Unless you've been living under a rock for the past week, you've probably heard that Microsoft acquired Yammer. As originally reported by our friend Owen Thomas, Microsoft ended up purchasing the enterprise social network for a cool $1.2 billion.
Yammer seems to be a popular collaboration tool for a lot of companies out there — but what about startups and agencies? Do they use Yammer in their day-to-day workflow?
Collaboration is important to us at ZURB. We communicate among ourselves frequently in a few ways. Notable, one of our ZURBapps, is used for collaboration on designs — the in-line annotation feature allows for faster iterations, which gets us very quickly to a great finished product the whole team can be proud of. We schedule brief scrums which keep us on the same page. Finally, we use Google Chat for brief questions and communication.
But enough about us — what about others? Here are three influencers' responses to the question, "What tools or approaches do you use to streamline and promote collaboration among your employees?"
Much of how we encourage open collaboration is by ingraining it in our culture and letting processes and tools happen organically. Things like an open floor plan, stocked kitchen where people talk over coffee and snacks, Friday scotch toasts and our ping pong "arena" are part of our company identity and help enable this. We also use a number of tools like Campfire (always-on group chat free for all and specific rooms for functional teams), Asana (for shared project planning), Twitter (we maintain a company list for public banter), and, of course, Jira (for bugs and engineering tasks).Adam Schoenfeld, CEO and Co-Founder, Simply Measured
At Decide.com, we use Yammer for everything from a pulse check on feature naming to who's grabbing Pho for lunch. We've also been known to use turntable.fm to rock out together and communicate on product releases.Mike Fridgen, CEO, Decide.com
SEOmoz uses tools like Google Docs for document collaboration, Atlassian's tools to support Agile, and Prezi for creating a layered presentation of our architecture. Small- to medium-sized companies no longer need to spend a significant part of their revenues on a traditional licensing model to help our employees organize and communicate. What's exciting about SaaS business software is the tool selection process is no longer a top down, what-fits-your-budget decision. The employees who actually use the tools can try them at little to no cost, and when they settle on the best software, the tools naturally proliferate in the organization.Anthony Skinner, CTO, SEOmoz
Let us know what tools you use for collaboration at your company in the comments below.
