Let's say your enterprise licenses SharePoint. You know that it's social networking (and some collaboration) capabilities are limited. What do you do?

It turns out you have many choices. For larger enterprises, however, a debate often emerges about Yammer versus Sitrion (neé Newsgator). In fact, that's a common advisory discussion with our research subscribers.

The comparison is particularly timely, because SharePoint promoters increasingly wax about future Yammer-SharePoint integration, even if that journey has to date remained slow and halting. (Though the fact that Microsoft is killing off some SharePoint Online features perhaps suggests a greater seriousness around Yammer.)

Contrasting the Two Vendors

Yammer and Sitrion are actually quite different, even if functionally they overlap a bit. Consider:

• Yammer is available for free or fairly low cost; Sitrion can become pricey
• Sitrion provides finished applications; Yammer is just a set of features (mostly a microblogging service), much the same way SharePoint is
• Yammer is only available in the cloud (though not the Office 365 cloud); Sitrion can be installed on-premise as well as in the cloud (with some exceptions)
• Sitrion runs pretty much inside SharePoint; Yammer runs pretty much next to SharePoint
• Yammer has a huge, steady, corporate parent; Sitrion does not
• Sitrion has historically emphasized SharePoint integration; Yammer has historically emphasized being cool

Well, the list goes on. For a full comparison of these two offerings, consult our detailed evaluation research. In any case, don't default to any SharePoint add-on tool without careful testing against practical, business-oriented use cases.

If your organization doesn't yet subscribe to our research, you can download a complimentary sample (our Yammer evaluation) to check it out.