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Author: Jim Lundy
Topic: Social Software
Issues: How will Social Software technologies evolve?
Who are the Social Software providers and how will they navigate a crowded market?
Summary: On November 9th, Yammer announced new Wiki and Content support for its flagship enterprise social networking platform and Ticker, which incorporates activity feeds from a variety of partners, including Salesforce.com and Microsoft.
Event: At a customer and partner event in San Francisco, Yammer announced a new Wiki (Pages) and improved integration of content into its Yammer Enterprise Social Network platform. It also announced that 9 partners will be able to integrate their respective activity feeds with Yammer.
Analysis: By continually enhancing the feature set of its core Enterprise Social Networking (ESN) platform, Yammer is demonstrating that it is ready to tackle the enterprise. Yammer’s new activity feed integration product, Ticker, is a repeatable approach to activity feed integration that allows enterprises to select the feeds they need to be part of their ESN. This sets a new benchmark for Activity Feed integration in ESNs that others will need to match.
With Ticker, Yammer is leveraging the Open Graph Protocol that Facebook uses. Because of the API approach, this gives enterprises choices on the applications they want to take feeds from. Others, such as Salesforce and even SAP offer Feed integration, but Yammer’s announcement allows for 9 partners initially (see Note 1), and we expect others to be announced in the future.
Yammer’s introduction of Pages (a full Wiki, with solid usability) and support for Content means that it is now positioned to compete with other providers to become the Enterprise Social Networking Platform of choice in an enterprise.
On the Content front, along with the ability to preview and mark-up documents uploaded to Yammer, files are also indexed for easy access via Search. Aragon Research feels that content sharing and retrieval is the secret sauce for increasing usage of Social Networks in enterprises.
With this kind of capability that Enterprise Social Networking (ESN) Platforms are now begging to offer, intranets are going to be start to be retired and replaced by ESN platforms offered by Cisco, IBM, Jive, Microsoft, Saba, Salesforce.com, Successfactors, Telligent, Yammer and others.
The combination of activity feed integration with a full ESN will put pressure on many application software providers who don’t have the resources to offer a full ESN. Additionally, the shift to more of a full-featured ESN is what is needed to enable the real sharing of knowledge.
Aragon Advisory: Enterprises need to begin looking at Enterprise Social Networking more strategically, including evaluating providers that offer a full social platform, not just piece parts.
Enterprises should evaluate Yammer’s new capabilities and its ESN platform, particularly the new open approach to activity feed integration.
Note 1: The Ticker Activity Feed Partners.
Yammer announced activity feed integration with the following providers: Badgeville, Box, Expensify, NetSuite, Saleforce.com, SharePoint, Spigit, TripIt and Zendesk.