SharePoint User Adoption the Big Winner with more “Yammer”

November 4, 2013

Between Yammer, the recently acquired private social networking platform, and providing further email integration features like participating in discussions via email, SharePoint user adoption seems to be one of the big benefits. Add to that the further ability to integrate with Office 365 at multiple points and the idea of having difficulty driving end-user adoption should be a thing of the past.

Much of the adoption boost is simply the result of giving end-users more software points that they are already familiar with and understand. The private social network gives the collaboration a more familiar feel and aids in boosting the comfort level of the user.

However, in order for this to succeed you need to see SharePoint increasingly running in the background allowing the more familiar access points to drive the experience and make things simpler. Although most adopters of SharePoint still value its power and usefulness, it hasn’t always been the easiest for end-users to learn and maximize their benefit from it.

Yammer, which is essentially a Facebook clone, gives private social networks a familiar interface and it does what they expect a social network to do. The same is true of other applications that can now be integrated into SharePoint. However the bottom-line according to experts is to give users something easier than what preceded it.

With so many options to choose from, selecting the right ones for your integration strategy is critical. If implemented properly and rolled out by experts you will require less end-user training and the learning curve for them will be significantly shorter than previous versions of SharePoint. Many firms with development capabilities in this arena will also have end-user training services to further aid you in driving user adoption and build greater return on your system investments.

So if you are building out an existing collaboration environment or implementing your first, taking a look at how Microsoft has made integrating these systems possible is going to be critical to your ultimate success.

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1 thought on “SharePoint User Adoption the Big Winner with more “Yammer””

  1. The new mobile app for iPhone is a dorwgnade. Not all bad but a dorwgnade overall for me. First, the bottom is easier to reach most of the time than the top so moving functions to the top makes it harder to use. This is magnified by the fact that almost everything is now in the sliding side menu but that is accessible now only from a top mounted button, very annoying. Much less smooth action than on the previous app where all were right at my thumb. Which app is more pleasant to move around, Facebook or Twitter? I never thought switching b/t groups was all that hard so I don’t think the side nav is an improvement. I hate the side nav in the Facebook app and I don’t like it here either. You give it less real estate b/c now you condense the horizontal axis with the portion of the sliding window that remains visible. So same amount of effort but less useful. Not cool. Apple uses bottom 4-5 button navs on most native apps for good reason, it is the natural place to put them, right by your thumbs.On the plus side I really like the new stream/feed layout. Simpler and better display IMO. Easier to see different bits and easier to distinguish unread msgs from read. Also seems faster to me. Its obviously not a deal breaker but I spend a lot of time on the app and so a small UI dorwgnade makes it a lot more annoying for me. It seems like some serious design horsepower went into this redo so I am interested to hear why we are back to a side nav and all the buttons pushed as far as possible from my thumbs. Yammer, what gives?

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