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 …
From an end-user perspective I like Yammer. We use it in the company already several years and the adoption is good. From a SharePoint developers point of view for on-premise farms I would prefer SP social. Especially if you want to extend social features. I have no idea about a possibly existing Yammer API though.
Generally I see the trend in the future to go in the direction of hybrid solutions. Meaning using Office365/SharePoint Online for traditional collaboration scenarios (internal and external) and an on-premise farm for more complex custom solutions, e.g. for the integration of LOB systems.
Considering this scenario, using Yammer would be the more logical step for me. It will be most likely much easier to integrate Yammer in both, than it would be combining on-premise SP social with O365 SPO social.
Wouldn’t you agree?
