Dubbed "Facebook for the Enterprise"and "a corporate version of Twitter" there's no doubt that Yammer has been a tremendous hit in the enterprise social arena, making it a perfect partner for SharePoint’s strong collaboration capabilities. Whereas Yammer provides a far more natural and inclusive approach to social, SharePoint provides a far stronger base for managing content, controls and the security around which conversations in the enterprise are typically focused – the combination of the two is what makes Microsoft’s acquisition of Yammer in mid-2012 so exciting.

On February 20th harmon.ie hosted a joint webinar with Mark Miller. Mark is a Senior Storyteller, founder and editor of the EndUserSharePoint.com community, and the voice of the SharePoint end user. 138 participants from different parts of the world joined the discussion about what social means in the everyday work environment and in SharePoint.

Microsoft’s new social email products – Outlook 2013 and Outlook.com (with its 1 million sign-ups in the first 6 hours) – are shaping up to be the final chapter in the “email-is-dead/long-live-email” debate, at least for the foreseeable future.

The transformation from traditional business to social business is incredibly difficult. As is the case in any organizational metamorphosis, making technology decisions must take worker behavior and corporate culture into account, since people and culture are by far the biggest obstacles to change. 

One of the big themes that came out of #SPJam is the need for the SharePoint Community to focus more on the business side of things, and not just on its technical implementation.