Yammer vs. Jive vs. Chatter: Social Software Reviews from Real Users
By Russell Rothstein
founder and CEO, IT Central Station
Buying an enterprise social platform can be a challenge. There are dozens of solutions on the market and if you read the vendor marketing materials, it sounds like each product does everything you would ever need it to do.
We created a website to enable real users of enterprise software to share their candid opinions with one another, without the vendor hype. IT Central Station provides trusted reviews from real users of Jive, Yammer, Chatter, SharePoint, StreamWork and many other enterprise social software solutions. It's like Yelp or TripAdvisor, but for enterprise software. The site authenticates the identity of all reviewers before their posts are published.
Here's a roundup of the latest reviews of enterprise social software on IT Central Station:
Yammer: One user, who was one of Yammer's first paying customers, wrote in his review that Yammer is the best in its class. However, it requires management support, proper communication, use cases, and people to look after the community that it creates. He recommends a trial of it (it won't cost you anything), but don't expect it to have any meaningful impact without further thinking, resource and investment behind it.
Another Yammer user, who works for a local government organization, writes that “if you research it you'll be told of numerous professional benefits, including sharing links, requesting answers to work issues, but it is the ability to bring people together who don't normally get to see each other that is the most prominent benefit.” The user notes that almost 800 people signed up and joined numerous groups on the network set up by colleagues.
You can read other reviews of Yammer on IT Central Station.
Chatter: There are a number of reviews of Chatter, the social platform from Salesforce.com. One of our users gave it three stars out of five. In particular he values the streaming feed of information, but he says he is frustrated that he cannot get it across the entire company.
Jive vs. Yammer: One reviewer, who is a developer at a tech services company, wrote a comparison of Jive vs. Yammer. He says, “Jive looks like a solid product that is also extremely expensive.” He says that while Jive has very strong features, he can get 80 percent of the capabilities from Yammer without the high cost. Another reviewer writes that his company has seen more success with Jive than Yammer: “Yammer relies completely on users self-organizing to create an emergent information structure. Jive allows that, but also has some top-down capabilities to allow community managers to design overview pages and high-level structure.”
SharePoint: A number of users of Microsoft's SharePoint compare it with other social platforms. For instance, one reviewer writes: “We use both SharePoint and Yammer at work. Yammer works well at our 26,000 employee firm. It's not perfect, but it provides a semi-private environment for meeting people and conversing across many different teams, something that hasn't been as easy to do in SharePoint by itself. It doesn't replace entirely what SharePoint does nor does it replicate other public social networks. It's a complement to the other platforms we all use.”
On IT Central Station you'll find dozens more reviews of enterprise social platform vendors, including SAP StreamWork, Atlassian Confluence, MindTouch, IBM Connections, and more.
All reviews from real users are validated so you can trust their authenticity.
Russell Rothstein is founder and CEO of IT Central Station. He has spent more than two decades in the enterprise technology industry at the crossroads of technology and business. Before founding IT Central Station, he worked at enterprise tech vendors including OPNET (acquired by Riverbed) and Oracle. Russell was co-founder of Zettapoint (acquired by EMC) and Open Sesame (acquired by Bowne/RR Donnelley). He received a BA in computer science from Harvard University, an MS in technology and policy from MIT and an MS in management from the MIT Sloan School of Management. Follow Russell on Twitter @RussRothsteinIT .
Drew Robb is a writer who has been writing about IT, engineering, and other topics. Originating from Scotland, he currently resides in Florida. Highly skilled in rapid prototyping innovative and reliable systems. He has been an editor and professional writer full-time for more than 20 years. He works as a freelancer at Enterprise Apps Today, CIO Insight and other IT publications. He is also an editor-in chief of an international engineering journal. He enjoys solving data problems and learning abstractions that will allow for better infrastructure.
