blog Corporate social networking tool Yammer has received its share of hype over time, with much of it being spread in Australia by the digital arm of consulting group Deloitte. With major customers like NAB, Suncorp and WA Health, at times it has appeared as if Yammer was set for rocketing success locally.
However, according to a yarn by The Register this week (we recommend you click here for the full article), at least two trials of the technology in Australia have been recently abandoned, with a couple of local government organisations finding the hype unconvincing. El Reg quotes Andy Carnahan, Information Services Manager at Wingecarribee Shire Council:
“We looked at Yammer because our General Manager went to a presentation where a presenter from Deloittes said they use it and spruiked its capabilities … Usage was really sporadic. There would be a flurry when a new person would come in, but it did not gain traction or critical mass”
To be honest, this is along the lines of what I’ve been feeling about Yammer in Australia for a while. The company launched in 2008, and access to the site is free (until you need the more robust enterprise management tools); often the software-as-a-service tool gets its start informally in companies, where employees sign up for it without their IT departments knowing about it. Consequently, there are patches of Yammer use everywhere throughout corporate Australia.
However, the hype has gradually died down around the platform, and I don’t get a sense that it’s being used actively by many organisations throughout Australia. It does see sporadic use, as it falls into flavour with different units within large organisations, but it hasn’t ever seemed to have taken off like wildfire as other corporate IT trends such as virtualisation or IP telephony have.
I’d be curious to hear from people that do use Yammer in their organisations — how intensely is it used? What do you tend to use it for most?
Image credit: Yammer
I think enterprise social networking is never something that’s going to truly take off. The biggest issue I see with the concept is that it requires workers to be willing to socialise with their co-workers, and this is not usually something that happens on a grand scale.
My employer uses a tool called Socialcast to implement enterprise social networking, and to be honest it’s been a complete bomb. It does get used sporadically, but for the most part nobody really cares about it. They’d much rather spend their time on Facebook or Twitter, interacting with people they choose to interact with rather than people they’re forced to interact with. Combine this with the seemingly draconian monitoring and censorship policies deployed by employers against social media-using employees (of which I’ve been an unfortunate target), and you’ve got the perfect recipe for indifference.
The best “social networking” I’ve seen to get the employees to socialize involved, pizza, beer and Guitar Hero of a friday evening.
“The best “social networking” I’ve seen to get the employees to socialize involved, pizza, beer and Guitar Hero of a friday evening.”
I agree, apart from Guitar Hero, which is a scourge on society :)
Well, there was Starcraft and Counter Strike involved too, but they are far less social.
StarCraft can be very social if you watch televised matches — check out BarCraft:
http://www.facebook.com/events/239947799401370/
http://www.sc2sea.com/showthread.php?t=3622
I have seen it take off really strongly in small teams in major banks; a team of 10 or so developers, for example. However, apart from this, I haven’t really seen it succeed. Even in Government, where you would think people would want to use this kind of stuff, it hasn’t really been popular.
Social networks are like freedoms. One group’s view of them can’t be imposed on others.
They work because of personal payoff and ultimately self interest. Hard to see how yammer engenders this in an organisation. It starts off covertly and virally but if you can tweet, you probably never want to yammer. Places that have draconian policies on tweeting are hardly likely to engender active social networks.
The new federation capabilities of yammer may have a place in organisational mashup, but I just don’t buy it as a standalone walled garden.
Very insightful comment. I particularly agree with this:
“if you can tweet, you probably never want to yammer”
I heard Twitter described once, by Stephen Collins (@trib) as being a network of weakly connected individuals. Inidviduals at the edges of organisations would connect with each other, and then relay that information back inside their organisation, where much stronger connected networks exist. If corporate social networks are spiderwebs, then, Twitter would represent links between those dense spiderwebs. In this sense, then, Yammer would be a strongly connected organisational network tool, representing an existing organisation, that would use some of the weakly connected strengths of a more versatile like Twitter.
I think what Yammer has done is try to replicate the nature of Twitter internally for corporate networks. But the truth is that Twitter is a network of people who don’t really know each other (ie, weakly connected), whereas internal organisational social networks are strongly connected networks of people who already know each other.
In this sense, I think Yammer has to do some thinking around what this means about its nature as a tool. Could it be that Yammer needs to become more like a strongly connected social networking tool of existing networks, like Facebook? I think there are viral lessons from Facebook which Yammer could learn well, which don’t really apply to Twitter.
For example; in terms of your workplace, what are you most interested in — what people are doing in their official roles there, or what they are doing in their unofficial roles (such as work drinks, for example)? In my view, much more interesting information is shared through after-work drinks or smoko breaks than officially using internal documentation systems. This also seems to be a bit more towards where Facebook shines. This would perhaps have a halo effect in terms of information sharing in general.
Hmm … perhaps I haven’t articulated this as clearly as I would have liked. But I think what I’m saying is that overall Yammer seems to be attempting to be too much like Twitter; whereas to be truly successful it probably needs to find its own path.
A very different experience here in South Australia (at least, in the department where I’m based). Rather than just an element of social networking, we went with Socialtext, an ESN platform that offers blogging, micro-blogging, wikis, groups, collaborative workspaces and a range of other features. I think the big difference is that we didn’t just install and configure the software, we took on the cultural change that is necessary to get the best out of it. Today, you’ll see the platform used for policy development, collaborative project management, social intranet, content management and a huge raft of other business activities. Growth continues and new applications for this way of working are being found on a regular basis.
Takeaway message? Enterprise Social Networking works, but it needs more than just technology and it needs the whole package to be embraced, not just tweets.
+1 for a very insightful comment
Renai – btw there is more background on the SA government example here http://www.socialtext.com/blog/2010/11/social-software-thrives-in-south-australian-government/
Interesting; I note that post was made in 2010; I wonder how the situation has progressed since then.
I feel Yammer is the tool that will allow different areas of an organisation to informally share their news, success and wins which otherwise is limited to their smaller group or through an email. A large noticeboard which gets read by a much larger audience than your immediate team. Yammer cannot be compared to other Technologies like Virtualisation and IPtelephony.Because the succes of a social media platform depends on everyone in the organisation not just IT staff. We introduced Yammer recently, and I think it has the potential to bring some light conversation mode in a very heavy built for purpose email environment. So we are comparing Yammer inplace of email and we love it. we can quickly like or follow a topic, without the need to write a 3 line email of appreciation which we most often do not bother with. interest groups are being formed that discuss and share comments inbetween their scheduled meetings. a lot of people are still finding ways to use it, but others are just using it.
We are big users of Yammer and we use it for projects, internal and external collaboration, resource and knowledge finding, and a heap more. We have 5000 people on our network with about 40% active on any given week. It has evolved from a Social network to a collab tool. Perry above is Absolutely right, if you don’t work on the cultural side it may not take off. BTW I am the Deloitte guy referred to in the Register article
hey Pete,
in my view Deloitte is a case where Yammer would be a natural fit; consulting as a business is all about communication and ‘weak links’ between individuals which social networks like Yammer aid.
However, I don’t think Deloitte’s business is representative of the wider enterprise sector in Australia; and I think this is why Yammer appears to be struggling somewhat to gain dominant mainstream acceptance in big government and private organisations. It seems like it’s a tool virtually everyone has flirted with, but not committed to.
What, in your opinion, does Yammer need to do to take that next step and become entrenched?
Cheers,
Renai
Hi Pete
We have introduced Yammer in our organisation recently. Conversations that are light, project groups, intrest groups are being started everywhere by staff who were hungry for a open space across areas of responisbility. I did not see your presention, but I am keen to to learn how to keep the momentum going and expose users to the various ways of using Yammer.
I think its a little unfair to only call out Yammer on this issue, although I accept that they are fair game due to the hype that has been generated around it as a brand by both themselves and Deloitte etc. Yammer is not the only platform in this market and all the vendors (to varying degrees) recognise the need for the deployment of their tools to be supported in the way that Perry Wheeler describes. I’m currently working with a number of Australian organisations that aren’t convinced that a hands off, viral approach is the right way to do this.
Also many of the other US-based vendors in this space (tibbr, Newsgator, Jive, etc) are now investing resources into our region and I think we are only at the beginning of the mature adoption of these enterprise social computing tools. If you look carefully at Yammer, you will also see that the emphasis is now on supporting their premium paying customers to make the use of their tools more successful.
Of course, none of this should come as a surprise. We’ve known that adoption of new collaboration and communication tools inside organisations can be hit and miss for decades.
I agree we’re only at the beginning of this revolution.
To my mind, a true enterprise 2.0 tool would allow you to keep your profile and much of your information when you migrated between companies …
Well, that’s what LinkedIn integration in these tools is all about – its the extra-directory of your professional relationships…
I think the initial comment by Matthew and subsequent replies to this have in fact missed the concept of what Yammer is and what it is best used for. It is and “enterprise” social networking tool, not a myspace, linkedin or facebook…
ESNs can increase productivity within all different types of organisations quite significantly, whether they are controlled or collaborative in nature. Where productivity is gained and where benefits are realised is from providing a business context around process, workflows or general business related questions.
Just from reading the article, it appears that Yammer has been imposed on staff from a top down level, which is why usage has been sporadic and the app hasn’t gained traction. When the groundswell is organic, I think there would have been a different outcome.
I think to be fair, Steve, it has to be both ground up in terms of use and top down in terms of endorsement. And as James Dellow says, it’s not just yammer that can fail or succeed, though Yammer has become something of a flagbearer for enterprise social networks.
@Renai, curious to know why there’s an assumption about why ‘government people’ wouldn’t necessarily want to use it. Government agencies/departments have exactly the same issues in terms of collaboration, communication, efficiency, productivity, staff in remote offices etc that private organisations do :).
There are already plenty of examples and hints at the interest at a federal level. For example: The ABS is using IBM Connections. AGIMO also have plans to upgrade GovDex, with what looks like a strong emphasis on supporting a Yammer-style of activity streams http://support.govdex.gov.au/1008/govdex-upgrade/
“@Renai, curious to know why there’s an assumption about why ‘government people’ wouldn’t necessarily want to use it. Government agencies/departments have exactly the same issues in terms of collaboration, communication, efficiency, productivity, staff in remote offices etc that private organisations do :).”
With respect to Yammer, I wouldn’t expect many Australian Govt (state, federal or local) organisations to use it officially as the data is stored offshore. In fact, some departments have actually banned it:
http://delimiter.com.au/2010/11/29/which-department-banned-yammer/
Perhaps Yammer could give us some current stats on how many .gov.au domains are active on Yammer and ideally how many have subscribed to their premium service? BTW Renai – I thought AGIMO was using Yammer?
Our parent department, Finance and Deregulation, allows the use of Yammer, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. The Yammer community gets little usage. I think there is an organizational culture thing that is being reflected here. If the workspace is close in a physical sense and work teams are loosely coupled, personal interaction in a physical sense is quite likely to be preferred over social media. We also have IM and a range of other tools across AGIMO that seem to meet staff requirements.
Yes Yammer’s ‘voluntary adoption’ for users presents the problem of ‘involuntary adoption’ for businesses. It’s a superb strategy for Yammer but not without its problems for organisations (something I explore in this post: Should Yammer be your enterprise social network? 6 things to think about: http://www.alexmanchester.com/alexmanchester/2012/03/should-yammer-be-your-enterprise-social-network-6-things-to-think-about-yamtour.html)
But… there are a number of issues at play here:
Is social right for the business (or is the business ready for it)
what’s the strategy
Which tool to use (cloud, on-premise etc)
As James originally pointed out, Yammer isn’t the only ESN, and the issues and opportunities presented by social tools are many. There is a risk that ‘Yammer/Socialtext/Jive fails’ stories are top heavy around the technology, when actually it’s the poor or complete lack of strategy (business, change, adoption etc) that’s to blame.
‘Social’ has been business news for close to a decade now, and existed well before that on a smaller scale, let’s not dismiss the considerable thinking and experience that exists, nor cloud everything to do with it by any given product not working somewhere.
We use it heavily within our company. It has been a real benefit for remote offices and people who are not based it the office. We did have some issues with usage until we implemented a formal communications strategy that positioned Yammer, when to use it, what sort of responses to post. Since then we have been able to dramatically reduce the inbox load that people suffered.
Very interesting post Sean — I’d love to see a copy of that communications strategy, or at least some of the points from it. This may be part of the ‘secret sauce’ that aids in taking this tool to the mainstream acceptance level.
The previously named Department of Education & Training in NSW started using Yammer as a corporate user for its employees, but due to their inflexible pricing structure shifted to Social Text. This has been an absolute disaster no matter which way the DEC try to sugarcoat it. A splinter group has begun using Yammer again as a free account, and it has a small (compared to the number of DEC employees) but enthusiastic user base. It is proving to be an invaluable, easy to use platform that is out-shining the Department’s official platform.
Very interesting, Michael. I would love to get more information about this, to do an article on it — perhaps I should point out our anonymous tips form? ;)
http://delimiter.com.au/anonymous-tips/
Moving from one network to another was always likely to be challenging and by all accounts DET had invested a reasonable amount of effort into their original Yammer deployment. I did noticed that Ross Dawson blogged this:
“DET launched Yammer internally, and soon grew to 13,311 users, with the most active time Sunday evenings. One story is a teacher who had a new student who knew one word of English, who went to Yammer to ask for help and got significant useful advice from the network.
DET has now transitioned to SocialText, and have 13,640 users after 4 months. There are many groups, including on teaching topics such as maths.”
http://rossdawsonblog.com/weblog/archives/2011/12/making-social-media-happen-in-government-case-study-of-nsw-department-of-education.html
I’m not looking for dirt but DET’s rollout is huge in an Australian context, so it would be great to hear more about what’s working and not working. It would be fantastic to hear some different perspectives on this.
How many enterprise 2.0 evangelists does it take to change a lighbulb? One will do it with the right tool, but the lightbulb has got to want to change.
Successful adoption of social media in the enterprise depends very much on the underlying ‘social character’ of the organisation and the existence of a ‘reason to bother’ making the effort of trying to create new behavours in a social platform.
Some organisations are just ‘anti-social’ in a social media context – there are few cultural or functional reasons for people to collaborate. Collaboration for them is “an unnatural act between non-consenting adults”, as the saying goes. This is particularly true during times of fiscal stress when folks are apt to see fellow employees as competitors rather than collaborators. Also true when the organisation is very static, just repeating the same tasks day-in-day-out with and where folks are in tightly defined roles with limited bounds of freedom to innovate.
Any surprise why it doesn’t take off in local government then? In contrast, there are good examples of rich use of social media in policy agencies where there are many novel problems to solve and hence more need to share information. Ovum has written an excellent case study on the use of social media in the SA Dept. of Premier & Cabinet. No surprise why Yammer is successful in a consulting firm like Deloitte …
It us unfair to pull out Yammer in this discussion – the dynamics of enterprise adoption affect all of the platforms … it is really all about human behaviour and the incentives that are created for finding, showing and sharing information that might be useful for others and responding to requests for information.
The key issue is that just because social networking seems to happen like wildfire in the consumer realm we can’t assume that it will in the workplace. The dynamics are different. If we want it to gain traction then we need to put concerted effort in to it. The model Ovum recommends is to treat the implementation like gardening.
The social spirit exists like the forces of nature … it just needs to be channeled. Despite nature’s bounties gardens die when they are poorly designed, poorly created, exposed to toxic elements or are neglected … so to do social networks. A workplace social network needs nurturing, weeding, fertilising, watering etc. in order to keep it alive and prevent it being overgrown with weeds. This is all nothing to do with the choice of the software or SaaS platform and all to do with the workplace social character.
Usually when we see social networking initiatives that have failed it is because the tool was implemented and then social networking was expected to just ‘breakout’. Of course some workplaces will be more receptive than others, but the approach to implementation also matter a lot.
One final point is that it needs to serve a useful work purpose. It is good to encourage social chit chat just to create interest and new habits of use of the social platform, but to be sustainable it needs to assist productivity. This is usually easier when the social dialogue is incorporated into the daily workflow somehow – rather than just being a standalone discretionary activity. This is why Salesforce Chatter, for example, is successful in some organisations where a standalone tool like Yammer is not. When Chatter is set up as an integrated part of the way social information is shared between staff during the sales and customer service processes then the use of the social tool is immediately associated with a clear work purpose and is not just a trivial ‘add on’.
I agree on the people and culture stuff, but at this stage I’m afraid the tool design has still a lot of maturing to do…which is fine as these are early days yet.
We are used to email for communication which has a big text box, with formatting, lots of space, pasting images (rather than uploading , then inserting), etc…
Blogs/Forums have formatting and space, but I think microblogging is closer to the feel of an email network…if microblogging had email like features perhaps we would have less of a reason to use email.
Coupled with this is filtering content…most activity streams don’t filter by people, date…actually “sorting” by people is very useful for me. When we do this in email, we stay put and use the filters, we never have to go to another page.
I also think the “notifications” stream needs attention, as this is pretty much exactly what our email inbox is ie. communications aimed at you so to speak (comments on your posts, comments on posts you have commented on, @mentions, etc…)
When I use an activity stream I’d like to make the “notifications” stream my default page (I think you can do this with socialcast)…similar to when I open Outlook, it opens to my inbox. I exhibit this behaviour on Twitter/Facebook/Google+…I go straight to my notifications when I first open the page…actually the twitter shortcut on my laptop is to the “interactions” page.
Yes the follow stream is something new, but the sent stream (my stuff), and inbox (notifications stream) also need attention…I’m always looking in my email inbox and sent items for part content…I want to do this in activity streams, and I want to experience it without having to go to another page
My thoughts
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2012/04/23/microblogging-or-macrobloggingor-simply-messages
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2012/03/26/enterprise-activity-streamssometimes-it-is-about-the-technology
Just to add a little further information to the mix, here’s a couple of posts I’ve written about Yammer use in Australian governments.
They’re a bit over a year old, but should help inform the discussion.
Yammer use in WA Health
http://egovau.blogspot.co.uk/2010/12/yammer-use-in-wa-health.html
Yammer study from a QLD government department
http://egovau.blogspot.co.uk/2010/12/yammer-study-from-qld-government.html
Australia is the second largest government user of Yammer – over 110 active networks
http://egovau.blogspot.co.uk/2010/12/australia-is-second-largest-government.html
I think that Yammer, Socialtext and similar internal group messaging systems are more useful for large organisations than small ones – due to the increased difficulty in connecting experts with those with information needs.
However having too many communication technologies can be as bad as having too few. The risk of fragmenting communication can damage the ability to inform everyone when required.
I wonder how many organisations have mapped their internal information sharing networks and needs and the gaps between their official staff communication and collaboration channels and their internal collaboration requirements.
Many organisations seem to consider communication technologies from a technical standpoint only, not a human one – and often do not provide the training and support needed to adopt a new technology into BAU activities.
Management also need to lead by example – demonstrating their own use and advocacy for these types of channels.
Good points Craig – you are right about scale. The challenge is to create a dialogue where folks feel that they get more out of it than they put in, and hence keep coming back. This is difficult when the user population is too small because it is hard to get beyond a few vocal participants and there isn’t the critical mass to sustain participation over time.
In the end, however, it all comes down to design – social networks need to be designed like any other ICT-enabled business transformation. Its just that the design logic is different. Forget traditional ICT-centric engineering approaches and focus on how to create the desired behaviours and small dailiy habits of use that create and sustain social networks.
@Craig, I would 100% agree many organisations (too many) roll out these tools from a technology perspective and that’s a big cause for failure. I have so far not included this reference, but a project we were recently involved with a project using Newsgator took a very user centric, business-focused approach. Staff research, alignment with business activities etc were all paramount. There is actually a free to attend webinar on this project being held on 6th June – details here:
http://www.alexmanchester.com/alexmanchester/2012/05/going-social-at-stockland-with-sharepoint-2010-and-newsgator-webinar-6-june-intranet.html
With this project in mind, I would also say that there are two streams of use that are involved with these tools that need to be separated.
One is the organisation-wide social tool/platform, ideally ‘adopted’ by many, that results in the sort of widespread, often serendipitous events – expertise location, questions answered, innovative ideas etc. – benefits that the majority of the vendors sell these products with. This is the thrilling side of it; the concept that with these tools we can change our business and be much more dynamic. You do need participation for this, but it can work whether it’s 10 people or 10,000. It just takes time to get enough people thinking ‘ask first’ etc.
The other aspect is more focused collaboration with a purpose. Social tools are used for specific teams, groups, projects etc. You don’t need organisation-wide participation for this aspect to be successful, but you do need tools/environments that have been designed to work within, and enhance, an employee or team’s day-to-day work. You can have a social tool in place, and it only be used by 2% of the organisation. If it’s been designed for them, and it’s making life easier for them, then it’s a success in that realm, it doesn’t require 100% adoption to be successful.
Those are two quite different aspects.
@John Tropea, The usability and integration of most tools is not yet up to scratch, true, but very few enterprise tools out of the box are. IMO, ideally you need to think strategically where it fits within your existing environment, and design it to integrate as a ‘fit’, not a bolt on, another app etc.
@alexmanchester really great comment on the network emergent aspect and the focused open group work aspect…spot on!!
The design aspects I’m talking about are no brainers:
eg. Newsgator call stuff I’ve posted “my activity” (in the email world this is “sent items”)
– but I want to sort this by date and people…I use this in Outlook daily
– the last thing we want people doing is taking forever trying to find past content
eg Newsgator only have a notification overlay box, but this page doesn’t have it’s own URL (even Facebook has it’s own notifications page…it’s liteweight, but that’s all that may be needed for a consumer tool)
– so just say I want to find a post in my notifications stream (ie. that was somewhat targeted at me) from what may seem a couple of months ago …was it someone who mentioned me, or was it a comment on one of my posts, I was thinking 2 months ago but maybe it was 4 months ago..
…I can’t do this as there really isn’t a notifications stream, let alone filters
…so basically Newsgator is lacking a “real” inbox
…my point is the notifications stream is important, and I need to be able to filter and find stuff just like I do in my email inbox
Yes it has “follow-up” so that’s good, but what about personal tagging like Gmail, Outlook, Google Reader…I talked about this in one of my posts I linked above, and last night I noticed alan lepofsky talking about this
https://twitter.com/#!/alanlepo/status/198227776610897920
My main deal is that activity streams need to have more organising/findability features
I’m not picking on Newsgator; each vendor as something the other doesn’t…
And what are your thoughts
– are activity streams for quick updates, sharing and questions…or can you do work in them, the way we do work in email…if so, they need “posting” features I mentioned in my previous comment
NOTE: Of course you can do (try) work in them, but more to the point are they designed for this
Ah yes, the management of noise, I appreciate what you’re saying now. We’re actually talking about this with a number of the vendors (both social and traditional CMS), and you’re quite right it is very early days in that respect.
People do work in the groups (e.g Newsgator you can filter between the communities you’re in, see your entire feed, or see ‘all posts – org wide). The searching, doc sharing, tagging etc enables certain levels management and retrieval of of content/posts. Feedback from teams using groups/communities is often very positive, and if the conversation changes tac, e.g to follow up with somoene on IM, email, that’s no problem.
However, you’re also right that the tools lack many of the more basic features you’d find using Twitter (e.g. multi-stream/channel clients like Seesmic or Tweetdeck) and even on forum software like VBulletin, PHPBB etc (and they’ve had them for years). It’s actually a bit of a pet hate for me in the LinkedIn groups context, where there’s no sticky etc. capability. Stupidly basic and results in a lot of wasted effort and repeat questions.
Also, given the dynamics are indeed different in the enterprise than on the web, curation and community management, whether among a 10-person team or the whole business, is important. Many of the more advanced intranet managers are now evolving to, or incorporating, community management skills/roles, it’s a relatively natural progression.
Again, very little of this is new, but the more you delve in to it, the mor you can understand why the lazy rollout of lightweight tools can often fail very quickly.
John,
Newsgator has a pivot viewer to view one’s activity stream visually and do faceted filtering exactly like this: “….but I want to sort this by date and people…”
Re: notification overlay — newsgator has customers who’ve exposed the notifications in the way you mention as a specific “url” link usually exposed via a global navigation header for a given user.
Re: “…I can’t do this as there really isn’t a notifications stream, let alone filters”. Even Facebook doesn’t this as you describe. There many ways to filter the newgator stream — and keep in mind Newsgator integrates with other MSFT tools like Lync — showing all notification history in Lync “activities” tab.
As for as a real “inbox” — I don’t think users need another inbox. I know I have 1 inbox too many already.
Re: Google-like tagging –in the social world it’s called hashtagging. You can easily add a hashtag to a post. Many of us a gmail inbox (as do I with 2000 messages). It’s the exception that a user will actually spend the time to tag every gmail…. same with social streams….no user will spend the time go thru all the activities and microblog messages in an activity stream and retag them …. why because the assumption is those messages are already tagged or have context by their origin (e.g. they came from a person or community).
One of the things to keep with a solution like Newsgator is that it is integrated into the Microsoft stack. Social webparts are often embedded into existing intranets and extranets with existing branding and global navigation…. How organization expose certain social features is really dependent on the user experience the organization wants to create for their users and their organizational culture. Social is not a one-size fits all model within the enterprise.
@rich…thx for weighing in
–
In my earlier comment I shared a blog post where I mention the pivot viewer…brilliant feature, but it’s not the same as low key sorting your content within 1 sec
–
Thx for sharing that others have made a page for notifications…I quite like how socialcast do it.
–
If I recall clearly, at the end of the facebook notifications overlay box there is a link to see all notifications on a page…but I don’t expect facebook to have a deep need to develop this more. Whereas in the enterprise, I’m busy and may not get round to dealing with a particular notification till 3 days time, so I need to easily come back to this item ie. my notification stream may contain a pile of stuff I have to do, so I need to browse it on demand
–
You already have a new inbox, it’s called the “notifications” stream…I just want to manage it better
–
I’m familiar with hashtags…my comparison to the email experience hopefully does not imply that I’m new to this, quite the contrary, I’ve been at this a while and have come full circle…activity streams will become the new overload stream and may become useless…so features that we are familiar with in email will naturally surface as a way to deal with the content.
–
…yes I might like to tag posts I see in the follow stream, and for them to be personal tags or perhaps public as well eg delicious.
But more to my point, I want to tag stuff from my notifications stream. Just like I tag stuff from my Gmail or Outlook inbox, I would like to tag stuff from my notification stream.
eg. At work I oversee over 50 CoPs, I have daily email conversations with facilitators of these CoPs. I file these emails in Outlook folders (I name each folder the name of the CoP). That way next time something comes up I can quickly find our last conversation. At the moment I cannot have this experience in activity streams…not just newsgator, but all the products I’ve looked at.
–
But maybe I have got a different idea with what I want out of an activity stream…
From my earlier comment – are activity streams for quick updates, sharing and questions…or can you do work in them, the way we do work in email
…and perhaps the answer is staring right at me eg in newsgator it’s called “newsfeed”…to joe bloggs this implies it’s a tool to share news updates, and perhaps ask questions…
Maybe this is what products like Newsgator are trying to achieve, if so then they are doing well.
I envision more than #narratingwork, and more about #observablework ie. doing real work online, not just the updates and questions, but the ping pong work.
http://mcgeesmusings.net/2010/06/23/managing-the-visibility-of-knowledge-work
And I’m sure plenty of this coordinating (ping pong) type work happens in Newsgator; so my point is do we need to accomodate this with managing features.
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Agree about Newsgator integration…sets it apart :)
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BTW – I have looked at many products (at least over 20), each have a unique feature…in the end I prefer both Newsgator and Neudesic Pulse…to note Jive does the communities thing well, not convinced about their activity stream…and with the eminent connections 4 release with the new activity stream, they will be a very robust product.
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