Office 365 Goes Yammer

Microsoft has taken the first step in its integration roadmap for SharePoint and Yammer, allowing Office 365 customers to swap SharePoint Online’s activity stream with Yammer’s.

This first, modest integration point will let SharePoint Online users click on the Yammer link and launch a separate browser window where they’re asked to sign in.

Later this year, Microsoft will deepen the integration with a single sign-on and the addition of Yammer to the main Office 365 interface, which will begin to merge the two products’ user experience.

Next month, Microsoft will release a Yammer application for SharePoint that will 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.

Also in July, Microsoft will provide instructions for replacing the SharePoint 2013 newsfeed with Yammer’s.

For now, the first integration step in optional, but Microsoft is strongly suggesting that Office 365 customers make the activity stream switch to Yammer.

“Our recommendation is to use Yammer, since it’s our big bet for enterprise social, and we’re committed to making it the underlying social layer for all our products,” wrote Christophe Fiessinger, a Microsoft Office Division product marketing manager, in a blog post.

Customers should also accompany the technical change with an outreach effort to promote the benefits of using the enterprise social networking features of Yammer, according to Fiessinger.

“To drive adoption and really get the value out of Yammer, you need a strategy, advocates, and openness to the way it will transform the way people in your organization work and communicate,” he wrote.

Microsoft bought Yammer for $1.2 billion in mid-2012 in order to boost the development and availability of enterprise social collaboration features in SharePoint and in other Office and Microsoft business software like the Dynamics applications.

Microsoft makes a convincing case for the benefits of integrating Yammer with SharePoint and its other software to provide a common social collaboration layer, but the process is clearly complicated and will take years.

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IBM Goes Social

Responding to increased use of tablets within business settings, IBM will launch on Wednesday several mobile applications designed to let employees use IBM enterprise social collaboration software with iPads and other mobile devices.

The new applications, free to customers with active licenses of the IBM software, have been built specifically for tablet interfaces and have security, IT management and compliance features.

“The apps are very lightweight and talk directly back in a secure manner to the enterprise systems that people who don’t have these devices are using inside the company,” said Rob Ingram, senior manager of IBM’s Mobile Collaboration Strategy.

One of the applications lets employees use IBM Connections via iPads, while another one is for LotusLive Meeting users to participate in online meetings using iPhones or Android, BlackBerry or iPad tablets.

For IBM Sametime, another application lets employees engage in one-on-one or group instant messaging sessions on iPad and Android tablets. There is also one application for Lotus Symphony Viewer that lets users view ODF-based files, including documents, spreadsheets and presentations, on iPads, iPhones or Android devices.

There are also applications for managing telephony tasks within IBM Sametime from tablets and for Android device users to add widgets to home screens as shortcuts to their Lotus Notes mail and calendar.

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