How to Use Yammer and Microsoft Teams

Yammer is a social networking service. Microsoft Teams is a collaborative system. These two very different utilities can work well in tandem together, but you need to work to integrate them. By using Yammer with MS Teams, you can create complete communication protocols for your business, and you can work towards improving the collaboration within your business.

How to Integrate Yammer with Office 365 and MS Teams

MS Teams is an ideal solution for daily communications. Employees are able to send messages to each other, video chat, and audio chat. They can connect with their entire team on the fly, sharing documents and other information. MS Teams is a flexible, mobile solution that can be used for tactical, day-to-day communications.

Comparatively, Yammer is better for long-term, large-scale, strategic planning. Yammer lets you share, create, and edit documents together, and operates like a layer on top of Office 365. As an Enterprise Social Network, Yammer is meant to build onto the capabilities of Office 365 to provide more venues for long-term communication.

When you connect Yammer with MS Teams, you can use the benefits of both. Through better integration, you can use MS Teams for short-term, agile communications, and Yammer for more permanent strategic planning. Embracing the differences of both platforms is critical to using them to their fullest extent.

The Advantages of Using Yammer and MS Teams

At first, Yammer and MS Teams may seem to overlap. After all, they’re both intended to improve communication and collaboration. But they have a different emphasis.

Here are the differences between Yammer and MS Teams:

• Teams is better for smaller groups, whereas Yammer is better for larger groups. In Teams, you can communicate in a single channel with team members, with teams of small to moderate size. You can easily communicate with people who are working on the same project that you are, and you can speak with each other one-on-one about critical documents. Yammer, on the other hand, lets you send out information to the entire company at once.
• Yammer can be used to support an organization’s company culture. A Yammer installation brings the entire company together in a shared environment, and can therefore be used to extend the company’s mission and its culture. Leaders and managers are able to influence the network as a whole to support the company’s values.
• Teams is better for one-on-one and instantaneous communication. In Teams, you can connect to another employee immediately by calling them or video chatting them, or even sending an instant message. With Yammer, employees can instead check the information at their own leisure, rather than being always on call.
• Yammer connects to a “knowledge base” of the company’s own employees. Rather than having to only communicate with employees that you’re working with, you can connect to all employees through Yammer. Yammer has the full company and all its departments on an even playing field, so employees can engage with each other in a different context.
• Teams can provide for real-time video and audio collaboration. If you need to call someone or share a screen with them, Teams works best. Through Teams, you can communicate easily with employees in multiple contexts.
• Yammer is able to make larger companies feel smaller. With large companies and large departments, employees may not have the full grasp of the company, or feel as though they are truly connected with the company. Yammer condenses the entirety of the company into a single social network, which lets employees connect on a more significant level.
• Teams is simple and direct. When the Teams and channels are properly managed, employees are able to log in to immediately see what’s relevant to them. In Yammer, there may be more information, and that information may not always be as applicable, but it will give the employee more context about what’s going on in the company overall.
• Both Teams and Yammer improve the speed of collaboration. The goal of both Teams and Yammer is to make communicating and collaborating faster, by providing a layer through which Office 365 documents can be managed and maintained, and by making it easier to share thoughts on the company’s own internal data.

As you can see, the primary benefit for Teams is to talk to other employees that you’re working closely with. Comparatively, Yammer makes it easier to communicate with the entire company as a whole, and feel more like a part of the business.

But because there is still some overlap, you need to be careful about integrating the two systems. An organization has to be clear about how they’re using each application. If you aren’t, then confusion can set in, and efforts may be duplicated.

Many organizations can benefit from using Yammer and MS Teams together. Do you want to learn more about how to integrate Yammer with Office 365? Contact Red River today.