By Jim Lundy
At a session here at the SharePoint 2012 Conference (#SPC12), Yammer and Microsoft clarified the direction they are taking for where enterprises should look for deploying Social Networking. Given the major reduction in pricing announced at the event (Yammer Enterprise goes from 15/user/month to 3/user/month. See Yammer Blog), it is clear that Microsoft SharePoint 2013 is all in with Yammer.
SharePoint: Go with Yammer in the Cloud
What Microsoft and Yammer Executives indicated is this: for Cloud ESN deployments, the message was go with Yammer. While everything isn’t fully integrated, there appears to be a fast track for an even tighter integration than exists right now (Yammer updates its service very frequently and the promise from Microsoft of Cloud releases every 60 days).
SharePoint and Yammer: Customer Reference
The Customer that was highlighted at the event was Nationwide Insurance and they have Yammer in Production with SharePoint integration. We interviewed Nationwide and they did indicate they have a hybrid deployment: Yammer is in the Cloud and SharePoint is on-Premise. Clearly, this may be the model going forward, since many enterprises have SharePoint on-premise.
For onpremise deployments, where the enterprise wants to be fully on-premise, the main option is SharePoint 2013 or their main Social Partner until they purchased Yammer, Newsgator. Newsgator does offer on-premise deployment options.
The event so far has been packed and there is significant buzz about SharePoint and Microsoft’s stated direction to shift to the Cloud. More on this in later posts.