This is a guest post written by Graham Walsh, Partner Account Manager for HP and Microsoft covering the UK and Ireland at Polycom. His specialties include putting the customer first, channel development and training, and general business development within accounts. Follow Graham on Twitter. Please note that not all posts are work-related.
Whilst I was a Sales Engineer (SE), I was seeing an enormous amount of email going around the worldwide distribution group. To try and iron this out, I installed a forum server powered by PHP and MySQL in our lab for all SE’s to use globally. The problem with it was that people would not check it daily for any new posts. I started using Twitter in late 2008 and found it of great use for some Microsoft SharePoint testing I was doing as part of building a new SE Portal. It then got me wondering, could we have an enterprise microblogging tool? I researched whether one could be installed in our lab, but it was proving difficult. Also, I knew we would need applications (desktop and mobile) to make the tool more viable and user-friendly, and I was unable to find a product that met this requirement.
Then along came Yammer! Two other SEs and I decided to take on the project to propose a new site that corporate IT could install and maintain for the SE Community, built around SharePoint (as that was the corporate standard). As part of this new portal, I wanted secure enterprise microblogging. This was something that SharePoint didn’t have as a feature. Our IT team was able to integrate the feeds from Yammer into the new SE Portal. Great work, guys!
Initially, Yammer was intended for the SE team, and we planned to add product managers later, so we could ask them informal questions about their products and features. Our Yammer network quickly grew to approximately 150 users, and now it has reached more than 2,000 users globally. Our CEO has joined and requested that all informal questions be directed to him on Yammer.
The goals that Yammer would help us achieve included having a forum in which we could ask time sensitive questions to people who were online at that point in time and reducing the email inbox each day. At Polycom, we noticed that we were oftentimes duplicating work because we had the French team doing the same work as the Italian team for a global customer. This was also true for local SEs duplicating work across different account teams within a single country. Posting on Yammer, “Working on the #telepresence #RFP for Company X” meant that you could eliminate duplicate work because you could see what everyone was working on and work collaboratively on projects. Using Yammer will, therefore, reduce the number of resources focused on one customer bid.
Yammer has also fostered connections across departments at Polycom. For example, there was a developer who was “Yamming” about building applications for hospitality on our Business Media Phone. A colleague asked the developer if they could have a meeting to build an application for a trade show. The developer expected this person to be on the other side of the globe, when, in fact, he was on the same floor in the same building. Without Yammer, these two people likely would have never connected (or it would have taken many introductions to try to reach that department). Furthermore, this would have required an extensive email chain before agreeing on a meeting time. Again, Yammer is reducing email. IT must be happy :)
