![[SharePoint 2013] Service Pack 1 Adds Half-Baked “Integration” with Office 365 and Yammer](https://i1.wp.com/www.johnchapman.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/SharePointLogo1.png?resize=600%2C191&ssl=1)
After installing Service Pack 1 for SharePoint 2013, you may have noticed some new configuration options in Central Administration: Configure Yammer and Configure OneDrive and Sites Links.
Thinking that there may have been some real integration between your on-premise SharePoint 2013 environment, you may have activated Yammer and configured the OneDrive and Sites links. After which, if you we’re like me, you we’re sadly disappointed. The first thing you will have noticed is that the suite bar links have been changed to include Yammer and OneDrive.
When you click on Yammer you are simply redirected to the cloud service. If you navigate to your My Site host (which you now have to do manually as there is no suite bar link for it), you’ll notice you still have an activity feed, but no post box to add any microblogs, etc.
Clicking OneDrive from the suite links bar now simply redirects you to your My Site on Office 365. You can, manually, still navigate to your on-premise My Site if desired.
Enabling the Yammer and Office 365 OneDrive integration gives you:
- Updated suite bar links to redirect users to Yammer and Office 365
- Removal of the post box on the Newsfeed page
- Removal of the suite bar links to take you to the on-premise My Site content
It does not give you any actual social integration with your on-premise environment and the cloud-base services. None of your on-premise activity is displayed in Yammer, none of your Yammer content is displayed on-premise, and there is no interactions between your on-premise My Site content and the Office 365 My Site content.
Looking for a social solution that actually integrates with SharePoint? Check out Sitrion Social (formerly NewsGator Social Sites): http://www.sitrion.com.
Do you have faith that Microsoft’s ‘Office Graph’ and ‘Oslo’ will provide better integration? Or at least that Yammer + Office 365 + SharePoint integration is a long journey?
Honestly, I think we will eventually see some better integration between Office 365 SharePoint (not on-premise) and Yammer. I don’t think that will happen until the next version of SharePoint, we probably won’t see much improvement for 2013. Microsoft basically said at the conference that they aren’t investing any additional development into on-premise social. That’s where Sitrion (formerly NewsGator, my employer) really shines. We have written the best social platform for SharePoint hands-down. In the future, I think Microsoft’s social offerings will really only be viable solutions for cloud-only users. Knowing how many SharePoint customers operate, this is primarily going to work for small companies with minimal on-premise SharePoint footprints. Large companies with large investments in on-premise architectures will not really benefit from Microsoft’s social offerings. The sad thing here is that Microsoft really had the opportunity to do great things with social in SP 2013, but utterly failed in doing so. The not-so-sad part is that it gave even more opportunity for companies like the one I work for to do great things without any real threat or competition from Microsoft.
Thanks John, it feels like I’m going to have to consider SharePoint to be different beasts – there’s the on-premises version, and then there’s the cloud version (especially considering SP15). End-users (y’know, people) will be frustated if things don’t get integrated as they expect, or if SharePoint works differently when they move companies.
Yep. The version reported is even different (15 for on-prem and 16 for O365). I see the hard part for MS in this in that they want to have an agile cloud solution for SharePoint, but don’t want to in turn lose the billion dollar business of on-premise SharePoint.