The community have battled for long around Yammer, is Yammer "dead", will Yammer still be around, or does people even want to use Yammer when "everyone" anyways are using Microsoft Teams. First we had the battle between Office 365 Groups vs Yammer, then we have the battle between Microsoft Teams and Yammer. But Yammer is still there... But is it on life support or what?
Microsoft tried with the Communites app for Microsoft Teams to bring Yammer to where the end users are, but honestly saying I don't think a lot of organizations manage to enroll the Community app in their environments because still it was just Yammer wrapped in a wrapping inside of Microsoft Teams, and we still stuggled with the old question, when to use what...
Microsoft wanted in my opinion to compete with Workplace by Facebook (or now Meta...) with Yammer, and that is why they decided to buy it back in 2012, but for some reasons Yammer didn't appeal to the consumers in the same way as other platforms from Microsoft has done, like for instance Micorsoft Teams, so instead of using the included license for Yammer, companies spent a lot of money trying to integrate with one of the biggest competitors Workplace by Meta.
That integration is not the best, for Instance if you want to have a Intranet hosted in SharePoint, you will not have like a feed from Workplace. SharePoint btw is according to Microsoft the most used Intranet platform with like 8 out of 10 companies uses SharePoint for their Intranet. Also if you post a news in SharePoint you will have to copy the url and then post that into Workplace, so it's not a perfect integration at any point.
But still even if it looks very similar the "hype" from Yammer haven't been the same as for Workplace, so again it was a great product that the customers had but nobody used it. Or was is great?
Yammer was kind of like that evil stepchild or something, that didn't belong into the Microsoft family like other products did, maybe because it took way to long before it was integrated properly into the Microsoft Platform, and especially for companies outside of US, with the data for long just beeing stored in the US, made it impossible to use that as a internal communication tool. Because internal policies didn't allow for that.
Now on the other hand Microsoft has finally refurbised Yammer, and I think end users and companies now should give Yammer a new try.
With the new storylines Microsoft finally in my opinion comes with a solution for employees to share their stories, their vibes, their feelings in the new Hybrid Work.
Before Covid we was always talking at the cofee machine, at lunch or during the smoke break, now it has been super hard to replace anything like this with the new "normal" and Microsoft Teams is not the perfect platform for this.
Viva Engage introduces a new way to share your unique perspective at scale through your storyline. There are two ways to share to your storyline: posts and stories.
Create rich posts that include links, files, photos, and videos. These posts reach and engage followers and colleagues in Microsoft Viva Connections, Outlook, Teams, and Yammer. A feed of storyline posts from people you follow and recommended colleagues can be found in the new Storylines tab. So with this also Microsoft is making sure that the integration with Yammer and their other tools is finally working great. So why not give this a try?
Stories land at the top of the storyline in a carousel. They also show up in popular Microsoft apps like Outlook, Teams, and Yammer for easy discoverability.
I got a lot of questions about Viva Engage and does this mean that Yammer is "finally" dead, at the answer is no, Viva Engage is just another layer to bring Yammer content into Microsoft Teams, it's in some ways the enhanced version of the Community app they launched before. Just in the same way as SharePoint is not going anywhere even if we have Microsoft Teams. It's just a layer on top of the SharePoint Document Libraries to make it easier to work with files together. So no Yammer is not going anywhere.
Also the communities, storylines, and stories are made available through both Yammer and the new Viva Engage app, so you as an end user can chose if you want to just use Yammer as before or to use it with the new Viva Engage app for Microsoft Teams.
Check it all out here with this videos from Microsoft:
So let's see if this will attract users to switch to Yammer / Viva Engage from Workplace by Meta or where this story will end... only time will tell...