Saturday, March 15, 2014

Yammer – A Social Network for Your Business

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If you're updated on what's happening in the social media sphere, there's no doubt that you've heard about Yammer, the very corporate-friendly social media tool that Microsoft bought in June 2012 for $1.2 billion.

So what exactly does it do for your business?

Features

In the most basic sense, Yammer is a social network whose main focus is on your business. Through the platform, you can bring together people, conversations, content, and business data in a single location.

With Yammer, you can easily stay connected to co-workers and information, as well as collaborate with team members and really make an impact at work. Even better, Yammer can be accessed through a web browser or mobile device, making it all the more easier to connect and collaborate with those you work with anytime, anywhere.

How it works

In order to join Yammer, a user must have a working email address from your company's domain. You can also create an external network to allow non-employees such as suppliers and customers to get in touch with your company.

The Primary Screen

This basically has a lot in common with what Facebook looks like. All the new posts appear in your primary screen while private messages and other notifications appear on top.

Users can also create groups to separate discussions that just need to be participated by certain individuals. If a conversation needs to be shared to someone outside of the group, this can be done through instant message. Yammer also allows the sharing of posts with specific groups.

Hashtags

Just like any other social network, Yammer also incorporates hashtags into their service for easier segregation of posts. So, if you're posting about the budget for 2015, make sure to tag your post with #2015Budget so it can get filtered a lot easier.

People Directory

This creates a searchable database of everyone who’s enrolled in your Yammer. This feature makes it easier for you to find contact information of those in your company. There's even a Skills listing in case you want to find the right person for a particular task.

File Sharing

If you have a file that you want to share, you can easily upload this to a repository for everyone to access. If you just want to share it to a certain group that is possible as well. In fact, Groups have their own separate repository aside from the main one. Users are alerted whenever critical files are updated.

Pages

Other than using repositories, team members can also collaborate using Pages in a group setting. The administrator of the page is the one responsible for marking pages as official or read only.

History

Yammer was launched at the TechCrunch50 conference on September 8, 2008. David Sacks, the co-founder and former PayPal executive, developed the concept for Yammer while working on a startup project after he left PayPal in 2002.

By September 2010, the service was being used by more than three million users and 80,000 companies around the world, including 80% from Fortune 500 companies.

Microsoft acquired Yammer on June 25, 2012 for $1.2 billion. Following the acquisition, Microsoft announced that it would be integrating Yammer into the Microsoft Office division.

The Future


Seeing that Microsoft integrated Yammer into the Microsoft Office division shows that they see social networking as a major key to the future of their flagship software. That being said, Yammer has also been integrating into Office 365 (a cloud-based productivity suite) and Sharepoint (an enterprise collaboration tool) – just to name a few.

So, if you want an easier way to collaborate with co-workers and integrate existing Microsoft services, take advantage of what Yammer has to offer. There's no better way to connect all of your business applications into a single social experience.

Sunday, March 9, 2014

We are happy to announce our entrance at Blogger! Stay tuned for interesting articles about social media, web design and other web development topics.