LAWTECH: Up Close – Yammer Enterprise Social Network

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Time for me to ‘fess up: When it comes to social media, I’m a bit of a skeptic. It’s not that I don’t understand the value of using social media channels for marketing and promotion. Between the tweets, Facebook posts and blog entries, though, social media fatigue starts setting in. When the signal-to-noise ratio dips below the “meh” level, I’m done. I’m always eager to try something different, though, so when a colleague brought Yammer into the office I was willing to give it a fair shot. Eight months later I’m pretty impressed with what private social media can do for intra-office communications and productivity.

Yammer describes itself as an “enterprise social network” hosted as a service in the cloud. It might be a little easier to visualize if you think of Yammer as a combination of Facebook and Twitter made private to your office. Sorry, no Farmville or “Which of the Seven Dwarves are you most like” applications. Just a no-nonsense set of tools for communicating within your company. Since we rolled it out, we’ve developed a number of key business use cases where Yammer has proved to be effective:

• Status reporting – you can update status on an important project or case in near-real-time.
• Brainstorming – message feeds make it easy to pose questions and solicit feedback.
• Last-minute changes – communicate a last minute schedule change with your office.
• Discussions and decisions – message feeds capture the discussions and decisions made for everyone, whether they were part of the discussion or not.
• Questions and answers – you can post a question and get answers quickly, or search for previous answers to the same question.

Key features

If you’ve used Facebook or Twitter, the conceptual design of Yammer will be immediately apparent. Users post “microblog” entries and subscribe to the entries of other users. When you log into Yammer, you will see all of the postings from the users to whom you subscribe. You can reply, attach file and images, and add topic identifiers for easier searches.

Posted messages stick around indefinitely, which is a pretty powerful tool. Unlike ephemeral instant messages or emails that get lost or deleted, your Yammer posts can be easily searched by message content or by the topic keywords. The topic keywords make it easy to tag messages into buckets for later retrieval.

Yammer groups help to organize and limit messages you see. Groups can be made public so that anyone can join and post, or can be secured as private by-invitation-only. We have created groups for our major projects and initiatives so it’s easy to share status, post questions and collaborate.

Yammer also lets you create “communities” as a means to communicate with those outside of your office. You can create a community as a secured, by-invitation-only workspace, and limit who can invite others to join. The message feeds for communities are isolated from the rest of your Yammer account data so you can safely incorporate outside counsel and other service providers to your Yammer network.

Setting up your Yammer account for your company is cheap and easy. There are two levels of service: basic (free) and enterprise ($5 per user per month). Both versions have the same core functionality. With the basic account, access to your Yammer messages is controlled by email domain. Once you set up your account, you can invite other users with the same email domain and they can join. The enterprise version comes with more options for securing data, managing users, single sign-on and controlling usage and message content.

Integrations

Yammer has a nice portfolio of integrations. Smartphone applications for iPhone, Blackberry, Windows Mobile and Android are available, even with the basic plan. When you are away from the office, the smartphone applications are an effective way to stay plugged into the office and to keep your staff informed. You can also configure SMS (text messaging) alerts for those with “less capable” mobile devices.

The email integration post Yammer messages to specific groups or members when you add those emails to an email. This makes it very easy to add email messages and attachments to a message thread to keep it as part of the searchable knowledgebase – just add the email for the group or account to the list of addressees.

For enterprise plans, there is a Microsoft SharePoint integration that lets you add message feeds to SharePoint pages, post messages and files from SharePoint to your Yammer account, and integrates SharePoint search with your Yammer feed content.

Security

Yammer’s engineers have done a good job at building security into the system. Connections from your web browser are made using secure sockets, so the data is encrypted while it’s being transmitted. Each company’s data is isolated from other accounts to prevent any unauthorized data access. Off-site data backups are encrypted. Enterprise accounts have additional administrative tools to further secure access to the system (for example, limiting access to a known range of internet addresses, ActiveDirectory sign-on and strong authentication).

Verdict: Check it out

If your office consists of more than one person, Yammer is worth checking out (www.yammer.com). The free basic plan is very capable, and will give you the opportunity to test drive it and determine if you want the enterprise plan (a bargain at $5 per user per month).