TalkingHeadz with Murali Sitaram, GM Yammer
It was wonderful to catch up with Murali, now at Microsoft. The first time we met was eight years ago when he was running Webex Quad. We did this interview. Quad was replaced by Spark, now known as Webex Teams. Now he’s heading Yammer at Microsoft. #YearOfYammer started last fall at Ignite19. It was the first time ever that Yammer got considerably more attention than Teams (see my post from last November: A Tale of Two Apps). Teams is more like Slack (team chat plus), and Yammer is more like Workplace by Facebook (social news feed). However, both apps share a lot of common features. Murali explains how Yammer and Teams are best used as complementary, rather than alternative apps.
It’s a perfect time to be discussing enterprise social apps. Fears and concerns over the spread of coronavirus has many employees working from home for the first time — often feeling disconnected. It’s kind of odd because the most common objection to telework has been around poor supervision concerns, but evidently employees at the office are very social.
Regardless if you work at home or in an office, you likely are increasingly working with distributed team members. Humans are social creatures and as a work adapts, we need to new tools. Yammer was one of the pioneers in this area, and Microsoft is making it much better.
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