It’s been a little over a week since I posted my opinions on why Yammer is not a good choice for a potentially millions strong publicly accessible community site. As backdrop, the Office 365 Network had been running for about 2 years on Yammer, as a peer to peer community of customers, partners and Softies who are deploying, managing and developing O365 technologies. There were about 88,000 people registered on the network, and monthly active usage of about 10,000. My short and sweet original post is here.

In that time I’ve received some incredible (both in scope and number) responses. Some have been via private message for the folks who are not brave enough (or more likely not as stupid as I) to express support publicly for change. Some are great expressions of their feelings and opinions on how they see things which is fantastic addition to the conversation of what community means.

Some have been outright personal attacks via Twitter and comments on my blog that I will never approve for publication but I’ll keep them in the queue for their sheer shame wall potential. Let’s just say that the next time I speak at a Women In Tech gathering, I’ll have some new material to cathartically release. Perhaps I’m just experiencing a teeny tiny microcosm of what’s being discussed more generally with Twitter. I’m an INTP. My extroversion is completely learned. I like to discuss ideas and concepts. I enjoy the heat of passion in crafting and windtunneling ideas. But if you denigrate into making personal comments when you have no material addition to conversation, please don’t engage. Stay classy, people, because even a fictional misogynist character is classier than some of you.

As a CTO at a SaaS company that develops apps for adoption and sustained engagement of Yammer and discovers expertise from collaboration networks and Office 365. I have to say this much passion about a community around software products and services is a wonder to behold. It’s an amazing problem to have. It’s also incredible how people have highlighted so much about what they like about Yammer.

For the sake of clarity, I want to brightline the topics of discussion and my stated opinion on them, both because I am being attributed many things from extrapolation that aren’t accurate and there’s confusion in the threading of issues :

  1. Microsoft’s choice to not use Yammer as the platform going forward for Office 365 Network
  2. User Experience of the new Network.Office.com site
  3. Difference between community and support
  4. Improvements of Yammer as a platform since the Microsoft acquisition
  5. Should Yammer’s product team invest in making Yammer public facing?
  6. Is this the end of Yammer?
  7. Will people share as much on a public network?
  8. Can a community be forced to do anything?

 

My opinions on these issues:

  1. Microsoft’s choice to not use Yammer as the platform going forward for Office 365 Network
    ‘Use the right tool for the right purpose’. It’s one of the most basic principles in IT. It’s also been the subject of some violent agreement in this particular case. The business need was for a peer to peer knowledge sharing platform that is anonymously accessible via the lowest common denominator, doing a search on the internet. Yammer does not do this.

  2. User Experience of the new Network.Office.com site
    Microsoft selected a new platform. I was not involved in that selection process. I’ve used Lithium for external facing communities with my customers, mining consumer sentiment and ideas from there for new product dev. Generally I like the platform. I was delighted it was an ‘off the shelf’ software burnished with real-world customer experience and not the old style forums type, or even worse, a ‘grow your own’ thing. But the choice in implementation styles are customer driven.
    MVPs got a preview of the new site before public preview and the opportunity to give feedback (admittedly limited in scope). Changes were made based directly on this feedback and it got better.     Now the current iteration (and I say that word with a lot of intentionality) is lacking in some features. I don’t like the lack of threaded discussions, no mobile app, that the categories and groups are all using the same icons/colors which makes it hard for me to pick the difference out quickly between ‘Office 365’ and ‘Change Alerts’ and that there’s not efficient use of space on the screen. But it’s all being worked on.I am a huge believer in the Search First interface though. Perhaps selfishly, since I and every other community manager and contributor who has had to answer the same question dozens and even hundreds of times before, just want people to read previously shared knowledge. And hey, I can edit my posts, ‘typo queen and I’m on the autism spectrum cryptic short posts’ status might just be revoked!

    Do I believe it will get better over time? Wholeheartedly. Right now, it’s improving and you’ll see dramatic iterations (you know how that experience goes from your Yammer journeys). Was the Public Preview released too early? I’m undecided on that. The software entrepreneur part of me says get a ‘minimum viable product’ into production, take the ice cold firehose of stinging feedback and iterate fast and you’ll have a community that understands you listen and learn. Another part of me says I hate that Microsoft as an organization often works to artificial deadlines (in this case three weeks or so before Ignite).

     

  3. Difference between community and support
    I’ve pushed to different teams at Microsoft that what constitutes community versus support areas have been poorly communicated. Even though internally they understand the difference, it’s clear the people who matter, customers, don’t. My take: Answers.microsoft.com is consumer oriented and is the most basic form of support if you don’t have another option (form of paid support). You must submit tickets to get official support. It was very bad timing that just a month or so earlier the Office 365 for Business Community (nothing to do with the Yammer network) was merged (née dumped) into Answers. As graceful as a new born giraffe on ice skates. Perhaps it was coordinated behind the scenes (like ripping off a Band Aid, fast is better when it comes to taking the pain all at once).The Office 365 network is not for official support from Microsoft. You can and will get amazing answers from your peers on how they solved an issue. You can and will interact with Microsoft product teams, listening to your issues, learning from your use cases and testing future developments. You must submit tickets (most normally) through the Office 365 admin portal to get official support. There’s a series of connected processes for feeding back tickets, not just direct action for support, but also to note what needs to be in future product development. There’s no ticketing system to ensure that your issue is being addressed on network.office.com like there is on Answers. All you have on the network.office.com is amazing community managers and contributors and a best practice forged in Yammer to let No Post Go Unanswered.

  4. Improvements of Yammer as a platform since the Microsoft acquisition
    Adoption comes in waves. There were the early adopters of Yammer pre acquisition who made the company and the category to some extent successful enough to make MSFT realize this was a real thing. There was a wave of companies who answered Jared Spataro’s 2012 call to Go Yammer.  There are companies who are adopting it right now. (For those in this wave, yes, you still made the right decision. Keep going.)There have been a lot of changes on the user interface in Yammer in the last 4 years. But these visible changes have not been enough for some folks. User interface change is just the tip of the iceberg. You must have the infrastructure in place to be able to onboard the huge next wave of organizations. By infrastructure, I don’t mean ‘simply’ hardware and databases. I mean massively scalable, replicable, integrated, secure, compliant and global processes. Microsoft might have been early in acquiring Yammer, perhaps adjusting the fate of a category before it really materialized. But still a good decision in my opinion.The bigger picture is that enabling new ways of working is not a fad. Way back in 1999, when I read The Cluetrain Manifesto, the statement that blew my mind was “Markets are Conversations“. Read that whole chapter if you get a chance.  

    It’s true for your company’s internal knowledge markets as well as externally. It’s a determining force right now, 17 years after it was trend enough for the authors to notice it.

    It’s taken a lot longer to put in the place the infrastructure I referenced above. I wish it had gone faster. But I don’t want security and compliance compromised for the sake of speed. HIPPA compliance, EU Model Clauses, ISO 27001, data encryption in motion and at rest, hosted in Azure Global Foundation Services, unified log in with O365 AAD and Groups integration on the way. And all of this and (so much more coming…), to make Yammer part of a Global technology platform serving Local needs. All of this is necessary for the next wave of adoption.

    Using Office Online to co-author documents while in Yammer, integration with Skype, Groups and Office Graph is going deeper and deeper every day and so you’ll see the interface changing, but as I have been saying for many years, enterprise collaboration network conversations are all about context. The interface is not the destination. The conversation needs to be where you get your work done, to get information to the right people faster, to make decisions based on better, timelier information and support agility in your organization. The ultimate interface is the one you don’t notice.

     

  5. Should Yammer’s product team invest in making Yammer public facing?

    There are some really cool things on the roadmap as well things we’ve asking for forever (like Editing a post – yay). I don’t think its a good use of time or effort to re-engineer Yammer to be anon accessible. There’s already been enough furor around enabling external groups, I can’t believe that large enterprises would be hugely supportive since there’s a lot of existing platforms (Lithium, Higher Logic, TurnTo etc.) for external communities  and smaller organizations’ external customer servicing needs might be better served with service desk type apps like ZenDesk, FreshDesk or even Slack. I think people would be up in arms if the Yammer product team had announced an intention to make external networks anon accessible instead of working on the things that people have been asking for for years, like integration into the rest of Office 365.

  6. Is this the end of Yammer?
    Again for the record, I have been using and loving Yammer for almost 7 years. My ability to pay my mortgage each month is directly correlated with sales of our internal communications app for Yammer and Office 365 Groups. I have implemented Yammer successfully (and by that I mean, I have enabled business processes to be more efficient by the use of a collaboration network) in some of the world’s largest companies for at least a million users. I have more skin in the game and only a handful of people have as much experience in the platform from a technical and change management stand point. I’m not saying this to brag, I’m just reiterating how much of a committed advocate I am. My opinions are my own.Yammer is not dead.

    Yammer is growing and usage has grown incredibly since the acquisition. Office 365 Groups is the service into which it will integrate and it is the future of how value will be realized in productivity from the whole stack.

    I think Groups is the best thing that happened for Yammer at MSFT.     In time, I think you’ll think so too. Edited to add: Here’s the Yammer and Office 365 Integration story so far. If your business need is to have an internal or invite only community of practice that is inclusive, enables serendipitous discovery and may go over team longevity and org boundaries, then Yammer is still your choice.

     

  7. Will people share as much on a public network?
    This is an unknown. Despite that the old network was technically public, anyone could ask to join, you had to know about it, be motivated enough and willing to use Yammer, and ask to join. So it was a walled garden that was open to the public. Now the knowledge shared will be easily discoverable by search so the barriers to entry are even lower.

    There’s been a steady progression to increasing openness and consolidation over the evolution of the networks, when the YCN and Yammer U networks were created where only paying customers and those training for paid accreditations could engage. Over time the YCN also became public and the training became free and the Yammer U went away, along with the Yammer Developer Network. Then the YCN merged in with the IT Pro Network (which itself started as a walled garden targeted at IT Pros) but became available to everyone because making business success through the use of technology is part of so many people’s jobs.    This progression means that folks who are at large customer organizations may be less likely to share their own corporate stories, but may generalize instead. What will likely not be shared as much is actual in practice resources (that were often scrubbed a little). Many of these were based on Yammer’s original decks, but with twists, personality and specific info on the outcome pertaining to that organization. I suspect that is what may be lost since its hard to get approval to post these kind of resources publicly with data.
  8. Can a community be forced to do anything?
    Just as with your internal customers, the fundamentals that networks and communities rely on, in my humble opinion, is that we are all PART of:

    – Peer to peer interaction
    – Alignment of purpose
    – Reciprocation of value
    – Trust formation over timeNone of these can be mandated. They can be influenced, cajoled even, but change is a process. Even just a few days of perspective has made a difference in the emotional tone for some folks. Change is a process, learning is a steep slope and when you are at the bottom looking up, it looks daunting. We recognize the reaction in ourselves of when trying to implement a new tool. It’s  important to have those guide ropes and pitons on the way up in place. Those who lead the community have the responsibility to put those in place and show the way. By lead in this case, I mean early adopters. You are the community. Not the technology, not the platform, not the brand. You.

    Your experiences – your willingness to share, your willingness to learn, are necessary and sufficient to create community, whether that is hunting for Pokémon, supporting in person one day Office 365 events around the globe hosted by local user groups or this online network.

 

If you read all the way here, wow, you are really are awesome. And I apologize about the inevitable typos that are likely littered along the way. Find me at Ignite and I’ll buy you a drink of your choice. Or bake you healthy cookies if you tell me in advance that you’d prefer that.

I won’t write on this subject again until the end of the year, except if there are major updates, but I doubt it. Stunning to me I had to write 2400+ words to explain my position.

Go forth, contribute and learn!