My second Social 101 session from the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (#WPC13) in Houston, TX (www.digitalwpc.com) that provides a very high-level walk through of the differences in social capabilities of SharePoint 2013 and Yammer.

1. Understanding the
Differences Between
SharePoint Social and Yammer
Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference
July 2013 – Houston, Texas
Social 101 Sessions
Christian Buckley
Director, Product Evangelism
(@buckleyplanet)

2. There is Confusion in the Channel
As Microsoft COO Kevin Turner shared in the Wednesday morning keynote at
WPC13 in Houston, over 85% of the Fortune 500 have both SharePoint and Yammer
deployed. However, owning the software and understanding how to best take
advantage of what you own are two different things.
Organizations are recognizing that they have social adoption issues. Within
SharePoint, there is weak usage of taxonomy and templates and other information
architecture standards, which has lead to poor collaboration across the enterprise.
As a result, many organizations have been slow to realize the benefits of their
SharePoint investments.
Unfortunately, many companies have now picked up Yammer as a way to improve
internal collaboration, but without understanding why collaboration may have been
failing within their SharePoint efforts.

3. According to Gartner, over 75 percent
of Fortune 1000 companies will undertake
some kind of online social-networking initiative for
marketing or customer relations purposes by 2014.

4. An Avanade global study of enterprise social collaboration trends, analyzing
the habits of 4,000 users and 1,000 IT and business decision-makers
in 22 countries, found that
• Facebook is twice as popular as
SharePoint – 73% to 39%
• Facebook is also four times more
popular that IBM Open connections
(17%) and six times more popular than
Salesforce’s Chatter (12%)
Of course…
• Although Facebook is used by 74% of organizations surveyed, organizations
put SharePoint and Chatter (tied at 23%) at the top of their list of deployments
for the coming year
• When asked about priorities, Facebook fell to the end of the list
http://ubm.io/17WDTQs

5. According to the Avanade study:
▫ Social technologies make their jobs more enjoyable (66%)
▫ And more productive (62%)
▫ And help them get work done faster (57%)
▫ Of the businesses using social collaboration tools,
82% want to use them more in the future
http://ubm.io/17WDTQs

6. Which Technology Should I Use?
As a SharePoint MVP, this is one of the most common questions I am asked by
organizations as I travel around the globe. Most organizations have both SharePoint
and Yammer, and want to understand the “best practices” for using one over the
other.
First off, what is a “best practice” for one company may not work for others. At the
core of any technology decision should be a thorough understanding of both your
technical and governance requirements, as well as the cultural needs of your team.
Beyond that, it also helps to have a solid understanding of what both platforms offer.
Let’s take a quick look:

7. Social in SharePoint

8. Social in Yammer

15. The overall goal of social
is to reach business goals
The best-deployed platform in the world, if
ends user do not embrace it, will be a failure.
Companies are looking to social as a way to
drive employee engagement, improve
collaboration, and to instill a sense of
community. Whether that is done through the
structured collaboration model of SharePoint
(on premises or in the cloud) or through the
unstructured (ad hoc) collaboration of
Yammer really depends on what best fits into
the way that your team works.
How you move forward with social really
depends on what you are trying to achieve.
But beginning with an understanding of the
technologies is the right first step.

16. How to move forward:
• Understand your organization’s cultural capacity for social
• Experiment with technology, monitor and measure the results,
focusing on end user adoption and engagement
• Closely align your social activities with your business objectives
• Extend features as the business is ready for them

17. Christian Buckley
cbuck@axceler.com
@buckleyplanet
www.Axceler.com
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