Yammer: Giant Step Or Misstep?

A week ago, Yammer released a big upgrade to their ‘Twitter for the Enterprise’ solution. But in a very strange way.

They have introduced something called ‘Communities’ which are intended to complement their existing corporate accounts. But they way they work is confusing. Or at least I am confused.

The original model for Yammer still stands for people who want to create a Yammer network for people sharing a corporate email domain. For example, I created a domain for ‘Edgewards.com’ a year ago. To join, people have to have an email account in that mail domain. And following the Get Satisfaction model, anyone with a corporate account can join, and the company can choose to claim the account later, and become the administrator of the system.

So, the Yammer baseline model is a perplexing mix of open and closed. People don’t have to be explicitly invited to join, but they have to possess a valid corporate email address, which means thay have to have been admitted to that email group. So it is actually closed. But if you are the proud possessor of a harvard.edu email address, it might feel like an open experience to join the Yammer group associated made up of current and past students of Harvard University.

Now, they have created a wrinkle. Any user can create ‘communities’ where those invited do not necessarily share a company email domain. In principle, this would allow a business to create working groups involving consultants, partners, clients, whoever.

The UI allows the creator to pass along the adminstration right of being able to invite new members to everyone, if they wish. That’s not confusing.

What is confusing is that the heading says I am creating a network, when I clicked on a tab to create a community. I thought what I had before — with the Edgewards.com domain — was a network.

It turns out that the ‘community’ is actually just another network, with slightly relaxed invitation options. All networks and communities show up on a pull-down list that allows me to switch from context to context very easily, using the same login identity: an identity initially created in a network, or by being invited to a community.

If this confuses you a bit, Yammer won’t help much, because there is nothing written up in the help system about any of this.

And then there is a secong point of confusion, or maybe annoyance. Yammer is displaying a checklist of tasks that they suggest I undertake to complete the set-up of my new community:

I was momentarily excited to see that Yammer had implemented tasks! See the to-do list’?

But it’s not true. It’s some narrowly defined approach to making me go through a small number of predefined items on a fixed checklist. There is no way for me to add tasks, assign them to people, check status, etc.

Isn’t that one of the most basic ideas in the coordination of work? Without that, I don’t know why I would even use a tool like Yammer.

So, this release of Yammer seems more of a misstep than a giant step. I am sure that communities have eben widely asked for, but the lack of explanation and the confation with networks is problematic. And I still need tasks to get anything done in work-oriented networks.

(hat tip to Martijn Linssen)