Jason Cartwright said at September 16th, 2008 at 5:49am

Posting internal information to an external site? Can’t see any company’s information security people thinking this is a good idea.

James Cridland said at September 16th, 2008 at 9:00am

Don’t be silly. We’re all quite grown up.

Nobody’ll be posting passwords to the Borg, nor any sensitive plans. But I’m sure the Borg will be mentioned a fair bit.

Any company’s tech support team that worth it’s salt does trust the people who work for it. Try it sometime. It might work for you, too.

Jason Cartwright said at September 16th, 2008 at 11:47am

Sure, I’m all for trusting the user – it does work for me :-)

I’d like to trust them to not post information about unreleased products to untrusted 3rd parties too. Why not just run a copy of Yammer (or an equivalent) inside the firewall?

James Cridland said at September 16th, 2008 at 1:19pm

Why should we have to?

Jason Cartwright said at September 16th, 2008 at 1:41pm

Yammer makes out that the information is just being shared within your company – but that isn’t guaranteed if it’s sat out on the web.

Mistakes like this happen:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/23/privacy-disaster-at-twitter-direct-messages-exposed/

I’m sure that Yammer are good people, and their service is solid, but trusting them to solicit and hold onto information that should just be internal to your company (without an SLA, or any other form of contract?) seems like asking for trouble.

James Cridland said at September 16th, 2008 at 4:07pm

Or simply trust your team not to be careless with their data. Either works. I prefer trust, not sticks.

Jason Cartwright said at September 16th, 2008 at 4:29pm

Of course, of course – but you said unreleased products had been mentioned on the service. That sounds like it should be classed as careless.

Lawrence said at September 17th, 2008 at 7:18am

With so many ways to communicate trust is really the only thing left. Any employee will be under some formal obligations in a signed contract anyway.

Neville Hobson said at September 17th, 2008 at 9:36am

No sooner has Yammer appeared than another contender emerges – Present.ly.

This one, though, may well have greater appeal for large organizations in particular (eg, the BBC) as it offers an option to run the whole thing on the organization’s own network, behind the firewall. That is likely to make IT more comfortable.

Plus it offers some great opportunities for corporate software developers to explore ways of connecting Present.ly with other applications within the enterprise – it comes with an API.

http://presentlyapp.com/

Steve Ellwood said at September 18th, 2008 at 9:43am

We’re playing about with this in my company (BT). I was mostly concerned about barring individuals who’d left – without admin access.

It’s actually a really easy process. Anyone can report them as “no longer part of x network”. Next time the barred individual comes back, they have to reconfirm their corporate email address. No email address, no access.

Still leaves an issue that if it really takes off, you have hundreds of folk who nobody may know (we’ve 100k employees round the world) who might not be challenged.

As far as trust goes, most big corporates (with any sense) have a blogging policy, and do trust their employees not to share stuff they shouldn’t. I *do* think it’s worth making colleagues aware that Yammer isn’t guaranteed *employee only* though.

How do you find the absence of the 140 character Twitter limit?

Zox said at September 18th, 2008 at 1:25pm

I’m inviting my company to join, but they are a bit slow at adapting new stuff – laggers. Just curious, is everybody participating? Lots of users?

The Outraged Potato said at September 25th, 2008 at 3:49am

Trying Out Yammer.com…

Want a Twitter like app just for your company? Try Yammer. Its almost exactly like Twitter only you can create a community for people only in your domain……

tomVersus » Yammer on! said at October 6th, 2008 at 8:35pm

[...] As I’ve been typing this – almost 11PM on a Tuesday – another two people have joined our work network. So far, it’s looking active. James blogged about it last week, which started a bit of a conversation regarding trust and data on 3rd party sites. [...]

social media for innovation at the BBC (and elsewhere) « Lucy in the sky said at October 19th, 2008 at 5:23pm

[...] firewall and because we test a lot of tools opinion about which might be best for us is, of course divided even in our own [...]

Roo Reynolds said at October 26th, 2008 at 7:06pm

I’m all for trusting people, but I can’t help thinking Yammer is straddling a strange space. It’s neither properly external nor properly external. More discussion of this (including sme interesting news from Steve) at http://commonplatform.co.uk/index.php/2008/10/15/huggers-yammers/

Yammer goes down, TechCrunch and BBC staff go silent said at November 4th, 2008 at 11:38am

[...] Cridland, XX at the BBC, posted on his personal blog back in September in a post titled “Yammer = quite good really” that: “Today, [...]