Microsoft's Yammer rises as the communication tool for British Airways employees

Kareem Anderson

As we report on the steady adoption of Microsoft’s Office 365 among businesses, we are also starting to notice the uptick in tangential Microsoft Office services being used as well. Once companies have begun using Office 365, it seems many tend to find relevance and utility from using Office compliments such as OneDrive, Skype for Business, SharePoint, and Yammer.
Another case in point is British Airways use of Microsoft Office 365 coupled with the use of Yammer. With British Airways employees using Office 365 to help collaborate in the office or the clouds, 11,000 have joined Yammer to post over 1 million posts to each other.
Since Yammer is an enterprise social network of sorts, it would appear the service offers just the right mix of communication and productivity used in a working environment.
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Adrian Steel, the global head of IT operations of Internation Airlines Group, discussed first introducing Yammer two years ago;

We introduced Yammer two years ago, and within just six months, more than 11,000 employees had joined the British Airways network. We’ve found that Yammer facilitates spontaneous conversations among employees—sparking innovative ideas that help us operate more efficiently and improve customer service.”

Not only has Yammer been an excellent tool for addressing coming up with improvements to the business, but British Airways is also using Yammer to help get planes off the ground faster. “Anything we can do to speed up a process by even one minute can have a huge impact on getting planes off the ground on time,” says Adrian. Both Yammer and Skype have been used to supplement the core processes online for encouraging collaboration among the many teams working at British Airways.
While Microsoft’s grasp on the enterprise is arguably the strongest it’s been, it should still be welcoming for business adoption that Microsoft is leveraging multiple solutions to help Office provide an all encompassing tool.