I realized as I was writing my posts about Outlook Groups that some people might wonder if there would be a reason to use a Group in place of Yammer or vice versa.\u00a0 So I thought a quick discussion about how the two pieces work and relate might be in order.<\/p>\n
The first thing to understand is that Groups and Yammer are really meant to serve two different needs.\u00a0 Yammer is the place to put all of your \u201cthinking out loud\u201d as it is really \u201cgroup\u201d IM with \u201cpersistence\u201d.\u00a0 Groups, on the other hand, while they can have a certain \u201cthinking out loud\u201d aspect are more for aggregating, storing and sharing collaboration data through the various component tools such as OneNote and the document library.<\/p>\n
At itgroove we leverage the hell out of Yammer as a tool to do all of our thinking out loud as well as all of our notifying.\u00a0 As an example, rather than use distribution lists and email as a tool to alert colleagues to things they need to know we use Yammer Groups (not the same as Outlook groups) and put all of the information that would have gone into an email into a Yammer post instead.\u00a0 And if we need to reference files or other materials that are stored in OneDrive or SharePoint we use links to point back to the source materials.\u00a0 Nothing gets lost in the email shuffle and we aren\u2019t pushing files back and forth like mad as attachments.<\/p>\n