Microsoft Yammer

Note : This page has been translated into English from French by a machine translation tool

Who said that the social network was a tool for purely private use with a single vocation of leisure? It is now possible to implement and adapt this model within a company. Its interest is all the greater as the structure is important, allowing in particular to facilitate communication between colleagues and information exchanges. If you are interested in such a tool, we will present Microsoft Yammer here…

As you will have understood, Microsoft Yammer is a corporate social network. It is included in some Microsoft Office 365 software suite license packages (see our Microsoft Office 365 productivity software article for more information). With Yammer, you’ll be able to produce live and on-demand events such as public and corporate meetings and training. Rather than sending an email to everyone who might be involved in a business gathering of any kind, an email that can get lost in a flood of other information, Microsoft Yammer lets you create the event and associate whoever you want with it. You can easily imagine that if the profiles of each collaborator are correctly filled in, this will limit your chances of forgetting contacts who could be concerned by these events, allowing you to extract more easily all the collaborators related to a project or part of the same service.

Yammer offers the possibility to optimize communication within an organization, to collect ideas, comments but also answers to its questions. The interest here is as much to be able to help other collaborators to solve their problems as to be able to call on others when one is stuck on a specific task or project. In a traditional corporate organization, you would make arbitrary choices to ask for help from those around you, either live or over the phone. And if you could make a choice among a set of colleagues, depending on the nature of your difficulty, who you could ask and especially to do it all at once. That’s what Yammer is all about. But it doesn’t stop there, because it is a tool that allows everyone to express themselves and suggest new ideas or react to the ideas of others with the aim of moving the organization forward, involving each employee and valuing this involvement.

But there is no reason to limit your contacts to your own department or company. All external partners or stakeholders who also use this tool can interact with you. Anything that is confidential can in any case remain within the framework of private conversations.

As we said, Microsoft Yammer is a social network. And a social network means allowing users to gather around common interests. So everyone can communicate informally with those who share the same activities, whether at work or outside of work.

Finally, it allows you to share and edit files directly from Yammer conversations using the other tools in the Office 365 suite. So if you’re collaborating with others on a project, you can make your work directly available to your colleagues so that they can view and make changes to it, whether it’s text documents, tables, spreadsheets or slideshows. Easier than sending them by email and waiting for a return, isn’t it ?

For those who need assistance in understanding how it works, Microsoft gives you access to a community of users and support and training materials.