A year ago today, Microsoft announced it was acquiring Yammer for $1.2 billion (the deal officially closed in July 2012). Today, Microsoft decided to look back at the past year since buying the business-themed social networking service while also looking ahead to Yammer"s future, particularly with Office 365.
In a new blog post, David Sacks, the Corporate Vice President for the Yammer division, said that user activity has gone up 55 percent past year and Yammer now has about 8 million registered seats. The number of paid networks has gone up 200 percent in the same time period, and the amount of activity on the Yammer network, in terms of messages, groups and files, has doubled in the past year.
Earlier this month, Microsoft announced that enterprise users of Office 365 can now set Yammer to be the primary social network, instead of the older SharePoint Newsfeed system. In the next 12 months, we will see more integration with Office products. Sacks states:
As we look ahead, I’m more confident than ever that not only was the acquisition the right move for both Yammer and Microsoft, but that our combined vision is the right one – that enterprise social is how people will work, and that we have the expertise, portfolio, capabilities, vision and insight to make that future real.
Microsoft also released an infographic, shown below, that offers a quick history of Yammer and a look at their ideas for the future of enterprise social networking.
Source: Microsoft | Images via Microsoft