Private Social Networking with Yammer

Twitter doesn't need any introduction to anybody. It's perhaps the first and certainly the most popular micro-blogging social networking site out there. However, Twitter is a consumer product open for everyone to try out. So if you want to create your own private communities within your own company, and allow your employees to collaborate with each other with the same ease as offered by consumer social networking sites, then Yammer could come to your rescue.

Yammer is an enterprise social networking cum microblogging tool. It provides the option of a social networking environment for workers registered with an organization. The basic eligibility criteria you have to fulfill to be able to use Yammer is that you should have a registered official account with the company domain. Once logged in, Yammer automatically creates a group with reference to your company domain (cybermedia.co.in, in our case). Any user henceforth from the same domain accessing Yammer will be entered into the group by default.

Sub groups within the main domain can be created. This helps users to remain connected with their coworkers in a network. Almost all social networking capabilities are open for that group. A particular user can send any info to a particular user or broadcast it to the whole group. The site can be accessed online using a browser. Also, there are options of using Yammer through a desktop or even a mobile client. The Yammer desktop client makes it easy to collaborate. It's available for multiple platforms like Windows, Mac, Android and BlackBerry, iPhone. SMS, Twitter, IM, Sharepoint integration is also facilitated. Some of these high end features come at a price though.