Yammer announced today that its social enterprise products are now available in Dutch, French, German, Japanese, Korean and Spanish. The company plans to add support for a new language each week via its Translations application, which lets users participate in the translation process. There are currently 94 languages available for translation via the Translations application. According to the company’s announcement, 55% of Yammer’s traffic comes from outside of North America.
Yammer also plans to establish operations in Europe and Australia in the near future.
By comparison Salesforce.com is currently available in 16 languages, Huddle is available in eight and Jive is available in six. The open-source enterprise social networking product Elgg has plugins to support many languages, as does Drupal.
Yesterday, Salesforce.com officially announced a freemium version of its Chatter product, a move that is a direct challenge to Yammer’s business model. Moving into more localities is a logical move on Yammer’s part, but is it really that much of a differentiator?
I’m exclusively familiar with social enterprise products available in English. I know there are anglophone enterprise 2.0 vendors like XWiki from France and Yooplus from Italy, but most of these also have English versions. Are there many social enterprise products available that are not available in English?