SharePoint 2013, Yammer and Enterprise Social with @EUSP

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In honor of our upcoming SharePoint 2013 as a Social Business Platform webinar with Forrester’s Rob Koplowitz and our own Rich Wood, I connected with some Social Business Thought Leaders from the SharePoint Community.
First up was AvePoint’s Jeremy Thake. You can read that post here.  This week Mark Miller, Senior StoryTeller and well know SharePoint Community event speaker shared his thoughts with me.   Mark was recently named as a Top SharePoint Thought Leader in Social Business by Harmon.ie. Mark also co-founded NothingButSharePoint.com with Jeremy Thake and they continue to encourage community authors to contribute End User, Developer and IT Pro content to their 140k unique user base. You can register for the webinar here.
What direction do you anticipate Microsoft will go with enterprise social?  Mark Miller: Microsoft always chooses to run at the back of the pack with intentions of catching up in the long run. With the massive purchase of Yammer, they have become a serious contender for enterprise social, but it’s going to take them a while to integrate that into the stack. In the meantime, social will continue to develop at an increasing speed, making it much harder to catch up than in previous cycles.
Do you think Yammer will make up the core of Microsoft’s social strategy going forward? Mark Miller: It seems that it will be a key component, but much more is going to have to happen in order for the Microsoft stack to become truly social.
What’s the importance of having a SharePoint mobility strategy as it relates to a social platform? Mark Miller:  It is essential. Mobile is how most people are now accessing all of their information. Not having a mobile strategy would be disastrous.
Is it imperative to have an IT execution plan for social business strategy? Mark Miller:  IT execution plan? I think a step is missing here. First, we need to define the business objective before even thinking about IT. What is the business object of the social plan? What are the goals we must reach to be considered successful? How are we going to measure our progress towards those goals so we can make adjustments during the process? All that comes before opening ITs Pandora’s Box.
In your opinion, what’s the value of social business as it pertains to SharePoint? Mark Miller:  That’s an open question mark at this point. What is the business value of any social program, not just one that uses SharePoint as its platform. I’m certain there is value for social business, but it won’t be determined by the platform. Future social engagement is going to be platform agnostic, meaning the end user will not care about the platform, but how easy it is to access and utilize the information on that platform.
Does an organization need to choose between Yammer and SharePoint?  Mark Miller:  They are two separate animals. It’s not an either/or situation.
What do you think?  Tune into our SharePoint 2013 as a Social Business Platform webinar with Forrester’s Rob Koplowitz and Perficient’s Rich Wood to hear their thoughts on SharePoint 2013, Yammer and Enterprise Social. There should be a lively Q&A discussion!