Yammer buys oneDrum to extend collaboration tools

Yammer, the enterprise social network company, has announced the acquisition of OneDrum, a UK-based start-up that provides Office collaboration services for businesses.

This is Yammer’s first acquisition and will allow users to collaborate, share and co-edit documents in real-time via oneDrum’s desktop application, which connects Google Docs with Microsoft Office. Following the acquisition, Yammer’s collaboration tool will also feature oneDrum’s communication features such as edit tracking and instant messaging from within the document.

The documents can also be viewed on mobile devices and local copies can be stored and used offline. Additionally, documents can be fully-text searchable within Yammer.

David Sacks, Yammer CEO, said: “Employees spend a huge amount of time working with files, especially in Microsoft Office. Through oneDrum, Yammer will incorporate all of that content into the enterprise social graph, making it discoverable and collaborative. Our mission is to create a social layer across the enterprise, bringing together people, content, and conversations across all business applications.”

The acquisition follows Yammer’s $85m funding round last month; no financial details of the oneDrum sale have been given.  

According to the firm, the oneDrum functionality will be rolled out by summer 2012.