Yammer has just rolled-out a major upgrade. They have added the ‘Ticker for Enterprise’.
This is a significant upgrade as it provides an insight into where we believe the industry is heading. Yammer, and other similar tools, will become ‘social middleware’. Up to now Yammer was a place where you could share, communicate, and collaborate. The trigger for the dialogue would always be a person. However, in our professional lives, there are more events in our company that (should) trigger communication or collaboration. Imagine if a CRM system would send out a signal to your activity stream when the status of your client is out of the ordinary. You would be able to collaborate on the issue with colleagues instantly and solve the problem. What if an angry tweet from an important customer captured by your webcare team would appear in the activity stream of the team servicing the client? They could instantly collaborate on solving the issue and regaining the clients trust, faster and more effectively.
In the near future social tools will not only be fed by people posting messages, entire processes will feed them. The social tool will become the spider in the web. Information will be posted by people as well as company systems and instant virtual teams will collaborate to seize opportunities, solve problems, and better serve clients.
The current Yammer upgrade isn’t at that level yet, but it’s clearly moving in that direction. The current integrations aren’t with systems that directly affect the bottom line (except for Salesforce). At this time the ticker integrates streams from: Badgeville, Box, Expensify, NetSuite, Salesforce.com, SharePoint, Spigit, TripIt and Zendesk.
Yammer has built the Yammer Activity Stream API that lets other platforms feed the Yammer activity stream.
We believe that in 5 years time tools like Yammer will become our single point of interaction with our corporate systems. This is where we will organise our work, where we will receive signals and inputs from the organisation, and where we will collaborate with others. Email as we know it will rapidly become extinct.
Want to know more, check out what Yammer has to say about it’s upgrades.
