Social Roadmap for SharePoint and Yammer

Yammer, a hosted social networking service for organizations, has become Microsoft’s preferred option for enterprise social networking. However, the company continues to offer social networking in SharePoint Server 2013 and the SharePoint Online cloud service. Social networking—Web-based communication and sharing similar to that provided by Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter—has proven useful inside companies for various many-to-many communications tasks, such as resolving support questions. Microsoft recommends Yammer for enterprise social networking, but Yammer will coexist with SharePoint’s social networking features for some time, and companies choosing between them face difficult trade-offs on ease of use, security, and management complexity.

Yammer: Grassroots Social Networks for Companies

Yammer is a cloud service that enables organizations to create private collaboration sites with some of the features of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other public social networking sites. While it can be purchased with Microsoft’s Office 365 services, it is technically a distinct service, with its own user, administrator, and developer interfaces.