What I learnt about Teams vs Yammer from watching Ignite 2017

At the Microsoft Ignite conference we heard a lot about how Teams, Yammer and email should co-exist in an organisation. It’s good to see Microsoft deliberately addressing the ‘which tool when?’ question in a more systematic way, all the way from the keynote down. Last year the message was all about ‘user choices’ that didn’t really help anyone. Even further back we had models that mapped tools onto grids of urgency vs scope in a variety or forms, while I applaud the folks who were trying to answer this tricky question, it was just horrible and completely lost on every human user at my organisation.

Slide from presentation Embrace Office 365 Groups: Overview and Roadmap by ChristopheFiessinger

Let’s recap how it was presented this year, there’s a couple of different views but they tell the same story:-

Teams is for your Inner Loop, people you work with regularly on key projects. Yammer is for your Outer Loop, people you connect with openly across your organisation.

This works quite nicely, the inner-outer loop is catchy, something that will stick in the mind and help recall. I also like the second diagram showing SharePoint in the middle, a common place for documents that’s used by everything. Unfortunately the story becomes less clear with email …

Outlook is ubiquitous for targeted communication.

OK, targeted communication then? That doesn’t really fit with Outlook Groups, or DLs for that matter. Ubiquitous does sum up email, as would “lowest common denominator” or “fall-back option”. I think the right point here is that Outlook is to allow you to reach people who just aren’t digitally collaborative, they aren’t part of the Work-Out-Loud world.

Later in the week MVPs Simon Denton and Melanie Hohertz joined by Sara Krajewski ran their own session about Microsoft Teams and Yammer: Velocity meets Community (watch on periscope here). It’s one of the great things about Ignite and the MVP programme that you can see other views, and how other organisations are tackling the same questions. Simon, Mel and Sara used a number of analogies, the superheroes thing worked well and was entertaining, but perhaps is hard to translate to represent without your own dressing up box. Best was thinking about ‘the room’, Teams is where you know everyone in the room, Yammer is where you don’t know everyone in the room.

This works nicely if you think of a party in those rooms, I think it also helps put people into the right mind. I would behave, talk and maybe even dress differently in a party full of people I don’t know, compared to a party of my friends. While they avoided the Outlook Groups question, again that’s where people just aren’t at the collaboration party.

My chief concern is what I see and experience with my users is more tribal separations. I’m really not sure that people want to live in multiple loops, if you are using Teams for your high velocity inner loop, why would you want a different tool when talking to the outer loop? Where Slack has been adopted there is minimal Yammer usage, and even though the product isn’t ideal, they seem to bash along in large unstructured, unthreaded conversations. I don’t really like broad demographic generalisations based on age, but it does seem that younger members of the workforce aren’t comfortable to engage with the outer loop.

I think this year some great progress was made, the Microsoft 365 Suite is a little easier to explain, and I’m going steal slides about loops and use analogies about rooms in my own organisation. It’s time to challenge the Outlook users and make it clear that they aren’t working in a way that generates team progress.