Competitor Analysis

This section compares and evaluates the differences between the two famous current social applications for the work environment. Yammer and slack are the two famous and in-demand applications. The reason to pick these two popular applications is that I have personally used both tools in big companies. It was easy to analysis these tools, instead of those which I never used before. Both applications are developed by well-reputed companies. Yammer was acquired by the well-known technology company Microsoft.

Slack is one of the famous business communication tools which most of the companies are currently using.

2.7.1 Yammer

Yammer² is an enterprise social networking service launched in September 2008, but with the increasing number of features and applications on the Yammer platform, Yam-mer is no longer just a communication platform. These new applications include voting, chat, events, links, topics, questions and answers, ideas, and more [26]. It provides an Activity Feed that aggregates the activities of colleagues in all enterprise applications, and users can also pay attention to the content.

Yammer has more than 5 million certified business users, including more than 85% of Fortune 500 companies. The basic version of Yammer is costless and users can upgrade their user account for advanced management and security controls, integration with en-terprise applications, prioritized customer service, and designated customer success managers. Yammer has raised approximately $142 million in venture capital. [26]

2.7.2 Yammer features

Like other microblogging products, Yammer can post messages and follow other users, but Yammer has several unique features compared to twitter microblogging.

 A linear response model, which increases the Yammer's community function.

2 www.microsoft.com/en-US/microsoft-365/yammer/yammer-overview

 You can manually add Tags to the information to classify the information.

 Many groups and networks can be created, and users can contact people outside the company.

 Pictures, files and documents can be uploaded in a common format. It also sup-ports voting, calendar, and question and answers type of functions.

 For multi-user private messages (instead of e-mail function), Yammer information or post information can be sent to users via e-mail.

 IM function allows you to see online contacts.

 Support for Android, iPhone, Windows mobile, BlackBerry, and other mobile cli-ent applications.

2.7.3 Yammer disadvantages

Yammer is a very nice tool, but yet it lacks some features. The analysis was based on how the user is flexible to make changes? One window operation is missing in this.

Where the user is willing to use all Microsoft applications in one place without any prob-lem.

Following are the cons in which Yammer is still lacking.

 Device app functionality. Many of us only use log in to their social media ac-counts, e.g. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, on our smartphones or tablets. This is relevant for our work tools as well. But you cannot yet edit notes or see current hashtags in the apps. [55]

 SharePoint integration. This is very necessary for our users that the present level of integration must be considered as a weak point even though Microsoft has it as one of their top requirements.

 Outlook integration. Many of us use Outlook for email, calendar and contacts. To break the habits of sending emails, Yammer and other ESN-tools face the chal-lenge of having people switching from Outlook to Yammer to send a message.

However, Yammer is working on an integration to Office and Outlook to bring the ESN-experience closer to the productivity tools. [55]

 Feature of document editing tool is not good enough. The rich text editor tool is far behind compared to other online editors tools.

2.7.4 Slack

Slack is a chat group, massive tool integration, file integration, and unified search. By the end of 2014, Slack has integrated 65 tools and services, including email, SMS, Google Drives, Twitter, Trello, Asana, GitHub, to bring together fragmented enterprise communications and collaboration. [27]

After receiving more than 40 million U.S. dollars in financing in early 2014, it completed another 120 million U.S. dollars in financing. Its valuation has reached $1.12 billion, and

the company was founded just eight months ago, making it the fastest-growing SaaS company ever [27].

In February 2015, the first anniversary of Slack's corporate chat tool reached 500,000 active users, and the increase in the first six weeks of 2015 was 35% (at least 130,000), and the number of chat messages sent by users reached 1.7 million.

2.7.5 Slack features

Compare to Yammer, Slack has also several good features.

 Slack brings all your communication together, At Slack, teamwork takes place in channels and all the news, tools and files are in one place - saving time and encouraging collaboration.

 A channel for any kind of entertainment. Channels can be broken down by team, project, customer, or other topics relevant to your business.

o Team members can join and leave channels as they need them, unlike endless email chains.

o Threads prevent secondary conversations from distracting from the topic or the current project.

 Share channels with companies and companies that you work with on a regular basis, such as clients, agencies and partners. So, all relevant people are in the same digital space.

 Face to face and across the screen, discuss things by audio or video call directly from Slack and if you want to present your work, you can also share your screen.

2.7.6 Slack disadvantages

According to personal use and asking other users, following are the cons of Slack.

 The interface is difficult to get used to.

 Notifications have been a little bit of a challenging for us where they do not pop up right away.

 Video chat becomes choppy when there are over 3 people.

 For new users, it is difficult to start conversations.

 Missing a calendar feature which would have been useful.

 No project management features

2.7.7 Yammer and Slack features comparison

Yammer and Slack are both valuable communication tools that fill several user needs.

Yammer is to a greater degree a social communication site for organizations. Conversa-tions are made when somebody posts a message and after-ward individuals react with remarks to that post. It takes out the requirement for extensive messages as it permits

you to message your whole organization legitimately with tips, organization announce-ments or general questions.

On the other side, Slack is, even more, a messaging service for the organization. It is utilized more for real-time messing and responding to inquiries on ventures or other fun-damental projects.

Since individuals answer quicker, Slack is increasingly helpful for working for in-side groups and discussing related tasks. For better understanding, the following image ex-plains the comparison in tabular form.

Comparison of both applications was made, to understand which social interaction fea-tures are missing and which tools have advance feafea-tures than others. This comparison will help us in our application design process. We will try to include missing features.

Figure 2. Yammer vs Slack features comparison³

3 comparisons.financesonline, Compare Yammer vs Slack, 2018, Link:

https://comparisons.financesonline.com/yammer-vs-slack