifications. We put together instructions for deleting your account and passed it around because that was the only way to get out of notifications.
Even still our communications department tried to push it as the primary platform to disseminate information and it was pretty worthless. It was destroyed in the annual survey they sent out and quickly faded into obscurity.
I guess it just depends on how you roll it out. I personally don't see the value in a social network for the office unless you're trying to identify who wastes time in the office not being productive.
At one point they "upgraded" half of the organizations we had setup, and clean forgot to upgrade the other half. Despite me repeatedly asking their support people why a variety of odd things were occurring, it took 3 months before they noticed and somewhat sheepishly told me what had happened.
Yammer, quite simply, is a pile of crap. They constantly changed the UI, which meant I'd have to field support calls to help end users because of their brain dead changes. I not even once got forward notice of these changes, so it was a giant pain in the arse, and often happened right when I was trying to get more important revenue generating work completed.
If it's getting killed off, I for one won't be shedding any tears at all.
I've worked with a number of them, mostly doing data extraction and munging for compliance reasons, and whether it's Lotus Connections, Yammer, Salesforce Chatter, or the other ones I'm forgetting, they seem like somebody went through a lot of effort to create something that's anti-productive.
So even if it is superficial it is a way to reach out and connect with people facing the same challenges. I don't expect someone from another business to solve my issues but at least I can get some input/ideas/feedback.
This is still a rather poor way to connect, but I don't see any better solution at this scale. Much better than a mail @all-company "is anyone else working on X?"
It's the perfect tool for "hey I'm struggling with __, got any recommendations?" in very large corporations.
some people post a piece lots of people should see, some people chat publicly, and the rest lurk and ingest passively. instead of the same conversation happening over and over and over in isolation, you can see and learn from what other people are talking about.
What we actually needed? A logged chat that isn't inherently tied to any other service (ie, if O365 problems arise, we can discuss it, etc etc), and we tried HipChat early on and swapped it out for Slack.
Re: comments about Slack desktop clients being webviews... Slack seems to be much faster and use less RAM than Hipchat's desktop client which was also a webview. I can't tell Slack's desktop client is a webview tbh, even though I know it's one.
Slack also has that killer feature of knowing when you're not at your desktop and can interact with your phone in certain ways based on that knowledge.
It is normally touted as some form of magic where everyone needs to get involved and keep everyone up to date. It is simply a waste of productive time as it tries to recreate a twitter/facebook style social media mess of which its value is over inflated.
Use Slack or a wiki or any other sort of collaboration tool that allows for better communication without the hyped hipster propaganda of corporate twitter. I have never worked in an organisation where Yammer added any real value to those who had to deliver. It seemed a great way though for those with too much time and too little output to look busy and impress their often clueless managers come annual review time.
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