We written frequently about corporate microblogging tool Yammer and today they have made the digital equivalent of the Louisiana Purchase. This is a major land-grab for the company and an example of how wide they can extend their service into a variety of other nooks and crannies of our online lives. The announcement concerns six new partners and three new features.
Let’s take the features first. The trio includes first an activity stream ticker, which publishes content in a sidebar, consolidating key activities similar to what a lot of social networking software is doing lately. It presents information for more serendipitous display, similar to the Twitter and Facebook and G+ activity streams.
The six new integration partners include:
Second is something called Yammer pages, which allow users to create a custom page that can hold longer and more persistent content, along with real-time page editing tools too. Pages can be shared with groups or individuals, and can be published to a group for better coordination.
- Badgeville: The social loyalty and smart gamification platform notifies colleagues when a badge has been unlocked.
- Box: The content sharing platform publishes stories notifying coworkers about recent file uploads from the cloud-based content sharing platform.
- Expensify: The company behind “expense reports that don’t suck” allows employees to see when an expense report has been uploaded and later approved.
- Spigit:The crowd innovation company publishes new ideas, votes, evaluations and comments, as well as idea graduations.
- TripIt: The online travel itinerary and trip planning service provides stories when a coworker plans a trip or is scheduled to return.
- Zendesk:The help desk software publishes ticket updates enabling coworkers to follow the life cycle of a support request.
Third is Yammer Files, which leverages their service to share files and comment on them across your social graph. Information about file uploads and changes are part of your activity stream and other conversations.
Look at these features. Yammer now competes with a broad swatch of players and is so much more than an internal Twitter for enterprises. It goes against the file sharing services such as Dropbox and Box, against what G+ and Facebook are trying to do for public services, real-time document editing such as Google Docs and strengthens its mix against the established players such as Socialtext, Basecamp and Jive that have formed the traditional (if one could use such a word for such a young market) social media intranets. They started with the Twitter UI and have incorporated the best features from Facebook, G+ and these other services to make themselves into a collaboration tools powerhouse.
If you haven’t looked at Yammer in a while, now is the time to check them out. You can sign up for a free account for your business domain here, and there are additional fee-based plans for more advanced features and larger user populations.
