Yammer is more than just a place to communicate with colleagues, share content and work in teams; it’s also the social layer that connects all of your existing line of business apps. It’s our goal to create a platform that enables a uniform social experience across the applications people use every day at work. Yammer connects people to one another and to the information they need to get work done – whether this content is a document [note] created inside Yammer, or something shared from an external business app.

While we continue to create deeper connected experiences across Microsoft products, we are also committed to expanding our partner ecosystem to include all enterprise apps.  In fact, we’ve doubled the number of partner integrations to 60 since we launched the Yammer App Directory in October 2012. We’re excited to highlight some of our newest integration partners, including Klout, which we are introducing today.

Klout’s integration with Yammer is twofold. First, as a Yammer user, you can publish your public Klout score and expertise directly on your Yammer profile. If you’re someone who has a lot of influence in the public social-sphere, this is a cool way to showcase your Klout score in the workplace. The second aspect of integration allows Yammer admins to turn on a deeper integration with Klout to produce Yammer-specific Klout scores for employees based on their activity within their company’s Yammer network. This is a great opportunity for organizations to identify top contributors and subject matter experts based on their Yammer participation. Check out Klout’s blog post to learn more.

In the past few months, Yammer has also added integrations with 7Geese, a social performance management tool, and Scoop.it, a content curation platform. From the business intelligence side, Yammer partner GoodData introduced a new and improved integration in conjunction with sentiment analysis provider Kanjoya. The updated integration combines operational reporting and sentiment analysis in the same dashboard, providing full context on the structured and unstructured data from your Yammer networks. Analytics is top of mind for companies looking to measure the ROI of their technology investments, and this integration offers a unique way to measure the impact of Yammer conversations.

Just as the volume of Yammer partners has increased, so has the adoption of and activity on these apps. The frequency of transactions between Yammer and partner apps, measured through API requests, has increased significantly. Compared to year-to-date numbers last year, API requests have increased 180 percent and are on pace to grow 300 percent by the end of the calendar year.

Given the power and flexibility of Yammer’s open APIs, it’s no surprise that partners continue to reap the benefits of their integrations with Yammer. Mindflash, the online training platform who partnered with us last summer, has seen a significant jump in free trials since joining the Yammer App Directory. Mindflash is benefitting from the exposure their app gets on Yammer as they can target companies who are embracing technology within their organizations — in fact, Yammer is one of their top sources of trials.

We’re even broadening our partner ecosystem to include SharePoint partners. For example, SharePoint partners Axceler and Nintex have already developed integrations for Yammer, and we expect this trend to continue moving forward. The established SharePoint Partner ecosystem of over two thousand partners is embracing the app model, which is reflected within the SharePoint Store.

Coming this November, Yammer is launching a Developer’s Certification program, which will feature self-paced training, community groups, webinars, and a certification exam that develops the advanced skills necessary to be called a Yammer Certified Developer. It’s the latest addition to the certifications offered by Yammer Education Services. Needless to say, it’s an exciting time to partner with Yammer. There are more than 12,000 developers using our open APIs to create deeply social experiences for business users to make companies more open, connected and productive. We’re looking forward to watching this ecosystem grow even more. Check out the Yammer App Directory to take advantage of these new integrations or learn how to build your own.

Rashida Powell is an internal communications leader at Cbeyond. Her role includes effective creation, delivery, reporting and measurement of internal communications. She is passionate about helping companies reach their business goals through the use of strategic communications and about the contributions that digital tools make in this endeavor. You can find Rashida on her own blog, or on LinkedIn.

Cbeyond needed a way to celebrate our 1-year Yammer anniversary, train employees on how to use the tool, and increase engagement and participation. That is how “31 Days of Yammer” was born. Our “31 Days” campaign included daily tips; weekly contests; in-person, hands-on training; giveaways; and participation of our senior leaders. In the end, we were able to celebrate our Yammer milestone while teaching employees how to use Yammer to get work done – and we did it in a fun, engaging way! Mission accomplished. Read more about Cbeyond’s 31 days of Yammer campaign here.

Zühlke Group – an independent service provider for software and product engineering, management consulting, and start-up financing, headquartered in Switzerland – is using Yammer for knowledge management and uniting a geographically dispersed workforce.

Highlights:

• Enhanced communication: Employees connect across teams, departments, and geographic regions – even when working remotely on mobile devices.
• Stronger engagement: Better connections means deeper business insight for everyone, from the front-line sales team to top executives.
• Efficient workflow: Employees save time by collaborating in public and private Yammer Groups to pool ideas and resources.
• Streamlined information sharing: Employees post queries on Yammer and get answers in minutes.
• Transformed customer relations: Yammer’s External Networks will allow the company to collaborate with clients, cementing ties and dramatically improving service.

Wolfgang Emmerich, CEO and Chairman at Zuhlke Engineering states, “One of the most valuable benefits is the sense of community the network offers. Employees can collaborate and share ideas, no matter where they are in the world.” And Jörg Dirbach, Chief Knowledge Officer at Zühlke Group sums it up, “Yammer has become such an integral part of our infrastructure, we can’t live without it.”

Read more:

Merlin Information Systems – an IT services provider in the UK with locations all over the world – uses its Yammer network to improve the customer experience and reduce costs through greater efficiency.

Highlights:

• The network lets employees connect and collaborate across long distances and in many time zones
• It enables efficiencies ranging from reduced email to faster problem-solving
• Yammer is enabling Merlin to move to the next frontier: using a social network as a channel for improving customer service

CEO Richard Patterson uses Yammer extensively, “Yammer is a powerful medium for communicating the culture and values of our business.” He continues, “Using the power of social networking to connect people improves the way we work internally and support customers. Yammer gives us the opportunity to reinvent ourselves as a business.”

Read more:

This post was brought to you by Zao, one of the newest partners on the Yammer Platform. Learn more about Zao here.

We’re really excited to announce a comprehensive integration between Yammer’s corporate social networking platform and Zao’s powerful employee referral automation and social recruiting tool. The combination of Zao and Yammer brings to the market an unprecedented referral-hiring tool.

Starting today, companies can engage their employees and extended business network in ways never before possible. This integration allows Yammer members to easily launch their employee referral programs on Zao and engage all their employees as well as their extended business network with referrals. Employees are automatically recognized for their effort, increasing engagement and participation in referral programs.

Here are some of the benefits you get from Zao:

* A fully automated employee referral program

Engage your employees like never before with a complete referral platform that makes sharing jobs and finding relevant matches as easy as clicking a button.

* A free, fully branded social career site

It takes less than 5 minutes to set up a fully branded career site, including custom backgrounds, banners and videos to showcase your employer brand.

* A complete mobile applicant and referral experience

Engage your employees wherever they are, and allow them to refer applicants, no matter what device they’re on!

* Applicant tracking and workflow

Do you have an ATS? We’ll integrate with it! Don’t have one? Zao has a built in, free applicant tracking system.

* Automatic social job sharing

Never forget to share a job again with automatic job sharing on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

* Comprehensive dashboard

You can’t improve if you don’t know what’s going on. Zao shows you exactly how much interest and traffic your jobs and social career site are generating

Zao’s integration with Yammer includes extremely important and exclusive features:

* Share key achievements and activities with employees on Yammer

Recognizing employees for referrals often goes unnoticed or forgotten when it requires you to manually thank them. Now Zao referral program achievements are automatically added to the Yammer activity feed. This means that when an employee makes a qualified referral or refers a friend that gets interview or hired, these achievements can be shared with the team on Yammer, giving thanks, bragging rights and rewards for helping the company hire. This is a great tool for increasing engagement throughout your entire company.

* Share open jobs and invite employees through Yammer

Easily share jobs with individuals, groups or everyone in the company, helping employees focus on the jobs that are the most important to you.

* Single sign on with your Yammer account

With Yammer, there’s no need to remember Zao usernames and passwords – one click and you’re in! Every employee on Yammer can easily become an active part of the company’s referral program.

Giving back to the community is one of Yammer’s key priorities so the office in London’s Tech City was home to a collection for Shelter, the housing and homeless charity in the UK. Imagine: Every 15 minutes a British family becomes homeless or needs support so this charity is doing crucial work for society.

Shelter is a charity in the UK that helps people in housing need by providing advice and practical assistance, and fights for better investment in housing and for laws and policies to improve the lives of homeless and badly housed people. The collected goods are sold in Shelter’s shops to ensure the charity has the funds to support their important work. Especially the cuts to legal aid in England and the ongoing recession have meant that Shelter is struggling to secure sufficient funds, so it was even more important for us to provide a little bit of help.

After two weeks of clearing out wardrobes, attics and garages the team collected loads of clothes and shoes, accessories, household goods, books, toys in our red ’Wendy House’ in the reception area.

Sarah Evans of Shelter said: “We would like to thank Yammer for their generous donations. Every collection like this makes a difference to those families in need.”

Georg Maikler, James Ashmead, Katy Cooney, Emma Stephen, Steph Thommen, Lorraine Martyn and Marlyn Maikler were only some of the generous donours [photo from left to right]

It’s no secret that social has revolutionized the way we communicate in our personal lives. Today, more and more companies around the world are bringing social to their businesses to transform the way they get work done.

With an Enterprise Social Network, companies are able to break down geographical and organizational barriers, open up communication channels and access to information, and bring people together to collaborate. The result is the ability to align and adapt quickly in the face of rapid change.

At Yammer, we’ve helped thousands of companies – including 85% of the Fortune 500 – successfully transform the way they work with social. Having worked with so many different companies, we’ve come to realize that “working social” is more than just a newsfeed. It’s a journey that fundamentally changes how people work together.

So where does the social journey begin? This is often the hardest part of figuring out how to bring social to the enterprise. Fortunately, we’ve created a step-by-step guide to walk you through what we’ve identified as the five key phases of a successful social transformation.

Filled with expert insights and examples from real customers, we designed the Journey to Working Social ebook to help you and your company learn how to drive business value with enterprise social. So what are you waiting for? Start your journey to working social today and check out the ebook.

You’ve just joined Yammer. Awesome! Now you’re probably wondering, “So what do I do next?” Below are a few suggestions for what to do after signing into Yammer for the first time:

1. Join groups. First join your group for your department. If one doesn’t exist, create one! Next, browse your department group’s related groups. You should also search for your hobbies. It’s a great way to connect with fellow employees. I’ve joined the Marketing Team group as well as a group for foodies. By joining groups, you see conversations that are relevant to your job and topics you are interested in. You can also post questions and updates to specific groups to ensure your messages are reaching the relevant audience.

 
2. Introduce yourself on the All Company feed. The best introductions offer a mix of personal and professional information. Say who you are, what you’ll be working on and a hobby or two. Keep it to a maximum of three sentences. For example, I would say, “Hi everyone! My name is Jeanette and I’ll be working on the Marketing team as the Marketing Coordinator. Living in San Francisco, I’m a bit of a foodie. I also really love travel and try to visit new places during my vacation days.” By saying hello in the All Company feed, you’re putting yourself out there to connect with more people. Be sure to share your introductory post with your department group as well!

3. Update your profile. Add your title, where you’ll be working from and expertise that relates to your new role. In the bio section, discuss your role at Yammer as well as a few personal interests. This makes it easier for people to know what you’re working on as well as connect with you on a more personal level. You should also add in specialties that maybe aren’t directly related to your current role, but could be useful to others. You never know when someone might need your expert advice! Read our how-to post for more pro tips on creating a great profile.

4. Follow your teammates. Identify team members and colleagues from across the company who you work with, and ‘follow’ them to see the conversations they are participating in. This way, you’ll be “in the know” on what they are working on and potentially be able to join in. I follow my manager and most of my teammates as it’s my job to have an overall picture of what’s happening in our department at all times.

You’re now well on your way to enjoying Yammer and using it effectively to get work done. Share your first update about what you’re working on today. You never know who might see it and be able to add value to your job.

In previous posts, Pavan Tapadia  and Peter Fishman explained how Yammer uses data and experimentation to guide our product development in order to ensure that what we’re building for our customers will give them maximum value. Put together, these posts illustrate that Yammer is pioneering the new relationship between enterprise software customers and vendors.

In a world of boxed software or on-premises software services, updates were infrequent and aggregate data analysis was difficult or impossible. This shaped the relationships between customers and vendors. I remember being in charge of major enterprise software purchasing decisions as a customer: I’d assess my team’s needs, build a hypothesis about what software features would meet my needs, and go looking to find the software package that had those features. It would sometimes be a year before an on-premises solution was installed, configured and rolled out. Only then could I check my original hypothesis. Also, the software vendor would have no ability to measure the usage of the software package at my company; it would be on me to follow up with my users and survey their usage. Because the investment in evaluation, purchasing, installation and configuration was so high, I’d pick the software with maximum complexity, configurability and breadth of features as a hedge against being wrong about my needs, or against my needs changing over time.

Today, we live in world of freemium software as a service: cloud-based, multi-tenant and with no rollout process. Yammer, for example, is available to any employee at your company to use within minutes, whether or not your company has ever used Yammer and without your IT department needing to do anything. The advantages of the cloud allow us to create a much more valuable customer-vendor relationship.

First, it’s no longer up to a single person or small group to reason about the needs of a huge employee base and find the software that matches those needs. With enterprise software tools available to users to try out for free, customers can take the guesswork out of finding the tools that will be used by employees. I certainly won’t miss sitting through lengthy sales pitches from vendors to try to figure out whether their software is what my company is looking for.

Second, cloud-based, multi-tenant software is available on demand. Software customers can save themselves what used to be a very time-consuming and often expensive installation, setup and rollout process. Upgrades happen automatically in this world. Customers aren’t on the hook to figure out a way to get a new patch deployed if a security issue or bug is discovered. Yammer often rolls out bug fixes within hours of identifying them — and we’re working to shorten this to minutes.

Third, and most importantly, the advantages of cloud architecture — especially around usage data analysis — enable the software vendor to shoulder the burden of keeping up with the evolving needs of the users. A modern relationship with a software vendor should be evaluated based on the ability of that vendor to deliver value over time. Historically, we evaluated vendors by looking backward at what they’d built. Now we can look forward at their ability to execute, learn and adapt.

Many enterprise software vendors have not yet embraced this new reality and are still stuck in the ways of historical software development. They organize as if they’re building something they’ll put in a box or that you’ll download and run on your servers. As Pavan and Fish both pointed out, the key to Yammer’s modern way of building software — and the way we believe all of your enterprise software will be built in 10 years — is to rapidly iterate. The value of an enterprise software vendor provides is not what they’ve built, but in how much of the right thing they can build over the life of your relationship with them as a customer.

In Yammer Engineering, we’ve embraced the idea that our core value comes from our ability to be fast and adapt to changing business needs. We take this so seriously that we’ve organized around it. We’ve eschewed traditional waterfall software development approaches that may have been appropriate for boxed or on-premises software. We’ve even gone beyond the limitations of established Agile practices to build adaptability and speed into our reporting structures and job responsibilities.

Yammer Engineering has found that hierarchies limit both speed and adaptability. Instead of building areas of product ownership into our reporting structures, we’ve organized around having pools of engineers available to work on the area of the product that will return maximum value to our users. Our product team is unconstrained by the org chart when they choose to build cross-cutting features. Small, cross-functional teams are assembled to deliver incremental value quickly, then disband and reform with new goals. This allows us to leverage the real power of cloud-hosted software as a service. Yammer has always been a cloud offering, and we’ve built its assumptions and advantages deep into our foundation as an engineering team.

Yammer Engineering’s organizational methodology is unique and could be a valuable example for anyone looking to build speed and adaptability into their organizations, whether in software development or any other business function. If you’d like to learn more about it and its specifics, please check out the links below:

http://eng.yammer.com/how-we-work-in-engineering/
http://enterpriseissexy.com/2013/04/10/engineerings-new-sexy/
http://blog.7geese.com/2012/12/05/learn-from-yammer-and-become-an-adaptive-tech-company/
https://medium.com/product-man/fcfde2bfd0a4

To learn more about Yammer’s development approach, visit http://about.yammer.com/product-development/

Yammer is a great tool for finding and connecting with experts across your company that you may not know or do not work with frequently. Post a question on Yammer and you’ll likely receive answers from people you did not expect. At every company, people have skills and expertise that go beyond their job descriptions, and Yammer helps people make connections based on what people know, not their job title. Your profile photo and summary are essential for helping solidify those serendipitous connections that are formed on Yammer.

Complete your Profile. Your career will thank you.

Matching faces with names and names with faces is no easy task. Yammer is a great cheat sheet.

Take the average company all-hands meeting. Someone stands up and asks a good question. You love that guy for asking the question. But you have to whisper to the person sitting next to you, “who is that?” The response is a shrug and “I think he works in operations.”

Reimagine that conversation on Yammer. The experience unfolds quite differently. Someone you don’t know posts a question. You still feel love for that guy, only now you can immediately see who he is, what team he is on and what office he works in. Checking his profile helps you to uncover this information. So, you ‘like’ his message. You make a connection. You now know more about the people you work with, which makes working together better.

What to Say About Yourself

If you’re stumped on what to include in your profile summary, think about what you would want to know about your colleagues. Here are a few ideas on how you can update your profile:

1. Go to your profile page and click the Edit Profile button in the top right corner.
2. First, complete your bio. People struggle with striking the right balance between personal and professional information. Pro tip: Say in your bio what you would say when introducing yourself to a new team member.
3. Add information such as your department, location, expertise and education. Pro Tip: Add why they should care.
4. You can also add your manager and direct reports to your org chart, so colleagues viewing your profile gain an understanding of the team you work on.

What Profile Photo to Use

Adding a profile picture is just as important as completing your profile information. Profile photos help bridge the gap between online and offline experiences. You may become acquainted with someone on Yammer and then connect with them offline in the cafeteria. When everyone has a profile photo, it makes it easier to recognize in person the people you’re collaborating with online.

While editing your account, you can upload a profile photo that is saved on your computer – no need to rely on IT to take your photo (insert cringe-inducing employee badge photos here). Here are a few tips for selecting your profile photo:

• Smile. Look at the camera.
• The picture should be professional.
• Choose a current photo, not one that was taken 10 years ago… no matter how good it is!

Yammer is a platform for you to share what you know and connect with coworkers from across the company to find information you need to know to be more effective in your job. Take the first step to forming those connections by completing your profile and uploading a photo.