Yammer

At this point in my career, having almost completely given up on dealing with the daily, constant deluge of emails, The team I manage has adopted and embraced the YAMMER platform, with amazing results. Not only are we able to collaborate only on the topics that require our attention, we can pull in other individuals as needed, update attachments and make edits - and do all of this from a single platform. It’s a truly indispensable work tool.

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I was asked to use Yammer as part of a smaller group within a national organization. The directors of my group posted many files for us, and “pinned” some of them for easier access. But as far as I can tell, when I access my group through the Yammer app, I cannot access the list of files that our directors have posted and pinned there. Instead, I have to exit the group and use the search function, which has two problems: 1) If I do not know the name of the document I am looking for, I am pretty much out of luck; and 2) the app searches not within my smaller group but within the whole national organization to which my group belongs. So if I search for something like “schedule,” I have to sift through every single schedule document that has ever been posted in the organization. This is a significant hassle, and has discouraged members of my group from reviewing required materials because it is simply too difficult to find them.

There are a lot of things right with this app, and a few small annoying quirks that make it that much more difficult to get work done on iOS. Speaking mostly about the iPad app here: Split screen will not work on iPad: you have an iPhone version, so why do we not have the ability to use that in multitasking view?? Split screen does not work at all currently. File downloading: I commonly download JPG & ZIP files to the files app on iOS, yet for some reason ZIP files are “unavailable” on mobile through the app. If I go to the web I can download, unzip, and retrieve the files right from my iOS devices. Why is the Yammer app the hold up here? The ability to save any files (no matter which format) to Dropbox or the files app would be GREATLY appreciated!

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I find the group conversations cumbersome and awkward. You have to go through the group to find the conversation and then scroll all the way down each time. Often times my app on the phone will be notified 10 minutes before my desktop app will show that I have a notification. Sometimes the notifications just don’t show up on my desktop. My team is having the same problem. Having used other IM Software, we find this one to be overly cumbersome for no reason. There are far better ways to carry on a group chat and individual chats. As an office 365 business member, I look forward to Yammer increasing its usability so that this can be our main go to in the future. It’s just not there yet.

I been using yammer for about a year now. I love the idea behind it. Helps to build a stronger work community. My company uses it to reward/ knowledge great work down within the company. The new added gif feature is nice. Specially when thanking a worker for a job well done. I would recommend being able to post in multiple groups at once. As my company uses different groups to separate from region to region. But would be nice when your trying to get a message across the whole company.