Update: Interesting discussion on this over at Hacker News.
We’ve been a paying Yammer customer for a while now, with generally good results. I recently discovered HipChat and after a short internal trial we found that it works better for our needs than Yammer does.
So I thought, let’s leave Yammer and move over to HipChat. Easier said than done.
Signing up for HipChat and adding our small user base has been painless. Leaving Yammer has been a nightmare.
To close your account you have to get in touch with Yammer Support. I raised a ticket and picked the option that said downgrade my account. In the contents of the ticket I clearly wrote that I want to close our account and have Yammer delete our data from their servers.
Many an email up and down to Yammer, followed by many angry tweets to their @Yammer Twitter account - and I’m still sitting here manually deleting each user from our account by doing an Ajaxified search which functions when it feels like it. There isn’t even a way to even select multiple users and just hit delete.
Why oh why have you guys built and application that I can’t leave easily? Did you not think that businesses may want to leave at some point? I just want to close our network and want you to remove our data - data that belong to us on “our enterprise network”.
What you guys will do should someone like the AAA decide to leave, I have no idea. I’m sure that their sysadmin will not be happy with individually deleting 3700 or so accounts.
Is your company on a free or premium pricing plan?
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We were on their old Silver Plan (if I remember what it was called right..) which was USD 3 per user per month. The pricing didn't change for us, even though they now price everyone at USD 5 before any volume discounts.
Why would they waste a bunch of time make the "close account" feature perfect. That doesn't make any sense. Do you think any SaaS service actually deletes all your data? Of course not.
It's not about making it perfect, but just having it available in the first place.
Any SaaS service worth it's salt should be able to remove your proprietary corporate data.
Could you elaborate on why HipChat was a better match for your needs?
Hi Martin,
Yammer is a really nice tool, but over time I feel that our needs have changed.
Yammer got people used to using an always available tool for having conversations and sharing information that would and could not have happened over email and sometimes even in person.
HipChat offers a platform that is more collaborative and allows us to have conversations that are live. I've tended to find that similar conversations to those that used to take place on Yammer still do, but take place at a given time rather than over time.
From time to time I miss the passive content sharing that take places on Yammer and on occasion and older conversation that gets revived.
However I feel that HipChat is just a better fit for our needs.
They both do collaboration but in fairly different ways.
Yammer is exactly that, a collaborative tool...sounds like you may not have utilized the full scope of the product...
To be honest, I think we did. It's just that we found HipChat to be more collaborative in the sense that it's instant, where as Yammer is more passive collaboration.
Conversation on Yammer tend to happen over longer time periods.
Like I said - they both do collaboration but in different ways.
I was guessing you were going to say something like that. It sounds very much like you and your team relied on threads, which is useful, of course, but you were looking for something more immediate. Yammer has built a very slick tool called "Direct Messaging" that is much like Hipchat. It also allows you to organize chats by groups, or in Hipchat linguo, "rooms".
We used Direct Messaging quite a bit too. Especially for one to one conversations that needed to be private. Occasionally these would turn into a group chat.
I'm not sure why your leaning heavily towards Yammer. Like I said earlier, they're both good solutions - addressing different needs!
My post above is my issue with Yammer not removing my network and data rather than a discredit to the features of the product itself versus a competing product.
Omar,
We apologize that your experience hasn't been good. We are working on making the removal process easier. Because we take security so seriously, we aren't able to delete / manipulate your network from our side. The only person that can change / delete the network is the admin. At this point, you have to delete every user, but we realize that this is not an optimal solution in many cases. We are exploring other ways of making it easier for admins to wipe their accounts.
We thank you for your patience, and please accept our apologies that your deletion process wasn't as smooth as it could've been.
Sincerely,
Maria, @yammer
Hi Maria,
Thanks for dropping in.
It still doesn't make sense to me that you can't actually delete a network and related data from your servers - I'm explicitly asking you to. If some data on a given network were corrupted - would you not be able to go in and restore? - leaving security concerns aside.
I feel like this remains a marketing ploy to retain a free network that a company could always return to and find there old data still available. Unfortunately I don't think that given this experience that will ever be the case.
Scott, a member of your Support team actually suggested deleting each "affected message" individually by hitting More > Delete. Beyond ridiculous.
We were lucky that we had only a few user on there, I can't imagine what it would be like for a larger organisation to delete every user manually.
Unfortunately you've not actually taken care of the problem yet. I just want you to delete our network and remove our data completely from your servers. This should not be a hard ask, especially given we have been paying customers for many months.
It shouldn't have to come to this to get a simple problem sorted out.
Nice recap Omar
What about if you wanted to move data instead of deleting it.... uffff
I think Yammer has a pretty good export function!