At last November's
SharePoint Conference, Microsoft announced our roadmap for enterprise social
and talked about three phases of Yammer integration: "basic integration,
deeper connections, and connected experiences." (For more details,
see the Putting Social to Work post I
published just after the SPC keynote.) Today at Convergence
2013 Microsoft provided an update to that roadmap, and I
wanted to share the details more broadly.
Yammer and Office 365. During the Office keynote today,
Microsoft demoed the integration of Yammer and Dynamics CRM (Customer Relationship
Management). Microsoft shipped
this update last month, and Microsoft love the scenario-social plus
CRM is a natural fit. But CRM integration is only one part of a broader
set of work Microsoft’s doing to make Yammer the social layer across all of our
products. Our next step is integration with Office 365, and Microsoft’s
now ready to share more details on what will be available when. Here's
what you need to know:
- Basic Integration. This summer Microsoft will update the Office 365
service and allow customers to replace the SharePoint newsfeed with Yammer.
Many customers are worried about confusing their users with two different
feeds, and this update will allow them to simply replace the
"Newsfeed" link on the Office 365 global navigation bar with a
link to Yammer.com. Microsoft will also ship a Yammer app in the
SharePoint Store so that end users can easily embed a Yammer group feed
into a SharePoint site, creating a connection between groups and sites
that will deliver the best of both worlds. The SharePoint newsfeed will
continue to be the default social experience in Office 365, but the option
to replace it with Yammer will be a valuable first step in the overall
integration process.
- Deeper Connections. This
fall Microsoft will deliver another update to Office 365 and deepen the
integration. Customers will still have the option of choosing between
Yammer and the SharePoint newsfeed, but this new, integrated Yammer
experience will offer Single Sign-On (SSO) and seamless navigation. In
other words, when you click on the Yammer link in the Office 365 global
navigation bar, Yammer will appear immediately below with the navigation
to get back to Office 365 services such as Outlook and Sites. You will
also see the user experiences of Yammer and Office 365 begin to converge
(see the concept mock below to get a directional sense). This new Yammer
experience will also offer rich document capabilities, integrating the
Office Web Apps to add editing and co-editing of Word, PowerPoint, and
Excel documents.
- Connected Experiences. As we move into 2014, we'll continue updating
Office 365 with new social enhancements roughly every 90 days. We'll start
by simply deepening the connections between Yammer and Office 365
services, but over time these incremental enhancements will combine
social, collaboration, email, instant messaging, voice, video, and line of
business applications in innovative new ways. This is an exciting time and
a hot space, and I can't wait to share more about our plans in the future.
Yammer and SharePoint
Server. Now of course
we recognize that a lot of SharePoint customers are still on-premises.
They're working on their upgrade plans and want to find a way to connect their
Yammer network with their on-premises deployment of SharePoint 2013. So
as part of the summer update, we'll also provide guidance for replacing the
SharePoint newsfeed on-premises with Yammer. The Yammer app in the
SharePoint Store will be a valuable addition, allowing customers to create
connections between Yammer groups and on-premises SharePoint sites. While
we don't plan on delivering updates for SharePoint Server every 90 days, many
of the enhancements to the Yammer service described above will still be
valuable in this scenario. The SSO, updated UX, seamless navigation, and
Office Web App integration will all deepen the connections between your Yammer
network and your on-premises SharePoint deployment.
What should I do? In my customer meetings over the last
few months, people have often asked, "What should I use for social?
Yammer or the SharePoint newsfeed?" My answer has been clear: Go
Yammer! Yammer is our big bet for enterprise social, and Microsoft’s
committed to making it the underlying social layer for all of our
products. It will power the social experiences in SharePoint, Office 365,
Dynamics, and more. Yammer's unique adoption model appeals directly
to end users and makes it easy to start enjoying the benefits of social
immediately. And because it's an online service, Yammer gives us the
ability to innovate rapidly-updating the service quickly as the market
evolves. So whether you're an Office 365 customer or running SharePoint
on-premises, Yammer will provide the latest innovations and best user
experience.
What if I just can't
use Yammer? For all my
exuberance about Yammer, I recognize that some organizations just don't feel
comfortable with multi-tenant cloud services. For these customers, our
guidance is to use the SharePoint newsfeed. It provides rich social
features integrated with a broad set of SharePoint capabilities. While
the cloud lowers the barriers to adoption and allows for more frequent updates,
we get that some customers just aren't ready to make the move. (Some
customers, in fact, are adamant that they'll NEVER move to a multi-tenant
service.) When it comes to the cloud, we're "all in," but we're
also realistic. We have a large on-premises installed base that's
important to us, and we're committed to future releases of the server.
Acquisitions can be
tricky business, but we're extremely pleased with our progress so far.
Yammer has continued to innovate and grow their standalone business,
and the
packaging and pricing changes we announced at the SharePoint
Conference last year have made the Yammer service more accessible than ever
before. But the most exciting thing for me is that we're just getting
started. Today's roadmap update provides a little more insight into how
we're planning to integrate Yammer with Office 365 and SharePoint. But
we're out to change the world, and there's much more to come.
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