Yammer
Yammer came to market as a business version of a microblogging environment, like Twitter, but has layered on features for group discussions, file management, and application integration.
Yammer is a widely used social collaboration platform because a basic version of the product is available for free. Yammer's freemium model allows it to take advantage of the viral growth patterns associated with consumer applications, meaning that employees who find it useful can easily invite their coworkers into the network without worrying about licensing fees or administrative overhead. Anyone with a verified email address associated with the company domain can join this social workgroup.
CIOs of large organizations often find out after the fact that thousands of employees have joined a Yammer network and are actively collaborating there. They then must choose whether to endorse Yammer as an official collaboration system and become paying customers to get administrative control over it, tolerate Yammer as an unofficial resource (but set guidelines for its use), or try to shut it down.
Paying customers get greater administrative control, including the ability to include accounts from more than one company email domain and synchronization with Active Directory, ensuring that the accounts of former employees are automatically deactivated along with their corporate profiles.
Of those organizations that have decided to embrace Yammer, some like the Supervalue grocery chain have capitalized on its cloud delivery model to simplify delivery of the application across sprawling organizations.
Recommended Reading
10 Questions Before Choosing An Internal Social Network Platform
What Enterprise Social Success Stories Have In Common
10 Enterprise Social Networking Obstacles
5 Enterprise Social Traps To Avoid In 2012
Yammer And The Freemium Trap
Enterprise 2.0 Payoffs: Sales, Innovation, Knowledge Sharing
10 Smart Enterprise Uses For Twitter
Top 20 Add-Ons For Microsoft SharePoint
Follow David F. Carr on Twitter @davidfcarr. The BrainYard is @thebyard
