Home » EGRC » Regulated Businesses Should Carefully Consider the Implications of Replacing SharePoint’s Newsfeed with Yammer

Regulated Businesses Should Carefully Consider the Implications of Replacing SharePoint’s Newsfeed with Yammer

Heavily regulated businesses in the financial services sector should carefully consider the implications of replacing SharePoint’s Newsfeed with Yammer. The task of complying with new FINRA regulations, specific to conversation “surveillance”, which are set to go into effect in December, 2014 may be much harder to achieve with Yammer, unless the migration is carefully researched and deemed to be the right move for one’s specific organization.

An opinion on these new regulations, and what impact they will have on the compliance burden can be found in an article published on the Wall Street Technology web site, which is owned by Information Week. The article was written by Julio Gomez of Attivio, and published on May 28, 2014: Next-Generation E-Communications Surveillance Starts Now.

If your organization is already adding content collected from your SharePoint Newsfeeds, and is parsing it, via MMS, for terms and term sets from your SharePoint Term Store, you will need to verify complete continuity for this activity as you migrate over to Yammer.

We checked the migration process out for our SharePoint Online, Office 365, E3 plan instance and were surprised at what we found. In fact, when we opted to implement the Yammer Newsfeed option, what we implemented was merely the “basic” Yammer service, which included no administration capabilities whatsoever, and could not be brought into the Managed Metadata Service (MMS) process we expected to be able to use.

We spoke with Office 365 and Yammer support and found we needed to be thinking about the Enterprise version of Yammer, if we were to achieve our goal of continuity. But even with the Enterprise Yammer service (which has a cost of $3.00 per user per month), there is no guaranty of compatibility between, for example, our Enterprise Content Management (ECM) process and what we can, realistically do with Yammer. A dependable answer to this question requires first researching the documentation Yammer provides on the administrative features of the enterprise plan, data communications options with SharePoint, etc.

Fortunately, Microsoft publishes a document on the Yammer enterprise migration process titled Upgrade your network to Yammer Enterprise.

We are interested in this topic and welcome opportunities to engage with organizations needing to adapt to the new FINRA regulations, but plan on supporting a social collaboration effort with a solution like Yammer, or SharePoint’s Newsfeed, at the same time. So please don’t hesitate to contact us if we may be helpful to you.

Ira Michael Blonder

©Rehmani Consulting, Inc. & Ira Michael Blonder 2014 All Rights Reserved