When Microsoft was preparing to release SharePoint 2013, one of the most highly anticipated feature areas was the expansion of the platform’s social collaboration capabilities. Feedback from customers was that SharePoint was woefully behind in the social space, with consumer-based solutions threatening to cut into Microsoft’s still growing enterprise collaboration platform. The most visible threat during this time was Yammer, a company that marketed itself as more than just a cloud-based social platform, but a way to support and enhance corporate culture and communication. And then, to the amazement of many in the space, Microsoft acquired Yammer, and the rest is history.

Even with Microsoft’s massive investment in Yammer and subsequent marketing push, there is still tremendous need for education on the business value of social. Companies that treat social as a technology add-on and do not take the time to align features with core business processes, or underestimate the cultural change required to make it successful, can find themselves struggling to get traction. Even Microsoft has shared that some internal teams have embraced the social model much more quickly than others, and has created teams within the company to help evangelize the necessary cultural shift to help them become more of a social organization.

Many companies still view social as an end user-driven feature set, with a loosely defined value proposition. The primary benefit that organizations adopting social intuitively understand is its ability to almost instantly improve employee engagement — getting people to engage in conversation, share ideas, and utilize the toolset — which is a major problem within most enterprise content management (ECM) platforms, including SharePoint. A collaboration platform that lacks end user participation, no matter how well-defined and implemented, is a failure. As a result, many organizations turn to social collaboration solutions, like Yammer, to fill the adoption gap.

Yammer is a quick and easy tool, providing great community and newsfeed capabilities – but one of its central issues is that it creates yet another information silo if not carefully aligned with Office 365 or SharePoint, which is not something that can be done out of the box. Some organizations absolutely love it, while others have struggled to adopt it for this very reason. From a feature perspective, the core Yammer capabilities are very elementary compared to some of the competing enterprise collaboration solutions available today — but its ease of use ensures that most large organizations have Yammer communities that are created and grow inside and outside of the purview of corporate IT. However, for organizations that have made large investments in Office 365 or SharePoint, the features and integrations available with Yammer are very limited compared to other competing platforms.

That’s where Beezy can help. In a press release announced today, Beezy now offer seamless, two-way integration between Yammer and the award-winning Beezy enterprise collaboration solution, allowing organizations to leverage their social investments in Yammer and extend them with the additional rich social capabilities in SharePoint. Read more here.

Why is this announcement important? Because Beezy enhances the Yammer stack with enterprise collaboration capabilities that are fundamental to social within the SharePoint world, including blogs, wikis, Idea Elevation, Q&A, Town Halls, and more. Organizations that have built out communities in Yammer, but that struggle to integrate these community efforts with their extensive SharePoint environments, can have the best of both worlds, whether hosting SharePoint on-premises or in the cloud via Office 365. Beezy not only enhances and enriches Yammer by taking Yammer to the level that enterprise customers need (and demand), but Beezy also connects all of the Microsoft collaboration dots — integrating Skype for Business, Yammer, Outlook, and the entire Office 365 platform — through one seamless user interface.

Having a single user interface that brings all of these rich collaboration features together is important, but equally important is how all of these moving parts are managed on the back-end. Beezy not only simplifies the collaboration experience of end users, it also makes the life of your SharePoint administrators much easier. Since Beezy is built for SharePoint (both online and on prem), our solution lives inside your SharePoint environment. That means your social collaboration data will reside inside of SharePoint, enabling better and easier governance of your data and end users.

For organizations looking to extend their enterprise collaboration capabilities by improving the social integrations between Yammer and SharePoint, Beezy is proud to offer the leading “better together” solution. We listen and respond to what customers are demanding for their enterprise collaboration needs, and we’re excited about our future roadmap.

Contact us if you would like a demo to see how Beezy complements and integrates with Yammer.