The Complete Guide To How Yammer Works In 2023

Yammer (Viva Engage) is an enterprise social network that gives employees a unified, secure and private place to connect and collaborate across the business. It’s used for internal communication, problem solving, and more. Yammer (Viva Engage) allows you to create private or public groups based on your organisation’s structure, making it easier for teams to share information internally without clogging up email inboxes with unnecessary messages. In this article, you’ll learn what Yammer (Viva Engage) is and how Yammer works so you can decide if it’s right for your team or company.

What is Yammer (Viva Engage) used for?

As mentioned previously, Microsoft Yammer (Viva Engage) is an enterprise-level communication and collaboration platform, connecting people with the information they need to work more effectively across boundaries and across your business or organisation.

To delve more into how Yammer (Viva Engage) works, let’s look at what it’s particularly suited to:

1. Crisis Communications
2. Company updates and two way conversations
3. Live Events
4. New Employee Onboarding

Allowing immediate feedback and the ability to take control of any issues as they arise, as well as keeping people in the loop about issues and company activities wherever they may be.

The benefits of using Yammer (Viva Engage) include:

1. Lightweight client and superior browser experience via extensions for all popular browsers, for example, Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome
2. Tight integration with other Microsoft 365 products, for example, email in Outlook.
3. Security is inbuilt, and it’s easy for administrators to manage users and content
4. Users will instantly feel at home due to the presence of familiar social media features, ‘LIKE’ and ‘SHARE’, for example.

Yammer (Viva Engage) is perfect for businesses and organisations with multiple departments from first-line support personnel, marketing, IT, sales, and HR to name but a few. This is because Yammer is scalable and integrates well with systems you already use, like SharePoint and Teams, and of course, Microsoft 365 products like Outlook.

Which companies use Yammer (Viva Engage) ?

Both large corporations and small businesses actively use Yammer (Viva Engage) , with over 100,000 organisations worldwide adopting it for effective communication and collaboration.

In sectors like financial services, healthcare, legal, technology, and education, businesses or organisations requiring collaboration, close communication, and quick decision-making stand to gain significantly from implementing Microsoft Yammer (Viva Engage) .

Reported benefits include:

• Company-wide connectivity on a single platform
• Simple setup and user-friendly, with a minimal learning curve
• Serves as an information repository for onboarding, enhancing new staff productivity and integration
• Unites businesses and employees across different locations
• Boosts employee engagement, improving performance and customer satisfaction
• Powerful search features for easy information retrieval
• Creates a community for interest groups, enhancing morale and belonging.

 

Can Yammer (Viva Engage) be used Externally?

You can include users from outside your network in your conversation by utilising external groups with your Yammer (Viva Engage) network which is fine if you only need to integrate a few users.

When you require more users and enhanced controls, an external network, including groups, can make management more straightforward.

Whatever the use case, Yammer (Viva Engage) can adapt and Changing Social can help to make sure you have the implementation that best fits your business.

Will Yammer (Viva Engage) be discontinued?

Microsoft has recently debuted Viva Engage which is as an app for digital communities. They say it demonstrates the value of their ‘employee experience platform’ to businesses just like yours.

Part of the Viva suite, it’s available to all commercial users of Microsoft 365. Like Yammer (Viva Engage) , Viva uses familiar social media concepts and the feel of it will make it instantly accessible to most end-users.

It’s aimed at businesses that would benefit from much tighter integration with Microsoft 365. In effect, Viva Engage facilitates a fully-fledged social layer experience throughout M365.

Inevitably, this leads to suspicions that Yammer (Viva Engage) will be replaced by Viva Engage.

The short answer is no and the two will live side by side. Microsoft has stated that Yammer (Viva Engage) will remain the standalone experience for employee engagement across the web, mobile and desktop.

They have reaffirmed their commitment to Yammer (Viva Engage) by promising to continue development and ‘creating a richer, deeper Yammer experience throughout Viva Engage and Microsoft 365.’

So Yammer (Viva Engage) is not going away any time soon, likely to co-exist and continue to serve users who’ve grown to love it for many years to come.

Viva Engage Vs Yammer (Viva Engage)

Comparisons between Yammer and Viva Engage are inevitable, with each having its pros and cons. Balancing these can help decide which product suits you best.

In a nutshell, here are the major points:

1. Viva Engage has no native desktop client, unlike Yammer (Windows only). However, both are available via the web and have clients for iOS, iPadOS and Android. Neither platform supports Google Chromebook natively at present.
2. Neither platform currently support an API (Sourceforge.net)
3. Only Yammer (Viva Engage) offers support directly from Microsoft during business hours
4. Microsoft’s extensive online support documentation and are covered in excellent product-specific forums
5. Viva and Yammer (Viva Engage) inevitably overlap in terms of features and capabilities – especially as Microsoft intends to meld appropriate features between the two. Ultimately, if you want to implement a deep social network for your company through Microsoft 365, Via Engage is your best option. For communication without the heavy social integrations, then Yammer is your choice. Of course, things are rarely that simple in business and particularly in IT, so consult a qualified professional.

The Microsoft 365 experts at Changing Social are ready to clarify the differences and help you select the best solution for you and your employees, ensuring you use the most suitable platform to advance your business.

For more information on how Yammer (Viva Engage) works, or to see Yammer in action, please do get in touch by clicking the green button on the right of the page.

We look forward to helping to improve communication within your business or organisation.