I attended the SharePoint Conference for Business Users last week and watched a good SP2013 session ran by Microsoft. During the latter part of the talk he got on to the subject of SharePoint social features and covered the announcement from last week about Yammer and SharePoint.
Reading between the lines, my guess is that the 2013 social features we see today, will disappear and will be replaced by Yammer features. (Similar to how this has happened with SP search and FAST). Now this is probably good for the long term future of the product, however, the transition period is going to be disruptive and probably won’t be complete until the next version of SharePoint.
So how does this leave your social strategy – right now ? If you go with SharePoint 2013 social – how will you migrate to Yammer ? What about all that history and activity that probably won’t be migrated ? This will also have impacts on the UI, as your users will get used to one way and then have to learn a new way …
I think your right that’s the Yammer integration will be just like FAST was, albeit for on-premise. I suspect integration will be tighter on office 365.
The company I am will will be sticking to the current Newsfeed for SharePoint until we get single sign on and tighter integration.
I don’t think there will be much in the way of UI differences and if anything you will see yammer look more like the rest of the office family.
At the moment I don’t see a pressing need to move to Yammer, to me it’s just another system to manage.
