Enterprise social how to WLAN

Bringing Social to the Enterprise:
How Microsoft Can Help Your Organization Work Like a Network
1
Bringing Social
to the Enterprise:
How Microsoft Can Help Your
Organization Work Like a Network
Published: September 2014
Visit www.enterprisesocial.com
for the latest information
Estimated reading time:
25 minutes
Work like a network.

Table of Contents
Introduction 1
Listen to the conversations that matter 2
Connect your employees 2
Inform and align everyone in your organization 3
Engage your employees 3
Customer success: Red Robin listens to employees 4
Adapt and respond more quickly 5
Work better together internally 5
Collaborate outside your business 6
Improve access to knowledge 7
Customer success: Esquel Group weaves in social to improve productivity 8
Grow your business 9
Zero in on what matters most 9
Win sales faster 10
Sell more by going social 11
Are you ready to work like a network? 12
Sources 13

1
Introduction
Thanks to the rapid growth of mobile and social
technologies that have made the world a giant network,
people today are more connected than ever before. The
widespread use of mobile devices and social networks makes
it easier for people to communicate, share information, and
work together on projects of mutual interest. As a result,
the value of bringing social technologies to the enterprise is
becoming increasingly clear.
The next question is how, exactly, can enterprise social technologies add value to your
company? What tools will enable you to connect employees to information and to each
other, and enable your organization to address critical business challenges such as:
• Employee engagement – According to the Gallup organization, companies
whose employees are engaged have higher productivity, profitability, and customer
ratings, plus lower turnover, less absenteeism, and fewer safety incidents. Yet only
13 percent of employees worldwide are engaged at work, while employees who are
“actively disengaged” cost U.S. companies $450 billion to $550 billion annually.1
• Cross-team collaboration – Collaboration is essential to the success of every
company, but changing work styles and disparate communication preferences, plus
geographic, functional, and information silos, create barriers that make it difficult
for teams to work together and get things done. Meanwhile, collaborating with
partners and suppliers poses many of the same challenges.
• Business growth – Sustaining business growth today is made more difficult by
competition from new players who are disrupting traditional markets, and new
trends and technologies that are changing the way customers do business. To
overcome these challenges, companies must be able to respond more quickly,
make decisions faster, and collaborate more nimbly than their competitors. And
to do that, they need the right tools.
This whitepaper will explain how you can work like a network using enterprise social
solutions from Microsoft—including Yammer, Office 365, Lync, SharePoint and
Microsoft Dynamics CRM—to listen to the internal and external conversations that
matter to your organization, adapt quickly to changing customer needs and market
trends, and grow your business in an increasingly competitive environment. For a
more comprehensive look at why business leaders should incorporate enterprise
social technologies in their organizations, see “Why Today’s Businesses Need
Enterprise Social.”

2
Listen to the
conversations that matter
Enterprise social technologies let you connect, inform,
and engage your workers—your greatest resource—more
effectively than ever before. Executives, managers, and
individual contributors—everyone from the CEO to the
newest hire—all have a place to ask questions, inform others,
and share insights and opinions across departments and
cross-functional teams. This allows for a more transparent
company culture. Workers who feel connected to each other,
and who get the information they need and the recognition
they deserve, also feel more invested in their jobs.
What it comes down to is this: enterprise social enables your employees to connect
through conversations; stay informed so they can make smarter and faster decisions;
and feel more engaged in their work and the company culture.
Connect your employees
Enterprise social technologies will let your employees experience a closer and
more connected work environment, regardless of their location, their position in
the company, or the hierarchical structure of your organization. According to a
2013 Yammer survey, 83 percent of workers who use Microsoft Enterprise Social
technologies feel better connected to their teams.2
One way to connect employees is through an enterprise social network (ESN). Yammer
is the ESN within the Microsoft Office 365 product suite that gives your employees,
managers, and executives a social networking platform for easy, open, and secure
communication. They can listen to and participate in two-way conversations or group
discussions, improve their understanding of teams or departments outside their
day-to-day sphere, and discover content that is relevant to what they are working on.
Some organizations even use Yammer to conduct “town halls” or “all hands” company
meetings as a way to improve internal communications. This gives all employees a
voice and encourages companywide discussions about important news and updates.
Company leadership also learns from the questions and opinions posed
by employees and the insights they reveal. The end result is an organization
in which everyone enjoys greater visibility and feels more connected.
83% of workers who
use Microsoft Enterprise
Social technologies feel
better connected to
their teams.

3
Inform and align everyone in your organization
Enterprise social technologies can help you
create an informed and empowered workforce,
an open company culture, and a transparent
organization in which information flows freely
and rapidly between people at all levels. Eighty
percent of Microsoft Enterprise Social users
report being more informed about what is
happening inside their organization than they
were before having the solution.3
In addition to enterprise social technologies
such as Yammer, Microsoft also has developed
a new app called Delve, to help organizations
increase visibility into internal teams and
departments companywide. Delve uses
the machine learning capabilities of Office
Graph, which maps and analyzes Office 365
interactions, content, and activity—including
those in Exchange Online, SharePoint Online,
and Yammer—so that users can discover
relevant information. When teams work
together on a project anywhere in Office 365,
conversations and file signals feed into the
Office Graph, which enables Delve to deliver
fresh insights to individual users.
As a result, employees can easily discover what
other team members are working on, track
information, and identify new opportunities.
At the same time, Delve exposes relevant
information from across the company, further
enhancing discoverability. Delve presents all
relevant information as content cards in different
boards, which may be named “Trending around
me” or “Shared with me” and so on. These
boards are based on insights learned from each
user through machine learning, and dynamically
updated. You can also customize the names to
suit your personal needs.
You can also use natural language to search
the Office Graph, based on actions and
connections. In the People view, you can
gain insights about your colleagues and the
content that is relevant to them. In addition,
you can see not only a hierarchical view of
your colleagues but also the most relevant
contacts generated automatically by the Office
Graph, based on their interactions with people
and content. With these tools, employees can
develop a deeper understanding of how they
fit into the greater network so that they can
better work like one.
Engage your employees
Employees who are connected and aligned
are also more productive and engaged.
As noted earlier, a Gallup study found that
employee engagement leads to innovation,
greater productivity, and real profitability.
One simple way to foster a more engaged
workforce is by openly praising employees
and recognizing their work—and Yammer is
the perfect tool. Imagine an employee named
Nancy who has done a great job of closing an
important deal. Walter notices Nancy’s success
in Microsoft Dynamics CRM and shares a
message with his team about her great work,
right within the program. Walter’s praise is then
pushed to his Yammer team group. All team
members can see that Nancy has done
a stellar job, and they too can provide feedback
through comments or simply by “liking” the
update. When applying this to your business,
simple recognition goes a long way toward
boosting employee morale and helping
workers feel more engaged.
Another tool for engaging employees is Lync.
Your employees, regardless of location, can
engage in face-to-face conversations through
video conferencing. In addition, Lync also lets
workers do a traditional call or send an instant
message, which allows them to be productive
regardless of their communication style. By
putting a face to a name, Lync helps coworkers
get to know each other better and feel more
connected, which is especially valuable for large
enterprises with thousands of employees in
multiple locations.
80% of Microsoft
Enterprise Social users
report being more
informed about what is
happening inside their
organization than they
were before having
the solution.

Customer success:
Red Robin listens to employees
Red Robin Gourmet Burgers got its start in Seattle in
1969, when a local entrepreneur bought a tavern near
the University of Washington campus and added burgers
and fries to the menu. Today, Red Robin has hundreds of
restaurants in 44 states and four time zones, with 1,500
managers coaching and developing 26,000 employees.
Although Red Robin has always been successful, the
company realized at one point that it was not growing
as quickly as the competition.
“In this economy, it’s not the big companies eating the small, it’s the fast eating
the slow,” says Chris Laping, senior vice president and chief information officer for
Red Robin.
Red Robin adopted Yammer and other enterprise social technologies to give
employees a voice, improve communication, and create greater transparency
between company leadership and employees. By using Yammer to listen to
employees, Red Robin was able to improve its business by gaining insights from
restaurant staff and learning more about the feedback that servers and managers
were receiving from customers.
“Yammer has been a very important tool for us to give everybody a voice,” says
Red Robin CEO Steve Carley. “We deliver our promise with a server standing
right here at the end of the table. So if you can talk to those people, in a non-threatening
way, it is extraordinary what you can learn, and the engagement and
excitement you can generate.”
“Yammer has been a very
important tool for us to
give everybody a voice.
We deliver our promise
with a server standing
right here at the end of
the table. So if you can
talk to those people, in a
non-threatening way, it is
extraordinary what you can
learn, and the engagement
and excitement you
can generate.”
—Steve Carley, CEO
Red Robin

5
Adapt and respond
more quickly
While keeping your workforce connected, informed, and
engaged is the foundation for increased productivity and
innovation, this is only one piece of the puzzle. Collaboration
is essential to the success and growth of any enterprise, yet
many organizations still struggle to collaborate effectively
and efficiently. The rise of a geographically diverse and
increasingly mobile workforce has created new barriers to
collaboration. Increasingly, knowledge workers today are
collaborating with colleagues who work not just down the
hall, but in different buildings, countries, and time zones.
Functional and information silos, often created or reinforced
by systems that are unconnected or not well-integrated, also
present barriers to effective collaboration. Similar barriers
also exist between companies and their external partners,
suppliers, and customers, where reliance on telephone and
email communication almost guarantees that important
information eventually will become lost or locked away in
individual inboxes or voicemail.
Increasingly, forward-thinking organizations are taking collaboration to a
whole new level by bringing social to the enterprise. With the right set of social
technologies to support open communication and seamless collaboration—no
matter where people work—companies can adapt and respond more quickly to
changing market conditions.
Work better together internally
Some difficulties of team collaboration include keeping up with all of the moving parts
of a project, plugging into what other people are working on, and making sure everyone
is working on the right piece. With Microsoft Enterprise Social solutions, teams can work
better together internally. Organizations that use enterprise social technologies see a 37
percent improvement in project collaboration,4 and almost 70 percent of users agree that
Microsoft Enterprise Social improves collaboration across remote locations.5
Organizations that
use enterprise social
technologies see a 37%
improvement in project
collaboration.

6
Microsoft Enterprise Social enables teams to
self-organize, focus, and collaborate more
efficiently. For example, Yammer Groups
provide team workspaces that bring together
people, conversations, and content in a single
location. With Groups, conversations are
available to every team member in the Group
feed so that other team members have the
latest information and updates. Groups
can be set up around anything—an office
location or subsidiary, a department such as
Marketing or Operations, a cross-functional
project team, or simply an idea—to enable
open conversations and collaboration,
no matter where people work or what
department they belong to.
For instance, meet Jane. She leads a large
cross-functional team that is responsible
for launching a new product line at a
leading clothing company. Jane travels
frequently for work, manages several projects
simultaneously, and has team members
located in Paris and New York as well as her
home base of Los Angeles. She doesn’t have
time to communicate directly with each team
member on every issue or to monitor all of
the day-to-day developments on her projects.
Instead, Jane creates a Group in Yammer
that aligns all of the members of her global
team, and brings together all relevant people,
conversations, and content in a shared, unified
workspace. Her team members share progress
on their work and engage in discussions about
key updates and project roadblocks in the
Group, which helps Jane and everyone else
stay up to speed. Groups are open by default
to enhance discoverability and sharing, but
they can be made private as necessary to
ensure that you have the privacy and access
control you need.
In addition to Groups, Document
Conversations also can help teams
accelerate collaboration. Designed to
help companies engage and tap into their
entire network, Document Conversations
enable team members to work together in
real time on a Microsoft PowerPoint deck,
Word document, or Excel spreadsheet, no
matter which application they are in. At the
same time, they can interact and discuss
a file through side-by-side Yammer feeds.
This way, individual team members can
make updates, easily get their colleagues’
feedback in context, and take steps to make
faster progress.
Even when your employees are on the go,
they can still collaborate and stay productive
using the Yammer mobile app, which enables
team members to keep up with important
conversations and to access content,
even when they’re not in the office. And
because the Yammer mobile app is available
on Windows, iOS, and Android devices,
employees can be productive using the
device of their choice.
Collaborate outside your business
Along with helping your employees
collaborate better internally, Microsoft
Enterprise Social solutions can help them
work more effectively with external partners,
suppliers, and even customers. According
to a Yammer study, companies that use
Microsoft Enterprise Social technologies
experience a 20 percent improvement in
supplier and partner satisfaction.6
When working with partners and suppliers,
teams typically exchange numerous
emails and phone calls, making it easy for
important messages and attachments to
get buried or lost in a team member’s email
inbox or voicemail. With Yammer external
networks, teams can create a dedicated
online workspace for collaborating with
people outside of their organization,
allowing the teams to quickly get feedback
from partners, suppliers, and customers in

7
real time. With a single workspace in which
to easily communicate and collaborate with
people outside of your company, teams are
better equipped to quickly respond and
adapt to change.
Yet no external collaboration project would
be complete without the exchange of files
and source materials. When working with
a research firm or creative agency, for
example, project teams typically need to
share reference materials to help onboard
their vendors. Meanwhile, vendors need
an easy way to share drafts and works
in progress, many of which can be large
files. OneDrive for Business enables team
members to share online files securely with
other people—both inside and outside their
organization. They can also easily manage
access and editing permissions to help
protect shared information.
Along with Yammer external networks, teams
can use Lync to shorten the feedback loop
from partners and suppliers. With Lync, team
members can call, use instant messaging, or
set up a video conference in one click to meet
with external collaborators and discuss the
latest updates, without incurring the travel
costs of meeting in person.
Improve access to knowledge
With the collaboration and communication
tools available in Microsoft Enterprise Social
solutions, teams and individuals are primed
to make smarter and faster decisions as a
result of this improved access to knowledge.
It’s easier than ever to stay plugged in to
projects and discussions that are taking place
throughout their company. According to a
study by McKinsey, 71 percent of business
leaders report that enterprise social tools
increase the speed of access to knowledge.7
Yammer enables employees to follow
people, conversations, and content all across
the organization. This helps them build
relationships with subject matter experts in
other groups or departments, participate
in or keep abreast of discussions that are
relevant to their work, and build on the work
of others to improve or advance their own.
And because Yammer conversations are open
by default, employees are able to see and
act on information that would otherwise be
hidden in information silos.
Delve also comes in to play here, enabling
better collaboration and knowledge with its
enhanced search and discovery tool that
helps you find relevant information across
your Office 365 applications. Let’s return to
Jane: she is working with her cross-functional
team on the budget proposal for a new
product launch. Throughout the project,
conversations and file signals feed into Office
Graph, which then delivers fresh insights to
Jane in Delve. This helps her discover what
the project team is working on and ensure
that they are on track with the proposal. At
the same time, Delve shows Jane relevant
information from across the company, so
she notices a conversation in the Finance
team about a new requirement for budget
proposals. She quickly shares the new
information with the product launch group,
so that the rest of her team can incorporate
it into the proposal.
According to a study by
McKinsey, 71% of business
leaders report that
enterprise social tools
increase the speed of
access to knowledge.

Customer success:
Esquel Group weaves in social
to improve productivity
Esquel Group is a major textile manufacturer with over
59,000 employees in nine countries. Producing more than
100 million shirts every year—about seven or eight shirts
per second—for clients such as Ralph Lauren, Tommy
Hilfiger and Nike, Esquel Group needed a technology
solution that would help it manage its complex and
fast-paced business.
“We’re trying to encourage a collaboration of people across our supply chain, so
that they don’t work in silos,” says Wilkie Wong, chief financial officer, Hong Kong and
Overseas, for Esquel Group. “By working like a network, you sort of break that silo.”
Yammer and Office 365 give Esquel Group the tools it needs to enhance productivity
and collaboration, enabling the company to communicate more effectively, capture
knowledge and make it accessible to prevent it from being lost, and engage
employees across its global organization.
“It’s actually helping us a lot, because we truly believe that a lot of the great ideas are
coming from the bottom up,” says Edgar Tung, managing director of Group Human
Resources for Esquel Group.
“We’re trying to encourage
a collaboration of people
across our supply chain, so
that they don’t work in silos.
By working like a network,
you sort of break that silo.”
—Wilkie Wong, CFO
Hong Kong and Overseas,
Esquel Group.

9
Grow your business
Salespeople already know which sales technique doesn’t
work today: cold calling. Calling on prospects without
knowing exactly what they need is far too likely to fail. Most
customers have identified their needs and are actively
seeking the best product or solution before ever engaging
with vendors. To gather information, they are researching
vendor websites, questioning peers, and initiating and
following conversations on social media. Technology has
turned the sales process upside down.
In addition to improving employee engagement and fostering internal and external
collaboration, Microsoft enables companies to modernize their sales strategies to
match this new reality and transform the way they sell. Microsoft Enterprise Social
solutions give sales teams the ability to zero in on targets ahead of the competition,
win faster by working as a team to create compelling and differentiated customer
interactions, and ultimately sell more products and services.
Zero in on what matters most
Salespeople today face multiple challenges, one of which is that customers do not
want to be sold anything. If they are already making up their minds about your
company before you’re in contact with them, and progressing through their
decision-making process ahead of you, then you can’t jump into the sales process at
the beginning. You have to be able to quickly assess where they are in the process and
meet them there. You need a system that allows you to get up to speed immediately,
and quickly develop the insights required for you to engage in a relevant way.
If your customers are using social networks to learn about you and your products,
shouldn’t you use them to gain insights about your customers? You may learn that a
prospect is dissatisfied with a competitor’s product, or you may find out that they’re
dissatisfied with yours. You may even discover that your customer has recommended
your services to a contact, so you can get a new lead. Your sales team can now have
real-time insight into the social activity of your contacts and accounts, and they can
engage with customers on LinkedIn and Twitter as well as with their team members
on Yammer—without ever leaving Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

10
As part of the Microsoft Enterprise Social
solutions, Microsoft Dynamics CRM provides
a holistic 360-degree view of your customers
that lets your salespeople get to know the
person behind the contact card. This includes
profile information and important relationships
as well as account, lead, and contact updates
from more than 30,000 business and social
sources delivered directly to your system.
Having this information gives your salespeople
valuable insights that make it easier for them
to engage with customers, build relationships,
personalize every customer interaction, and
earn customers’ trust. CSO Insights reports
that companies experience 8 percent higher
win rates when sales reps are provided both
internal and external data.8
With social network data from LinkedIn and
Twitter integrated right into the Microsoft
Dynamics CRM system, social insight becomes
a natural part of the sales process. Microsoft
Dynamics CRM delivers the latest market buzz
and news along with corporate data, so that
you are always up to date on your customer’s
activities. Getting this information in real time
can make the difference between being ahead
of or behind your competition. According
to Aberdeen Research, social sellers are 51
percent more likely to reach their quotas than
non-social sellers.9
In addition, Microsoft Social Listening lets
you measure sentiment and analyze and
act on market intelligence derived from
social conversations across many channels,
which can help salespeople gain early insight
into issues that customers are facing, and
connect with the most influential voices in
the community. It also provides social buying
signals. When people send a signal that
they’re looking for something, are dissatisfied
with their current solution, or need more
information on a topic, that’s an opportunity
for a seller to engage.
Win sales faster
Replace cold calls with warm introductions
by having your salespeople use an enterprise
social solution to review the business and
social data delivered there to see how they
are connected to their prospects. They can
use that information to either reach out for
a referral, which will make a response more
likely, or engage the customer directly in a
more meaningful way.
Ideally salespeople would have easy-to-use
tools that provide content relevant to where
they are in the sales cycle. A well-defined
process can help. Process flows drive best
practices and consistency across the
organization, while allowing salespeople
to remain agile and to deliver a great
customer experience.
However, traditional customer relations
management (CRM) business processes,
such as opportunity management, often
used workflows that were cumbersome
and difficult to understand. Therefore, they
required a lot of user training and were often
not widely adopted.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM provides
intuitive, visual process guidance, using
an outcome-driven user interface to help
ensure rapid, widespread adoption by sales
professionals. Because the solution tells you
what to do next, the ramp-up time is fast
and training costs are low.
Additionally, Microsoft Dynamics CRM includes
business process templates with industry-specific
best practices. These process flows
can then be customized, or new processes
can be created using a simple point-and-click
process. This allows sales organizations to be
agile and responsive. If a trend is identified
and the organization wants to react quickly,
the business process can be changed almost

11
instantly to reflect the newly desired steps or
outcomes. Capabilities like this are what enable
an organization to take an entire sales team
and make every member an all-star player.
Sell more by going social
In this new world of sales, salespeople
can no longer live in a silo. The ability to
work together in a much more open and
collaborative way is key to driving more
sales and achieving greater success. Sales
organizations need the right collaboration
and communication tools to stay connected
with the rest of the business, especially
marketing, operations, and services
teams. These tools must be mobile and
must provide seamless social experiences.
Microsoft has integrated essential
capabilities into Microsoft Dynamics
CRM, including Lync, Skype, Yammer, and
SharePoint, to enable sales professionals to
easily work with team members from within
one CRM environment.
Lync and Skype provide a powerful and simple
way to interact with colleagues, partners, and
contacts. Salespeople can quickly find subject
matter experts or decision makers and bring
them into meetings to answer questions and
get deals closed. Users see presence icons
within Microsoft Dynamics CRM and can
initiate an interaction in a single click.
Team members can also use Yammer to stay
connected from within Microsoft Dynamics
CRM. Yammer enables salespeople to
tap into the organizational knowledge
of the entire company from any location.
Conversations can occur within contact,
account, lead, or opportunity records, giving
you the ability to get the information you
need from the right people at the right time.
This makes it easy to find the people and
resources you need to make decisions, get
work done, and keep moving. It allows you to
tap into the combined social intellect of your
company to get answers fast.
Managing documents and information
is a big part of selling, so rather than
forcing teams to use a different document
management solution, Microsoft SharePoint
also works directly within Microsoft Dynamics
CRM, ensuring that any team member
working on a sales document, such as a
presentation, proposal, or RFP, will be able
to use the powerful co-authoring and version
control capabilities.

Are you ready
to work like a network?
At Microsoft, we believe that enterprise social technologies have
the power to transform the way companies do business and to
deliver real value by making it easy for employees to connect, share
information rapidly, and discover what they need to accomplish.
Put simply, our vision for Microsoft Enterprise Social is to empower companies to work like a
network by delivering seamless social experiences across the familiar applications that people
already use. Are you ready to work like a network?
Learn more about how Microsoft can help your company work like a network at
www.enterprisesocial.com.

13
Sources
1 The State of the Global Workplace: Employee Engagement Insights for Business Leaders
Worldwide, Gallup, 2013
2 Yammer, 2013:
https://about.yammer.com/yammer-blog/yammers-2013-business-value-survey-results-are-in/
3 Yammer, 2013:
4 Inside Communication, 2012
5 Yammer, 2013:
6 Yammer Business Trends Customer Survey, 2013
7 McKinsey & Company, 2013
8 CSO Insights
9 Aberdeen Research

The information contained in this document represents the current view of Microsoft Corporation on the issues discussed as of the date of publication. Because Microsoft must respond to changing market conditions, it should not be interpreted to be a commitment on the part of Microsoft, and Microsoft cannot guarantee the accuracy of any information presented after the date of publication.
This white paper is for informational purposes only. Microsoft makes no warranties, express or implied, in this document.
Complying with all applicable copyright laws is the responsibility of the user. Without limiting the rights under copyright, no part of this document may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), or for any purpose, without the express written permission of Microsoft Corporation.
Microsoft may have patents, patent applications, trademarks, copyrights, or other intellectual property rights covering subject matter in this document. Except as expressly provided in any written license agreement from Microsoft, the furnishing of this document does not give you any license to these patents, trademarks, copyrights, or other intellectual property.
© 2014 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

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