At the SharePoint2012 conference in Las Vegas, Microsoft showcased Social Computing in
SharePoint 2013 and Yammer, and articulated vociferously their new-found
commitment and enthusiasm for social as a central feature of intranets and
pretty much everything else going forward.
This love-fest
around social computing was dampened by the reality that Microsoft developed a
set of Social features in SharePoint 2012 and then subsequently acquired
Yammer. While the acquisition of Yammer underscores Microsoft's commitment to
social, it muddied the waters leaving us with a distinctly cloudy and
complicated message.
In a nutshell, that
complex message seems to be that Yammer is the premiere social computing
product that customers should use if at all possible, the Microsoft-developed
social features in SharePoint 2013 are an alternative that may also be useful
in certain circumstances, but pick one or the other: don't use both.
My clients are
asking me which way to go, and I am working hard to synthesize a decision tree.
Most of my clients embrace enterprise social computing and some need the kind
of deep integration of Social features into applications that Yammer's Adam
Pisoni was talking about at the SharePoint Conference 2012. (By deep
integration I mean solutions for scenarios like deriving insight into customer
needs or product development.) I don't have that decision tree worked out yet,
but it is clear that they must choose one of three directions: 1) yammer if at
all possible, the key problem being if
clients require hosting all data on-premesis, because the data in Yammer exists
in the cloud. 2) social in SP or 3) a third-party product like Newsgator or
Neudesic Pulse, which work fine in 2010.
