Big Comparison Teams Vs. Yammer: Which Communication App Is the Right One

Teams or Yammer – when is which app is the more suitable? Many companies are faced with the question of which of the two tools they should use or whether it might even make sense to use them in parallel. Microsoft does not make this decision easy for its customers because at first glance there are many similarities. However, if you take a closer look at the respective application scenarios, there are a number of features that sometimes speak clearly for teams and sometimes clearly for Yammer.

In order to make an informed decision, one should familiarize oneself with the respective strengths and weaknesses. Our following overview shows the respective characteristics of Teams and Yammer and helps you to classify them:

I.  Yammer & Teams – The Respective Characteristics & Areas of Application

II.  Advantages of Microsoft Teams & Yammer in Detail

Advantages of Microsoft Teams

• Teams is the hub for collaboration for departments, teams, projects or similar (manageable) structures
• Teams is first and foremost a comprehensive collaboration tool, from communication via file storage to joint editing of documents
• Microsoft Teams stands for informal, direct communication, working together on documents and regular, topic-related interactions within closed groups.

Teams helps with quick decision-making for small groups, ideally up to 15 members (and a maximum of 200).

• The main focus is on using teams to communicate with people with whom you work regularly, whether on joint topics or projects
• Teams represents a complete Office work environment by integrating a wide range of external applications, OneDrive, OneNote, Planner, Excel, SharePoint application and many more
• Teams formed a virtual office and a virtual conference room
• Teams will replace Skype for Business
• All everyday communication takes place via teams, whether via text chat or video call (telephony is possible, but not yet available everywhere)
• Spontaneous meetings can be set up with just a few clicks
• The communication filing structure in teams is more chronological
• Simple authorization structures can be set up to limit access to chats or content
• In private channels, users can set up secure work rooms for selected members

Advantages of Yammer

• Yammer enables news publishing for the entire company
• Yammer is suitable as a platform for executive communication to the entire workforce, as an alternative to newsletters
• Yammer stands for company-wide communication, leadership engagement, communities and the sharing of knowledge with colleagues.

With Yammer you can reach everyone in the entire organization, including those who are not team members and who you do not know personally

• Yammer is characterized by one-to-many or many-to-many communication
• Yammer is the place where you can reach people with special expertise or interest groups ad hoc
• The tool enables all employees to interact across BU and departmental boundaries, whether for questions, comments or suggestions
• The Yammer newsfeed is similar to that of Facebook, including the automatic preview of externally linked media content
• Yammer enables the establishment of a moderated social network and knowledge environment, including community management and curating of content
• Individual posts or message threads can be easily aggregated and curated in Yammer in order to set up knowledge libraries for companies and communities
• Metadata such as tags / keywords can be used to easily classify content in order to organize or highlight it
• Yammer offers an automatic prioritization of relevant posts, similar to Facebook, in order to keep them more visible

III. Cons of Teams & Yammer

In order to find the right app for your own needs, knowing the advantages of Teams and Yammer also helps to know their limits. And that would be the following:

Disadvantages Microsoft Teams

• When communicating with teams, many new threads are constantly emerging. This makes it difficult to find past information.
• Bundling or curating multiple posts on a specific topic is not possible.
• Employees who are not members of a team or channel have no access to the content stored there.
• Teams does not have an open community (such as ‘the entire company’), but only teams with specially invited members.
• The number of members of teams is limited, the system allows a maximum of 10,000 members.
• Managing notifications and notification emails is rather cumbersome.
• The chronological ord+10878er of messages makes things past disappear easily.
• Reorganizing team structures is time-consuming.

Disadvantages of Yammer

• Yammer communication takes place in a separate app, outside of the everyday work environment in the Office apps.
• Yammer is not suitable for collaborating on documents or organizing the storage of shared files.
• The integration of further Office 365 tools has been very limited so far, after the rollout of the new Yammer version there will be certain improvements.
• Yammer is not an integrated work environment for all office and communication tasks.
• It is easy to lose track of things through many different channels.
• Searching for specific topics can lead to confusing results.