Microsoft Viva Engage vs. Sococo

Yammer provides a social network experience for the enterprise, providing a "Facebook for work". Its mobile app provides an excellent user experience, showing the full mix of communications happening across topics and teams. The web app, while it hasn't evolved much in the last few years, provides a good experience consuming news. Personally, I use Yammer every morning to see what's happening across my company and comment, like, and share to interact across silos. As long as the size of the network inside of Yammer is managed - likely partitioning a large organization into business units, etc., - then Yammer provides an excellent platform for social news and "bottom up" collaboration across teams. Its free-form posting style, including articles and polls for interactive content, helps break down silos across the organization. Contrasted with the boring world of email, Yammer is a tantalizing world of pictures, GIFs, and videos. At LiveTiles, we share company and team news via Yammer, enabling others to see the progress and milestones - from a new office to a new customer - without the heavy burden of a company newsletter or similarly curated content. Even though we have fully adopted Teams for day-to-day, intra-team communication, Yammer is still the gold standard for inter-team communication.

Incentivized

We tried Sococo as means of gamifying a natively remote office. It does the job but the tool suffers from a lack of integrations. You will run out of free minutes very quickly and the additional charges are too high to make business sense.

• No one likes getting a long thread of reply-alls. With Yammer announcements and updates can be shared — without cluttering your inbox.
• Yammer's mobile apps are great for our on-the-go sales team to stay in touch with our office staff.
• Yammer's social aspect makes it incredibly easy to use, even for our less tech savvy teammates. If you've used Facebook, learning Yammer will be a cinch.

Incentivized

• Good voice codex. Voices come across clearly and I've never had problems struggling to understand another person due to static.
• Easy screen sharing. The screen sharing is intuitive and easy to use. In addition, it's easy for multiple people to be sharing a screen at the same time, and viewers can easily hop between the different shared screens.
• Has a mobile phone application version, web browser version , and stand alone client.

Incentivized

• While Yammer has been an easy transition from SharePoint, it's still relatively new and unknown. Some employees claim that feel like the product was just another "add on" to the entire Microsoft Office experience.
• When introducing new employees to Yammer, they are not as receptive because of how widely used SharePoint is across businesses and industries.
• Functionality is simple, but still vastly different from SharePoint, thus creating a learning curve.

Incentivized

• Audio quality is often a challenge. People will cut in and out.
• Video quality can be a challenge sometimes when someone is sharing their screen or camera.
• Moving between Sococo "Areas" can be a little bit challenging for new users not used to Sococo.

Incentivized

Microsoft is dedicated to continual improvement on Yammer. They realize the value that Yammer brings to the table with their clients. In the short time that we have had Yammer implemented, we are just now beginning to see the strong impact it has on becoming more effective and efficient around collaboration.

Overall easy to use and intuitive, although limited in the possibility to personalize layout and look & feel of a site. Some functionalities are not easy to use, like document editing, but some others are quick and effective (posts and tagging above all). Performance and responsiveness of the Yammer site is typically acceptable, in my experience.

It was easy to use but still needs lots of improvement to collaborate with other tools

Incentivized

Very available

It's a simple product but it does provide value.

We have never had to use the support for Yammer. The tool works well and we have not come across any bugs. User Interface is simple and easy to use, similar to other forum type products, thereby removing the need for any extensive training. Team members are invited in and immediately are able to start using the tool.

Incentivized

Sococo didn't seem to have a strong support line. In comparison to other products, such as Microsoft Teams, it did not regularly check in with us. There should be opportunities to give feedback on the quality of the program periodically and if we had any issues. Sometimes, Sococo would crash, and we would 'restart it' but not know why it happened.

Incentivized

The training that Microsoft provides is very generic training for Yammer. I like the fact the training is short and easy to understand

We organically implemented the product

I like how Yammer has functions that are fun and interactive, which can give you much more to do than using Teams or even Microsoft Forms. Yammer helps people feel included and gives people a better sense of how their friends and co-workers are feeling on certain issues. Yammer is a lot more like a social media platform than a work tool even!

Incentivized

Sococo has a better visual appeal. It makes it feel more like an office space when you work from home. There is increased awareness and accountability of whose in the office vs. whose not. There is also a better social connection that directly impacts productivity and company success. Employees will feel part of a team and, thus, put more effort because of that.

Incentivized

• Nothing negative. But what we tend to forget is that Yammer is just a product, not a vision for change. The true and deep implementation and adoption of an enterprise network needs work and commitment, just like everything else. The true benefits will only emerge over time.

Incentivized

• Sococo completely overcame the problem of staying in touch with remote development teams.
• Enabled daily scrum meetings, sprint reviews, etc.
• Helped keep everybody engaged in the project.

Incentivized