I have had some good response to my first blog about Yammer (the Yammer Team even Twittered about it!), so I figure I’ll try to keep the momentum going (and keep you from waiting) by continuing the conversation today.
Part 2: Signing Up for Yammer
When you first visit Yammer.com, the Yammer team has made signing up as easy and obvious as humanly possible. The main feature on the page is a single text box that says “Enter your work email.” You must use your work email, as the Yammer service connects you with your coworkers by your common email ending (so if you use your Yahoo email address, you’d just get connected to all the other Yahoo people…and that won’t help you at work). After entering your work email, click the blue “Join” button to the right.
Yammer will send an email to the address you provided with a link to activate your account (a typical email verification to make sure you actually own the email address). Check your work email (it may take a minute to make it through the COSI junk mail filters) and click on the link in the message to activate your account.
Fill out your information (so we know who you are), set your password, and upload a photo. It is HIGHLY RECOMMENDED (at COSI at least) that you actually use a photo of your face…that way those of us that don’t work with you every day can recognize you when we do see you in person! If you don’t have a decent photo of your face, stop by and I will be happy to take one for you.
The next page asks you to fill in who you work for, who you work with, and who works for you. The primary purpose of this step appears to be expanding your company Yammer network (Yammer will invite those people to join), although Yammer does seem to have retained who I work for and with as part of some mysterious “org chart” (something that will have more functionality down the road?). You can skip this page if you want.
That’s it…you’re signed up for Yammer! Try it out by sharing with the rest of us the answer to “What are you working on?” Just type something worth sharing into the box, and click “Update” …easy as pie!
Important note for those at COSI: Your first action after the sign up process should be to turn off email updates (and the method to do so has changed since we first invited the team to sign up). Click on “Settings” in the upper-right corner, then click on “Email” in the menu to the left. Make sure that ALL of the check boxes under “Receive Updates by Email” are UNCHECKED. Then click “Save” at the bottom of the page to save your changes. This important step will help relieve the unnecessary load on our COSI email server that would come from all of us getting an email when an update is posted (not to mention that getting your updates in email would pretty much defeat the purpose of using Yammer to reduce non-vital emails).
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