Enterprise social network Yammer has announced integration with Microsoft Dynamics as experts laud the platform's expansion.
The integration enables updates from the CRM solution to appear as activity stories in Yammer Ticker, the solution’s API activity stream. Users who have installed the plug-in and follow important records – such as accounts, campaigns and opportunities – can see any acitivity regarding changes to these records in real-time on the stream.
Yammer has also announced new feature Universal Search, which allows users to search information in Yammer and any third-party applications, including Dynamics. Universal search works within the Cloud and behind firewall applications.
Additionally, the company announced integrations with five Cloud software providers: Perks.com, Sciforma, Senexx, UpMo, and UserVoice.
Yammer’s existing integrations include AffinityLive, Badgeville, Box, Expensify, GageIn, Kindling, Microsoft SharePoint 2010, Moreover Technologies, NetSuite, Planview, Salesforce.com, SAP, Sparqlight, Spigit, Subscribe-HR, TripIt and Zendesk.
David Sacks, CEO of Yammer, said: “By continuing to integrate with the best-in-class enterprise applications employees rely on to get work done, Yammer is delivering on its vision to be the social layer across all systems of record. With this robust partner ecosystem, we’re providing our users with the ultimate collaboration experience.”
Indicator of success
Alan Lepofsky of Constellation Research believes that the fact other businesses want to integrate with Yammer is a great indicator of the success of its platform.
"Vendors such as IBM, Microsoft, Salesforce, Jive, Atlassian and Box have large partner ecosystems and now Yammer is successfully building their ecosystem as well," he says in a post.
He adds: "One of the subtle but important things about the various Yammer integrations is that the events being posted by the other systems are being created as Open Graph objects in Yammer's activity stream. Open Graph is a protocol (most notably used by Facebook) that defines events via user, action and object. So a Microsoft Dynamics CRM event would look something like: Alan (user) updated (action) the account record for Acme Corp (object). These events are then searchable by Yammer's new Universal Search, which indexes not only content from Yammer (status updates, groups, files, pages, profiles, etc) but also from all events broadcast into the activity stream by partner integrations."
However, Lepofsky does have some concerns as well.
"While integrating multiple systems into a single activity stream sounds appealing from an aggregation standpoint (and makes for a great sales/marketing demo), I am quite concerned that adding too much data in a single place is going to render activity streams unusable... But Yammer is not limiting their integration strategy to just becoming an aggregator, they are also wisely following the path of doing the opposite and allowing Yammer to be embedded into other business tools.
"Via Yammer Embed, activity streams from Yammer can be accessed from within other systems such as your intranet, blog or any other business system that supports HTML... This two-sided strategy of being both an integration point as well as being embeddable should provide a great deal of flexibility for Yammer customers."
In other news, Yammer has also announced updates to its iPhone and Android applications, an upgrade to premium groups and a new Share button for content sharing.
According to a company statement today, the enterprise social network has now surpassed five million corporate users and employs more than 300 staff.
The announcements follow the company’s fifth round of funding in February, which brought in $85m and allowed Yammer to acquire UK-based company oneDrum.
