“Now customers can use Office Groups to collaborate over information from popular third-party services and apps, including Salesforce, Twitter and GitHub.” – Office 365 Connectors Track Tweets, Scan Salesforce

What’s missing as one of these services and apps: Yammer.

I’ve been trying to figure out the reasons why Yammer isn’t included, and after reading through a happening-right-now conversation between Microsoft and Yammer admins, on the Office365 Yammer network, I still don’t see why it ultimately isn’t.

It’s a real head-scratcher.

Two of the arguments against its inclusion contain these points:

“Microsoft haven’t developed anything here with Twitter, GitHub etc. All of these companies already have an outgoing Webhook interface, Connectors are an incoming Webhook interface. Yammer doesn’t currently have an outgoing Webhook…a Yammer group could post every message, but it wouldn’t thread, wouldn’t be from the original user, and is one way.”

“Think of the search headaches, as the same content shows up multiple times. Think of the migration headaches. Think of the confused users who keep navigating to different groups and seeing the same conversations. And the poor trainers! They already have to explain to end users why both Groups and Yammer are being used and what the purpose of each tool is. As you know, this is difficult enough, but now they’ll have to explain to users why they see the same conversations in both tools?”

Here’s where I just don’t get it.

With any of these other connectors, there is the same risk spoken of about Yammer: You only get the high-level stuff.

From the article:

“Each time a key activity takes place in the service you’re tracking—for example, when a new task is added to a Salesforce opportunity, an update is made to a Trello board or an incident is triggered in PagerDuty—a message is sent to the Groups shared inbox,” said Pardeshi.

In the above example, I can only speak to Trello, but when I get notifications, it’s only the latest post and I still have to actively open Trello to see the full context.

As far as the point made that we’d have to explain to users why we see the same conversations in both tools…I really don’t see that this would be an issue, or this tool shouldn’t exist in the first place, then.

“Office 365 Connectors, a new Office Groups feature, eliminate the need to log in and out of multiple services or keep a Web browser full of open tabs to monitor social media accounts and software-as-a-service (SaaS) apps.”

All of these notifications, alerts, etc., are able to come to my Outlook right now. So to me, this is the same thing as what I get in Outlook, just in a different place and with a different feel. And NOT including a major tool for our company and customers.

I’m coming from a place where it’s imperative that my home network continues to understand and find use in Yammer, because that’s what our customers use in our external network.

I neither want to fragment their O365 experience nor divert them from Yammer because it’s shunted off to the back of the train as a forgotten caboose instead of being the locomotive.

I’m all for integrated experiences and one-stop shopping. I don’t see that happening with this new tool.

What am I missing?

(And thanks to Heather V for the train analogy.)