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According to Microsoft’s new Office 365 Customer Success Center, communities are all about Yammer

In this, the final post on our current topic, Microsoft’s new Office 365 Customer Success Center on the web, the writer spends sometime discussing the “Communities” section of the site. The previous three posts provided readers with:

  • an introduction to the Center and a look at the Scenarios section
  • a deeper dive into the “Resources” and training aides supporting the Scenarios section
  • and a description of the “Adoption” section

Yammer

Yammer, and the personnel representing it, play a very big role throughout the Center. Many of these people staffed the Office 365 Summit in New York City, which the writer of this post attended earlier this month (October, 2014). We think this makes perfect sense for reasons we hope our readers will also find to be important:

  • Office 365 is a cloud, SaaS offer, whereas SharePoint has an on premises component. Yammer has always been, and remains, a cloud SaaS offer. So adoption, and the notion of a migration to Office 365 computing from SharePoint on premises, or in addition to it, are much more likely to be ingrained in the methods and procedures of Yammer champions. From the start they have had to deal with these issues. Where they have succeeded, it’s safe to say the methods are worth sharing with stakeholders (and their partners) grappling with the same objectives for Office 365 and SharePoint Online

Communities

The “Communities” section of the Center includes 3 links: a link to the “Office 365 Technical Network”, a link to the “Office 365 Partner Network”, and, finally, a link to the “Yammer Customer Network”. All three of these “networks” run on Yammer. We think including the link to the “Yammer Customer Network” makes a lot of sense (caveat: our writer can’t connect to neither the Office 365 Partner Network, nor to the Yammer Customer Network. So related comments should be understood as assumptions, only), if for no other reason than to provide Office 365 stakeholders with a basis to build enthusiasm (through dialogue with peers already running successful implementations of Yammer), and a location where they will be likely to pick up promising techniques, which they might find useful within their own organizations.

Unlike the other two sections we discussed, the “Communities” section does not include links to the “Resources” section. Neither are there any clickable training aides. But we think the links to the Yammer groups will prove to be very useful.

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Conclusion

Any organization seriously considering Office 365 as a computing platform should take the time to thoroughly study the very deep set of content Microsoft has provided on the Center web site. We are very confident the time will be considered well spent, with a meaningful ROI. Please don’t hesitate to contact us if we can help you and/or your team derive more value from the Center for your needs.

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