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Yammer or Teams: Which is right for what you want to do right now?

By Alex Graves, Co-Managing Director & Founder
Posted on: 14th February 2020

Ok, you’ve got Yammer and Teams as part of your Microsoft 365 suite. Well done. You’re already in a good place. 

But which one should you use for project updates? Where should you announce the new CMO appointment? Which is the best to arrange the cross departmental Christmas party?  

Don’t panic. Here’s our quick guide to where to use Yammer and where to use Teams.

TEAMS

Teams is an informal, fast communication, content sharing and collaboration platform that works best for close-knit groups – such as small or sub-departments, project or client-focused teams. 

YAMMER

Yammer is a relaxed, yet business-focused social platform perfect for company-wide communication and high-level collaboration.  

USE TEAMS FOR:

  • Instant communication, particularly messages that require a response.  
  • Conversation with specific team members. Personal and conversational.
  • Collaborating on content in various formats (documents, shared libraries, chats or app integration), tracking changes and making comment.  
  • Generating high volume messages. Due to the close-knit nature of the groups on Teams, and how closely chat is tied to working goals, messages tend to be prolific and frequent and chats can go on for days, weeks or months. 
  • Mid-level confidentiality, when communication and discussion needs to be closed down to a smaller group. Keep a close eye on default settings to ensure permissions are right. 
  • Continuity and catch up. New users or transferred users can access all historic chat and documents to self-manage transfers and on boarding into projects and teams. 

USE YAMMER FOR:

  • Communicate broad messages that don’t need a response from specific people or groups, but you can see how many people have viewed a message. 
  • Conversation with groups or open conversation. Informal and colloquial. 
  • Sharing documents to a wider audience for communication purposes. Harder for users to keep track of documents if they follow a large number of feeds. Best for read-only information sharing and not collaboration. 
  • Lower volume of messages and content, although across a wider audience. Like any social network certain topics may generate large numbers of replies, but equally some queries may sit answered. 
  • Low level confidentiality makes Yammer unsuitable for confidential or private information sharing. 
  • Business wide, agnostic visibility. Presuming your organisation is consistent in topic tagging and maintaining groups, historic chat and content is easy to access and explore. 

How are you using Yammer and Teams? Contact us now to find out more about how Microsoft 365, Yammer and Teams can help your business to connect and thrive. 

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