Microsoft updates enterprise social road map, highlights momentum on Yammer acquisition anniversary

REDMOND, Wash., June 25, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Today marks one year since Microsoft Corp. announced its acquisition of Yammer, the leading provider of enterprise social networks. Since the acquisition, Microsoft's enterprise social momentum has accelerated in all areas, including new users, paid customers, user engagement, innovation, and the ecosystem of partners selling and connecting to the Yammer platform.

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Twelve-month growth highlights include the following:

• Registered users have grown over 55 percent to nearly 8 million
• Paid networks increased more than 200 percent year over year.
• Yammer user activity (i.e., messages, groups and files) has approximately doubled year over year.

"The continued boom in Yammer's growth is validation that enterprise social represents an important trend in the way people want to share, learn and connect at work, similar to how they're interacting in their personal lives," said David Sacks, Yammer co-founder and corporate vice president, Microsoft Office Division. "During the past year, Yammer has unlocked new opportunities to share the benefits of enterprise social through Microsoft's global sales organization and product ties with key communication, collaboration and cloud productivity offerings, such as Microsoft Office 365 and Microsoft Dynamics CRM. We see nothing but continued potential in enterprise social as a cornerstone of the future of work."

For more information about Sacks' perspective on the successes of the past year, see his post today on the Official Microsoft blog.

Customers and partners bet on Yammer

As more organizations embrace the benefits of enterprise social solutions, customers such as Manhattan Associates are seeing tangible return in areas like greater cross-functional collaboration and communication, improved customer response times, and increased business agility. Other customers, such as Electronic Arts, which is just getting started with Yammer, are excited for the opportunity to create more cross-functional collaboration and open communication within their organizations.

"Enterprise social has transformed how we work, breaking down organizational siloes, making us more open and collaborative, and enabling us to be more responsive to our customers," said Dawn Gartin, collaboration manager, Manhattan Associates Inc. "As both a Microsoft SharePoint and Yammer customer, we're excited about Microsoft's vision and how the products are coming together to offer one uniform social experience, which, for us, is the key to getting work done."

Partners also continue to invest in Yammer, connecting third-party applications to Yammer that add line-of-business capabilities and additional value for organizations using Yammer. The number of partners in Yammer's App Directory has nearly doubled since its launch in October 2012, and the number of developers building on Yammer has increased more than 70 percent.

Yammer today announced integration with online influence tool Klout, which allows Yammer users to publish their public Klout scores and expertise directly on their Yammer profiles. In addition, Yammer administrators can elect to turn on a deeper integration with Klout to produce internal, Yammer-specific Klout scores for employees based on their activity within a company's Yammer network.

More information on the growth of the Yammer partner ecosystem is available on today's Yammer blog post.

Advancing the enterprise social road map

During the past year, Yammer has continued to make significant product updates, including message translation capabilities, improvements to file collaboration, platform updates such as embeddable feeds and the Like and Follow buttons, and continued development on various mobile platforms.

Yammer also continues to deliver on its outlined strategy to provide a social layer across Microsoft Office and third-party applications. Microsoft believes that, in order for social to become truly mainstream in the workplace, it needs to be a part of the applications people use every day. To deliver on that vision and past roadmap announcements, Microsoft is delivering interoperability with Office 365 with these newly released features:

• Yammer newsfeed for SharePoint Online and Office 365. Yammer now works even more deeply and seamlessly with Office 365 and SharePoint Online, allowing customers to replace the SharePoint newsfeed with Yammer.
• New Yammer application in Office Store. Available by the end of June in the Office Store, the Yammer application will allow customers to easily embed Yammer group feeds into SharePoint sites, creating a connection between groups and sites to deliver the best of Yammer and SharePoint.

In the coming months, Microsoft will release a number of Yammer, SharePoint and Office 365 updates to deepen connections between the services and enable greater collaboration. Although Microsoft has already talked about delivering an improved user experience and single sign-on, new planned features include advancements in search and email:

• Improved email interoperability. New capabilities will make it easier for users to follow and participate in conversations across Yammer and email.  
• Expanded Yammer messaging and external communication. Expanded functionality helps meet everyday communications requirements, such as seamless external communication and enhancing real-time directed messaging.
• SharePoint search integration. Integrated search makes it easier to find information across Yammer and SharePoint quickly.

Microsoft will use its rapid development approach to provide ongoing enhancements to create connected experiences across Office 365 that combine social, collaboration, email, instant messaging, voice, video and line-of-business applications in innovative new ways. More details on the Office 365 and Yammer integration road map are provided in a blog post today from Jared Spataro.

About Yammer

Yammer (www.yammer.com) is a best-in-class Enterprise Social Network used by more than 200,000 organizations worldwide — including approximately 85 percent of the Fortune 500 — to foster team collaboration, empower employees, drive business agility and promote organizational connectedness. Yammer's freemium business model lets customers see the value of Yammer before upgrading to the premium offering. Founded in 2008, Yammer is now part of the Microsoft Office Division.

About Microsoft

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq "MSFT") is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.

SOURCE Microsoft Corp.