As a veteran concertgoer, I’ve picked up some great tactics over the years for how best to enjoy live music. How not to spill your drink on random strangers. Where and how to scan the masses for old friends from days long past. How to snake through the crowd before the show and find just the right spot to feel the music and watch from a good vantage.
All of those things helped me have a great time at yesterday’s Yammer on Tour event in Chicago. The Tour seemed to be part pep rally, part business-user-education day, and part networking opportunity. Beyond the free beer, catching up with some old friends, and making a few new ones, this really was an informative event that left you feeling good about where Yammer– and thus, Microsoft– is going with enterprise social. (Note: My colleague Darya Orlova has already posted some great impressions of the event that are worth checking out as well.)
While most everyone else was in the general sessions, I pulled the tradeshow equivalent of slipping through the crowd of casual concertgoers to find that prime viewing / listening spot. I made a point to meet a lot of Yammer folks, and did my best to learn a few useful nuggets. To the last of them, they were friendly, knowledgeable and enthusiastic, and they really believed in what they are doing. That sort of confidence is good to see.
As a result of those conversations and Adam Pisoni’s keynote, I’d say there were six things I know today that I wasn’t so sure of yesterday, and anytime you can learn that much in four hours at my age, it’s time well spent. Even without good tunes.
1. Yammer sees its mission as one of “disruption”. Simply put, information squirreled away in silos and hoarded in email threads is bad; information shared openly and allowed to seed further discourse is good. This is more or less the thesis of social business from a general perspective, and hardly new. The funny thing is, though, that novelty is in the eye of the beholder, and both from a Redmond perspective and that of many more traditional businesses, that social way of sharing is still very much a new message. Certainly it was for much of yesterday’s audience.
2. Yammer will continue to develop native Android apps for its social service. The mobile question is about market share, and Yammer’s being smart there, monetizing a platform its parent company sees as a competitor. Microsoft has been notably friendlier toward iOS of late, but has said nothing about developing apps for Android. I personally believe the Windows Phone is a better, friendlier device, but until the market reflects that this is the wise decision.
3. The platform is the best route to a social business. I’m sorry, but standalone social applications like Jive will be left in the dust by the Microsoft ecosystem in the near future. As I’ll discuss in a post later this week, for Microsoft and Yammer, this is all about the platform– making people productive with documents, data, and other people from anywhere on any device– and nobody is better suited to make that happen than the company that already dominates the market for how people work (i.e., Outlook and Office) and where they store their documents (SharePoint) with easily accessible technology (SharePoint APIs, Yammer and OpenGraph, the .NET developer ecosystem). How? Just add a social layer across everything else they already do. More on that soon.
4. We should expect Yammer to be offering developer certifications within the next year. This will be useful in formalizing a subculture of Yammer-focused developers within the Microsoft partner ecosystem, recognizing those who commit to Yammer as a platform– because let’s face it, the key to development on Yammer is pulling useful line of business data in from other applications and exposing it socially.
5. There’s still no magic formula for social ROI. The ROI question about collaboration technology and social computing is as tired as I am after a night of staying up with our newborn daughter, but people will continue to ask it (often of consultants like me and the guy who played devil’s advocate to pose the question). The truth is, this stuff has proven a victory for the qualitatives over the quants; you might not be able to put a number to it, but it makes life better. That was the consensus of the customer panel yesterday, and has been at every social business customer panel I’ve ever seen. Even with all the hullabaloo, Microsoft and Yammer don’t have an answer to that question– and if you really need to answer it, your organization probably won’t be getting social anytime soon, and (among other things) will probably find it difficult to hire and retain good talent. (And not just young talent. My favorite Yammer platform plank is their insistence that social is not just about millenials, and that data will bear this out.)
6. The Yammer web parts for SharePoint 2013 “on-premise” (i.e., SharePoint that’s not in the cloud) will be fairly similar to those available for SharePoint 2010. No surprise to those of us who follow this market closely, but it confirms (again) several things we’ve observed before. (1) If you fully buy into the Microsoft / Yammer vision, that means buying into the cloud, and (2) On-premise SharePoint in organizations with a mature understanding of social business and/or a tightly regulated environment will continue to be served well by NewsGator Social Sites. There’s room for everyone at this table.
All in all, this was a fun and informative event. I’d still have preferred Blur and The Stone Roses at Coachella, but since they’re not in Chicago, Yammer on Tour worked out alright.
