Yammer

Yammer is experiencing technical difficulties; we will be back shortly.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

UPDATE 1: Yammer is back up. We experienced a rare networking hardware failure which temporarily made the site unavailable. No data has been lost. We are in the process of restoring access to user photos and attachments, which will be completed shortly. Once again, we apologize for any inconvenience this has caused and we'll keep everyone updated as more information becomes available.

(Note: Images will appear immediately for users with cached copies.)

UPDATE 2: Access to image and file attachments has been fully restored.

IABC – June 9, 2009

"Current use of social networking sites such as Twitter (21 percent), Yammer (20 percent), and Facebook (18 percent) is significant, but organizations are planning to use those tools even more in the future."

It is noteworthy that 29% of respondents intend to use Yammer in the future, the third such highest rate. While 33% of respondents intend to use discussion boards in the future, we believe Yammer is your company's discussion board as well, making it a powerful and encompassing internal communication tool.

Tell us what you think by joining the discussion!

You've always been able to search public messages on Yammer. This is a great way to get up to speed when joining a project team, hunt down information someone posted a few months ago, or locate a user you may only know by first name.

Now, your private messages are searchable, too! Whenever you perform a search, we'll include your private messages in your search results.

Here's how it works:

1. Enter your search term into the Search Bar in the upper right hand corner.

2. Notice that an auto-complete list will appear, displaying members, groups, and tags within your network. You can make a selection from the auto-complete list or finish typing your search term and click the 'magnifying glass' icon to initiate the search.           

3. The results are categorized by Messages, Members, Groups, and Tags.  

4. Clicking Messages, Members, Groups, or Tags tab will yield the results for that category. The number within the tab tells you how many results there are for that category.     

                               (Notice the 'Padlock' icon, symbolizing a Private Message, appearing in the search result.)

Including private messages in search results is the first enhancement of many coming soon to the search feature. Stay tuned!

If you have any questions, comments or concerns about this enhancement, join the discussion.

You’ve always been able to post messages on Yammer via email. Using the email address associated with your account, send your message to:

yammer@yammer.com - to post a message to your followers
[groupname]@yammer.com - to post a message to a specific group

Many clients are using Yammer groups to implement email distribution lists. If you’ve ever set up a list on Exchange or another internal email server, you know that creating, removing, or changing lists means filing a request with IT and... waiting.

Why wait? Just set up a group in Yammer! You get all the advantages of an archived, searchable, taggable Yammer group along with your email list. You’ll be able to pull up files and links posted to the list instantly, even months after they were sent. New hires will be able to browse existing threads on Yammer, helping them get oriented and productive quickly. And your IT team will thank you.

It’s just a few simple steps to get started:

1.  Click the “Groups” tab

   

2.  Click “Create new group”

  

3.  Name and customize your group. The group name will become the list’s email address (groupname@yammer.com). If you want anyone to be able to join, view, or post to the group, make it public. If the information is sensitive or you want to control users’ access to the group, make it private.

 4.  Next, add the email addresses of your new group’s members. Be sure to check the following checkboxes (as seen below):

            •    Add these members without an invitation
            •    Email

Click “Save” and you’ve created both a Yammer group and email distribution list. Each post to the group will be delivered to group members via email.  The group members don’t even have to join Yammer to start sending and receiving messages to the group. And users who prefer to use Yammer’s web, desktop, mobile, or other clients to interact with the group can switch off email delivery and interact with the group using their preferred client. Setting this up probably took less time than it would’ve taken just to file a request with the IT department.

REMEMBER: This is a great way to guarantee message delivery, but you don’t want to flood the members of the group with too many emails. At any time, group members can choose not to receive emails for messages posted to the group by changing their email notification settings. Group members can also leave the group at any time.

Create a Yammer Group Today!

On Friday, May 22, 2009, starting around 7pm (PST) Yammer will be unavailable for about an hour, while we make enhancements to the database. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

UPDATE: Yammer is now back up! The engineers worked quickly and only had the site down for 15 minutes instead of the projected hour.

Yammer Helps to Cure Brain Cancer

Case Study by Oliver Bogler, PhD

The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center is a comprehensive cancer center that delivers cancer care to thousands of patients, and seeks advances in treatment and diagnosis through research (www.mdanderson.org). In my laboratory we are interested in understanding glioblastoma, a very aggressive form of brain cancer. I have 10 co-workers, who spend their day moving between the laboratory, instrument rooms, tissue culture rooms, seminars and their desks. Meanwhile, I am either at my computer in my office, or often at meetings all over the Texas Medical Center or even out of town at conferences. Keeping up good communication is, therefore, a major challenge. I try to walk through the lab once or twice a day, and have an open door when I’m in my office, but I don’t catch up with everyone often enough. More importantly, I am no longer an efficient information conduit between members of my team – I am tired of checking whether the right people were cc’d on e-mail, or forwarding messages to others who need to be involved in the conversation. 

About a year ago I started holding a weekly “huddle” to improve our communication – we stand in a circle in the lab, and everyone says, in a few sentences, what they achieved in the past week and what they are working on. We stand to encourage brevity and form a circle, as the idea is for everyone to listen equally to everyone else. It is amazing how often connections are made at the huddle – “I could use that, too” or “I did that in my previous lab, and you should try such-and-such an approach” is said almost every week. It also builds a good team spirit as people feel comfortable sharing their problems, not least because they often get help. Once a week for half an hour is great, but how do you keep it going the rest of the week?

That is when I heard about Yammer. With Yammer we can keep a virtual conversation going all the time. There are several key aspects of Yammer that distinguishes it from other microblogs – the main one for us is that you can easily control who sees what you write. Yammer requires an employer-issued e-mail address to access the site, and it is easy to make a private area for your own group within that. So, while we sometimes Yammer in the broader @mdanderson.org area, we usually communicate within our Bogler lab private thread – this gives everyone security that what they say is only heard within the team. Adoption by my lab was almost instantaneous. As people move around during work and circle back to their computers several times a day, they catch up on what is being said and chime in. Sometimes they logon from home, too. I often Yammer from my iPhone as I go from meeting to meeting, or when I’m traveling. Even when I don’t post myself, I like to read what others are saying to keep in touch. A key feature is that the posts persist forever, so that if you miss a little you can catch up. It has proved to be a great tool that fills the gap between e-mail and face-to-face meetings, helping us to keep the conversation going. I would like to give a big thanks to Jennifer Texada, our social media guru at M. D. Anderson, for bringing us these great tools.

If you've had a positive experience with Yammer, that you would like to share please contact feedback@yammer.com

This is the third year CNET has hosted the Webware 100 -- they had about 5,000 qualifying submissions from which we're honored to announce they selected Yammer as one of the final 300.

We feel privileged to be selected as one of the finalists in the Communication category, but we're really excited to see if we can win.

Please show your support and Vote for Yammer Now! 

You can now import your Twitter updates into Yammer, using the #yam tag. After linking your Yammer and Twitter accounts, any tweet (message posted to Twitter) that contains the #yam tag will be automatically imported into your Yammer network.

To add Twitter support to your Yammer account:

1. Go to Account Settings.
2. In the Contact section, add your Twitter username.
3. Add the tag #yam to any tweet that you want to also share with your Yammer followers.

To view all of the tweets people are also sending to Yammer view this feed.

If you have any questions, comments, or concerns about this feature, post them here.