Microsoft lays out more Yammer integration plans

Upcoming integration points between Yammer and Microsoft products will include email interoperability, document collaboration and enterprise search, as Microsoft pursues its plan to make Yammer a common enterprise social collaboration layer across its business software.

The news comes on Tuesday, the one-year anniversary of Microsoft's announcement that it was acquiring Yammer for US$1.2 billion primarily to boost the enterprise social networking capabilities of its SharePoint collaboration server.

In addition to the previously announced plans to unify SharePoint and Yammer via single sign-on, Microsoft said it will deliver improved interoperability between Yammer and email.

Moreover, Microsoft will improve the way users create, edit and share documents within Yammer and Office 365, the subscription suite that in its most sophisticated editions includes online versions of Office, SharePoint, Lync and Exchange, as well as cloud-delivered versions of Office desktop applications like Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote.

Yammer will also get expanded IM (instant messaging) and communication capabilities, and integrated search capabilities with SharePoint.

Earlier this month, Microsoft delivered on the first phase of its Yammer-SharePoint integration road map, allowing Office 365 customers to replace SharePoint Online's activity stream with Yammer's.

Later this year, Microsoft plans to deliver a single sign-on for the two products and to add Yammer to the main Office 365 interface.

Before the end of this month, Microsoft will release a Yammer application for SharePoint that will be available on the Office Store and let users embed a Yammer group feed into a SharePoint site. The application will work both with SharePoint Online and with the on-premises version of the server SharePoint 2013.

There is ongoing integration work between Yammer and the Microsoft Dynamics business applications as well.

Microsoft also gave an update on Yammer's adoption and usage, saying that in the past 12 months, registered users have grown more than 55 percent to 8 million and paid Yammer networks have increased more than 200 percent.

Microsoft also announced that the number of partners participating in the Yammer App Directory has almost doubled, and now includes Klout, the Web and mobile application that measures people's online influence. The integration with Klout will let users publish their Klout scores and expertise on their Yammer profiles, while Yammer administrators will have the option to generate internal Klout scores for employees based on their Yammer network activity.

Juan Carlos Perez covers enterprise communication/collaboration suites, operating systems, browsers and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Follow Juan on Twitter at @JuanCPerezIDG.