Microsoft/Yammer Acquisition: One-Year Later

momentum has accelerated in all areas, including new users, paid customers, user engagement, innovation, and the ecosystem of partners selling and connecting to the Yammer platform.

Below are some highlights of what Yammer has experienced since the acquisition:

· Registered users have grown by more than 55 percent to nearly 8 million.

· Paid networks increased more than 200 percent year over year.

· Yammer user activity (i.e., messages, groups and files) has approximately doubled year over year.

“During the past year, Yammer has unlocked new opportunities to share the benefits of enterprise social through Microsoft’s global sales organization and product ties with key communication, collaboration and cloud productivity offerings, such as Microsoft Office 365 and Microsoft Dynamics CRM,” said David Sacks, Yammer co-founder and corporate vice president, Microsoft Office Division. “We see nothing but continued potential in enterprise social as a cornerstone of the future of work.”

In a blog post on the Microsoft Web site today, Sacks added that the acquisition has been successful because it is true alignment with Yammer’s vision “to make enterprise social the cornerstone of workplace collaboration by weaving it into the applications people use every day.”

Sacks added in his blog post that another highlight of the acquisition has been the “continued ability to build the service through a rapid, iterative approach based on how people are actually using the product. This helps drive the kind of voluntary user adoption and affinity that is needed in the new world of consumerization.”

Partners also continue to invest in Yammer, connecting third-party applications to Yammer that add line-of-business capabilities and additional value for organizations using Yammer. The number of partners in Yammer’s App Directory has nearly doubled since its launch in October 2012, and the number of developers building on Yammer has increased more than 70 percent.

Yammer today announced integration with online influence tool Klout, which allows Yammer users to publish their public Klout scores and expertise directly on their Yammer profiles. In addition, Yammer administrators can elect to turn on a deeper integration with Klout to produce internal, Yammer-specific Klout scores for employees based on their activity within a company’s Yammer network.

Yammer also continues to deliver on its outlined strategy to provide a social layer across Microsoft Office and third-party applications. To make good on that vision, Microsoft is delivering interoperability with Office 365 with these newly released features:

· Yammer newsfeed for SharePoint Online and Office 365. Yammer now works even more deeply and seamlessly with Office 365 and SharePoint Online, allowing customers to replace the SharePoint newsfeed with Yammer.

· New Yammer application in Office Store. Available by the end of June in the Office Store, the Yammer application will allow customers to easily embed Yammer group feeds into SharePoint sites, creating a connection between groups and sites to deliver the best of Yammer and SharePoint.

In the coming months, Microsoft will release various Yammer, SharePoint and Office 365 updates to deepen connections between the services and enable greater collaboration. Although Microsoft has already talked about delivering an improved user experience and single sign-on, new planned features include advancements in search and email:

· Improved email interoperability. New capabilities will make it easier for users to follow and participate in conversations across Yammer and email.

· Expanded Yammer messaging and external communication. Expanded functionality helps meet everyday communications requirements, such as seamless external communication and enhancing real-time directed messaging.

· SharePoint search integration. Integrated search makes it easier to find information across Yammer and SharePoint quickly.