Yammer, the Enterprise Microsharing platform, has just released some needed functionality, Yammer Groups. Yammer, which connects employees of the same organization based on their email domain, now has gone a step further to provide for both public and private groups within an Enterprise. To my way of thinking, this is certainly “right to play” functionality. In the hopes of becoming part of an Enterprise 2.0 backbone for organizations of all sizes, grouping functionality is absolutely essential. Without it, there’s no way to cleanly and precisely provide direct team support capabilities.
The functionality provides for more granular sharing of information between work groups and teams, collaborative units, and parties of interest. As you can see above, it’s extremely easy to use. Simply provide a group name, a short description and if creating a private group, enter the emails of the folks you’d like to invite. Yammer then takes your description and enters a message into your timeline so that members of your organization know the group has been created, as well as issuing the appropriate invitations. I like the fact that it creates a group “@” address so that one can message all members of the group directly – a microsharing DL of sorts as well as a traditional group email distribution list. Both are a nice touch.
Now for Yammer to really become an integral part of an Enterprise 2.0 Collaboration backbone I think it needs to add related functionality, such as corporate Social Bookmarking. In fact, I suggested this to the Yammer team via their Feedback tab (prominent on every page). I immediately received an email back from an actual human which I appreciated.
At first the team tried to convince me that providing and saving links was a form of social bookmarking. To me, the answer is “yes and no.” It definitely meets the criteria of sharing content but there is no real organizing principle around that content and no way to access it via those organizing principles beyond tagging. Tagging is essential but a user experience needs to be developed to be able access the bookmarks effectively, share them or keep them private – all along the organizational folksonomy that develops within Yammer for a particular organization.
What I liked about my experience with the Yammer team was the rapidity of their response. Within half an hour the team had gotten back to me and told me they were planning to prototype the functionality in short order. Rapid Response baby! And with today’s market conditions, it is imperative to be able to deploy functionality quickly and efficiently and either make it a success for your users or fail fast. I think the Yammer team has the corporate DNA to do succeed with this model.
Steve Mann is a 20-year veteran of the high tech industry. Currently he is a Global Vice President of Marketing for SAP, focused on driving SAP’s Social Media Strategies to market. Steve has led or created numerous innovative organizations at SAP including its Total Customer Experience team, competitive Strategies organization, services marketing and Global competitive and market intelligence.
Steve is a former VC and Executive in Residence for the BRM Group and has also led product strategy for CA. Follow him on Twitter.
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FYI, both of these are features that Presently — http://www.presentlyapp.com/ — offered first. I’m surprised that someone who blogs about microsharing wasn’t aware of this.
P.S. It might be more appropriate to refer to Yammer as “_an_ Enterprise Microsharing platform”, since they have some serious competition.
Ed, thanx for your comments. My focus is not just on Microsharing but on Social Media in general but I very much appreciate you pointing out Presently’s functionality.
I was using “the” with a small “t” not a large “T” but i take your point.
Steve