Stop! Yammer Time

We have recently been trialling Yammer in the office as an internal communications tool. Anyone working in PR (or any office job for that matter) will know that the unassuming inbox has become the de facto place to store, manage, share and access documents, as well as a tool used to chat to colleagues, clients and journalists. With so much so going on in this one place it is becoming difficult to collaborate internally, this is why tools such as Yammer are in vogue. Here are my thoughts it so far:

The pros

  • Managing documents: uploading and storing files is easy with the drag and drop feature, and Yammer’s upload manager is compatible with most file formats. Documents are stored online by date and can be found on a ‘wall’ or by typing in the file name in the search bar. Files can also be put into group folders; which is useful for when you want to share things that are only relevant for certain team members.

  • Meeting actions: Certain teams within Spark have started to send updates from meetings via Yammer instead of email; the benefit is that you can allocate actions to teammates using hashtags. This allows us to establish personal actions simply by typing our names into the search bar.

  • Chatting: the IM tool is pretty straight forward and does exactly what it says on the tin. It also lets you participate in group chats, which is handy for having a quick team talk.

The cons

  • Team meetings: Yammer is not great for virtual meetings as currently there is no voice or video conferencing features available, although that might come in the future. To make it truly an all-in-one tool that enables you to collaborate on the go, it requires such features that are compatible across all devices.

  • Notifications alerts: Yammer sends emails to notify users of Yammer activity that can fill your inbox rapidly, which defeats the purpose of using it in the first place. Fortunately, there is an option to turn this off in the settings folder, under the notifications tab. Yammer notifications are also inconsistent; it has sometimes taken up to 15 minutes to be notified of a post that I’ve already read. This is also apparent with the desktop application – although this is a great idea, it needs to be faster to convince people to use it over the web version.   ****

  • Layout: the inbox layout makes it hard to differentiate whether you’ve received a direct message, group notification or chat message. At a glance, everything seems jumbled into one pile. In general, the interface looks like a tired and outdated Facebook. To draw users in, the web platform needs a revamp to make it less confusing and easier to navigate around.

Overall, whilst Yammer isn't quite the all-in-one collaboration tool that one dreams of having, it certainly has the potential to become one.