At the Yammer Tour, David Obrand, Yammer VP of Global Sales, stated that most intranets are not participatory, and that most existing enterprise software tools basically suck (my paraphrasing). And he’s absolutely right. By comparison, Yammer has good functionality and a class leading, very familiar UI (taken almost pixel for pixel from Facebook). It exposes a lot of enterprise software products as the creaky, dated code pits that they are.
But is Yammer a viable intranet replacement? Yammer’s team says, ‘We want to be the place where work gets done. In time it will be’.
Whether you believe this really depends on your definition of intranet. If you perceive an intranet to be just about communication and social conversation, and the ability to co-author documents, then Yammer may be a viable intranet replacement tool. Yet it is missing a lot of pretty common CMS functionality, and is simply in the lightweight class of products compared to the best intranets out there.
You also have to ask, is it Yammer’s destiny to become a mid-level, cloud-hosted CMS product, with social capabilities? If that’s the case, what will happen first: Yammer adds all the CMS capabilities that organisations need, or CMS providers add a micro-messaging capability? Even with every necessary feature, you still have the cloud-hosted aspect, which remains a huge hurdle for many organisations.
Yammer’s increasing integration and connections with other tools – SAP, Salesforce, SharePoint etc – is notable here (and awesome in many ways). But I don’t see Yammer’s (or any other social tool’s) place in the enterprise as the single environment or unified interface, it’s much more of an accompanying tool – the social layer in a composite system.
Replacing the intranet is an ambitious statement and a great strategy, but at this stage it’s difficult to agree with it at anything but the most lightweight level. To top it off, ambitions to replace or ‘kill’ incumbent products rarely turn out to be realistic. This is why Lotus Notes still exists.
