Yammer Roadmap Update

Yammer is a Microsoft-hosted social networking service for organizations. It offers Web-based communication and sharing similar to that provided by Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter and has proven useful inside companies for many-to-many communications tasks, such as resolving support questions. The service’s near-term roadmap calls for greater integration with other Microsoft technology, particularly Office 365, which could lead it to take over some tasks from other products, such as SharePoint and Lync.

Social Networking for Business Collaboration

Yammer sites enable users to communicate with one another using microblogging (threaded conversations using short messages as on Twitter) and instant messaging (IM). Users can also share files. Users track communications and other activity from people and topics of interest on an automatically compiled newsfeed page and can follow other users, topics, and files to receive notifications about them on the newsfeed. (See the illustration “A Yammer Home Page“.) “External networks”—Yammer sites that include selected users from other e-mail domains—enable collaboration with business partners or customers.