Enterprise Social Technologies and Prospects

The Yammer cloud service is Microsoft’s preferred enterprise social networking technology. However, SharePoint and Dynamics CRM both include built-in social networking features, and Microsoft will probably support those features at least for the lifetimes of the current versions of the applications. The built-in features are the only social networking options from Microsoft for on-premises software customers, and each currently offers better integration with its respective application than Yammer does. Microsoft intends to improve Yammer integration with both SharePoint and Dynamics CRM.

The Lync 2010 client application for Windows offered an Activity Feed feature that provided a newsfeed and activity tracking based on Lync user presence information. The feature was removed in Lync 2013.

Product	Social Capability	Prospects	Basis for Prospects
Yammer	Cloud service for enterprise social networking.	Continued enhancement.	Microsoft recommends Yammer