In The Next Version

Today Yammer made several announcements that help reposition them from being a micro-blogging/activity stream vendor to now competing with full collaboration platform. Until now, one of the key differentiators platform vendors such as Jive, Socialtext, Moxie, IBM, ThoughtFarmer and others had was that they contained integrated tools such as blogs and wikis for creating content. With today's introduction of Yammer Pages and Files, people can now share information with their colleagues right within Yammer, rather than having to rely on an outside tool such as Google Docs or Microsoft Office. However these changes also bring with them some new challenges for Yammer. The following video provides a 2 minute overview, followed by my review.



Yammer Pages

Yammer Pages enable people to create wiki-style content that they can share with either everyone in their All Company network, or with specific groups.

Some key features include:

• Multiple authors can collaborate in realtime, displaying each person's updates in a different colour as they type
• Comments can be made at the bottom of a page, plus all conversations (eg: status updates and replies in the Yammer stream) mentioning the page are displayed at the bottom as well.  I really like this feature as it brings together all the various discussions about a page in a single location.
• People can follow a page and be notified when updates are made. The page's followers are displayed on the right, allowing authors to get a sense of who's interested in the content.
• A related content box on the right allows people to manually provide links to other content focused on the same topic.

While Yammer Pages provide a good set of basic editor features, as well as a really nice implementation of real-time co-authoring, they do lack some of the more advanced editor features found in more robust wikis such as Socialtext or Confluence. Similarly, Yammer Pages do not provide owners granular access control to restrict who can read vs. edit pages. Instead Pages are open to everyone within the group they have been shared with. It's important to note that in this era of "transparent sharing", that may be fine for many customers. Finally, this first release does not provide any form of content rating or liking, nor the ability to tag/categorize pages, but Yammer tells me these features are on the roadmap.

Yammer Files

Yammer customers have always been able to share files by attaching them to status messages in the stream, but until now there was no central UI for accessing all the attachments in one place. Now with Yammer Files people can easily share attachments, comment on them and even follow files just like they do people and pages.  Yammer Files also enable people to annotate shared files, adding notes and drawing directly on the content making it very easy to collaborate.



Yammer Files are tightly integrated into the rest of the product, making it simple to add a file to a status update or a new Yammer Page.  The image below highlights how security is enforced, ensuring that files shared within a private group (ex: Roadmap) can not be shared with people out of the group. I think the "Select an Attachment dialog box" is extremely well designed, making it simple to select the files you wish to share.



Activity Stream Ticker

Taking a page out of Facebook's latest UI, Yammer has added an Activity Stream widget to the top right of their UI.  The ticker shows a constant stream of updates as pages are edited, files are shared and other similar actions. Facebook's version of this feature has not been favorably received by most users, as it tends to display a great deal of useless information such as what songs people are listening to. Yammer believes this will not be the case with their ticker, as it will only be displaying work related content, thus helping people discover relevant information that can help them get their job done.  The new activity stream ticker does not offer any type of filtering, allowing you to narrow the scope to just certain people, groups, content type, etc. However, you can access a more advacned, full screen version of the Activity Stream by selecting it from the main navigation on the left hand side of the screen.



One of the most important things about the activity stream is not actually the UI, but rather the architecture used to create it. Yammer is following the Open Graph Protocol, first championed by Facebook which defines the schema for how objects are displayed in the stream. This is significant as it has allowed Yammer to partner with several popular services such as Box.Net, Badgeville, Brightidea, Expensify, Spigit, Tripit and Zendesk to enable events that take place in those systems to be displayed right within Yammer.

My Point of View

Yammer is taking significant steps towards becoming a true enterprise collaboration platform.

• In recent weeks they have announced an additional $17M in funding (bringing their total to $57M), a new VP of Global Sales and a new Director of Security
• In August they surpassed three million total users (that # includes both free and paid) and expect to surpass four million by the end of the year
• The new Pages and Files features should reduce the need for additional tools for creating content and sharing attachments, meaning people will be able to spend more time within Yammer and less time switching over to other services
• Similarly, displaying events from other tools directly within the Yammer Ticker should also reduce the need for context switching. I'm excited to see their partner ecosystem growing, as this is a key indicator of the health of the platform.

So clearly today's announcements should make existing customers happy and could also get Yammer into the running in deals where they previously would not have been considered. However, while the product is making great strides, Yammer does face several challenges:

• Yammers reputation was built on being a best-of-breed microblogging platform. Similar to Twitter, Yammer originally focused on a limited set of use cases and was not trying to be all things to all customers. As they expand their feature set, will Yammer be able to maintain that best of breed image, or will feature creep start to dilute their value proposition?
• Yammer's Sales and Marketing teams will have to be very careful with how they position the platform, as competition in this market is fierce and accounts are not won or lost just on feature checklists alone.  As they try and compete against more seasoned collaboration platform vendors, they may struggle outside of their current comfort zone.
• As they add new features, including some which are licensed from 3rd parties, will they be able to continue to provide free services or will they need to start charging to recoup their development costs? It will be interesting to see see if Yammer continues with their freemium model, which lures customers into using the product then requires them to purchase the premium version when then need enterprise grade security and administration features, or if they move to something like a tiered pricing model based on number of users and eliminate their free offerings?

What do you think?

For more information on today's announcements please visit www.yammer.com/socialcontent

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