One year ago, Microsoft acquired enterprise social networking service, Yammer, for the princely sum of $1.2 billion (in cash).

I expressed my views at the time in my post “Microsoft acquires enterprise social networking company, Yammer“. A prudent purchase considering growth in the sector.

At the time Yammer had over 5 million corporate users including employees of more than 85% of the Fortune 500. Today it now has nearly 8 million users. Nearly 100,000 of these exist within Microsoft.

So there has been growth, this was to be expected following Microsoft’s spend, but what else.

Yammer is transforming.  Seemingly its feature set is and will continue to traverse the Microsoft product set.

But in a nutshell, it remains true to itself, despite the Microsoft bond. Yammer is still a cloud-based platform, delivering enterprise social networking; not only connecting remote project workers but changing the way these workers collaborate.

Microsoft also appears to be delivering on its strategy to provide a social layer across Microsoft Office, SharePoint, and other Microsoft and third-party applications. A big benefit to users if implemented well.

One hopes that this drives the empowerment of employees to instinctly engage and collaborate in a natural and social manner. Something that organisations have failed to achieve with the numerous iterations of intranets, corporate portals and the like.

Plus there is Microsoft’s apparent desire for more intimate synergy between Microsoft SharePoint and Yammer. I would not be surprised if, in the near future, Microsoft offers a single uniform social experience. IMHO a positive step for all organisations (not to say that what we have now is not positive).

For more information on this go to Christophe Fiessinger’s Blog (Christophe is an Enterprise Social Project Manager at Microsoft) and his post Happy 1 Year Anniversary Microsoft + Yammer! Christophe has some links to other useful information. (I’m looking forward to joining him to speak at the next Project conference in the US to talk about enterprise social projects and programmes).

Popping on my project/programme management hat again…

Crucially, such cloud-based enterprise social networking platforms provide anytime, anywhere access. Access essential to ever increasing mobile working practices and virtual project teams. We will continue to witness growth and acceptance amongst businesses (and project environments).

I’m certainly looking forward to the day when project management, social, collaboration, email, instant messaging, voice, video and line of business platforms are finally united as one.

Does it sound like we’re embracing Agile in the space?

First published on the blog, PPMpractitioner (a blog focusing on the extensive world of projects through to product, with programmes and portfolios tossed in for good measure)