Yammer

Yammer is a Microsoft-hosted social networking service for organizations that offers collaboration spaces with groups, conversations, and data sharing that are similar to public social networking services, such as Facebook and Twitter. Recent updates enable non-Yammer users to participate in conversations, expose Yammer features in Office 365 applications, and introduce a revamped user interface (UI). The service’s roadmap includes full integration with Office 365 to consolidate identity management and provide further access to Yammer features without accessing the service. However, Yammer faces internal competition from Delve and other applications, which offer many of the same features and are more integrated.

Yammer Overview

Yammer sites and groups enable users to communicate with one another using microblogging (threaded conversations using short messages as on Twitter) and instant messaging (IM). Yammer groups can be private, requiring authenticated access to view content, or public, which means the content is viewable by Yammer users in the same e-mail domain. Users can also share files through the service. Users track communications and other activity from people and topics of interest on an automatically compiled discovery feed (newsfeed) page: they follow other users, topics, and files and receive notifications about them on the feed. External networks—Yammer sites that include selected users from other work e-mail domains—enable collaboration with business partners or customers but require those users to have a Yammer login.