Forum Discussion
Launching a New Org Intranet Featuring Yammer/VE for Org News
Has anyone recently explored launching a SharePoint intranet using Yammer as core component for news and sharing resources?
I'm working on a project where the client is starting with a single communication home site that will be managed by only a handful of staff for an organization of a few hundred. There are no plans to expand this into additional sites.
We're still assessing the scope and scale of the site content, but if there is a need to publish a LOT of internal content, it may be too much for them to manage.
That's why I'm considering Yammer to manage the majority of org news.
Even a single community would allow multiple committees and departments to share their news and resources to a wide audience. All of which would be embedded into the home site.
There are several other benefits, but I'm curious to know if anyone here as already walked this path.
Happy to hear your experiences and your advice for a SharePoint/Yammer hybrid home site.
- For a smaller organization of less than 500 employees, this may be the perfect way to contain their organizational news. The key to initial adoption and sustained usage is entry to the Yammer community (how will they access it) and who will determine how posts are organized for easy search.
For instance:
You may have three committees that are allowed to post. Each committee should create easily identifiable hashtags and should include those on each post. You'll also want to create topics within the Yammer community.
Another piece of the Microsoft toolset you can leverage for them would be to create a Content Tracker List. The Content scheduler template helps you schedule and manage your content strategy. Filter down to the items that are due soon or get notifications when authors check-in their drafts. So that they don't overwhelm the Yammer community with too much news on any given day.- Topics and hashtags will be important for organizing content for sure. Also, a part of my theory here is that making content easier to publish (via Yammer) would lend well towards sustained activity in the communities.
The more I think about it, the less sure I am about whether this will amount to savings (effort, time, training, etc.).
Yammer is another tool for IT to administer and manage to some degree. Even if the active users are mainly community managers, it's still added overhead.
I think the core value-add here that Yammer should be easier to understand and adopt compared to SharePoint. I suspect the majority won't need special training to understand how post to Yammer.
Either way, this is a decision that needs to be considered from the top-down.
