Yammer Acquires oneDrum to Make Content Social

Brings Desktop Sync and Real-Time Collaboration for Microsoft Office Suite to Yammer

Yammer, Inc., the leading provider of Enterprise Social Networks, today announced it has acquired oneDrum, a UK-based software company that offers file sharing and collaboration solutions for businesses. With the acquisition, Yammer will gain powerful desktop sync capabilities, enabling file folders to be shared across multiple users’ desktops. oneDrum also brings collaborative functionality to Microsoft Office applications, allowing multiple authors to work together on Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents in real time.

“Employees spend a huge amount of time working with files, especially in Microsoft Office,” said David Sacks, Yammer CEO. “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.”

Making Content Social Today’s enterprise content management (ECM) systems are built on document-centric architectures designed for file storage and are inefficient for collaboration. As a result, users typically resort to email for file sharing, which presents significant challenges for version control and information discovery.

Yammer is taking social discovery to a powerful new level by making content that exists on the desktop instantly shareable, without requiring additional actions from the user. The acquisition of oneDrum will help Yammer users get work done faster, smarter and with greater transparency by bringing content to the place where employees from across the organization come together — the Enterprise Social Network. Key features include:

--  Sync: Users will be able to access Yammer files through a folder on
            their desktop. Inside this folder, users will see subfolders for each
            Yammer group that they are a member of. Thus, every Yammer group
            becomes a shared folder for the team.
            --  Shared folders automatically appear when a user joins a new group;
                they disappear instantly when the user leaves (or is removed from)
                the group.
            --  Users can drag and drop files into the shared folder to upload
                them to Yammer; this also syncs them automatically to team
                members' desktops.
            --  Users can open files from the Yammer desktop folder and work on
                them in their native applications. When new versions are saved,
                they are automatically synced directly to Yammer and to coworkers'
                desktops.
            --  Files can be worked on offline, and then synced as soon as the
                user returns online.

        
        --  Discover: Each Yammer file lives at a unique URL (or permalink) where
            it can be viewed in the browser, followed, shared and discussed.
            Following a file will notify the user of changes. Users can also view
            a revision history.
            --  As soon as a file is dragged into the Yammer desktop folder, it
                automatically receives its own permalink.
            --  The files immediately become full-text searchable on Yammer.
            --  They can be accessed on mobile devices and then easily shared or
                emailed from there.
            --  Opening or saving new versions will generate an activity story in
                the Ticker, a scrolling real-time activity feed in Yammer, driving
                a new level of content virality.

        
        --  Co-Create: Employees can work collaboratively inside a Word,
            PowerPoint or Excel file added to the Yammer desktop folder.
            --  When multiple co-workers open any Microsoft Office file that lives
                in a shared folder, it automatically becomes co-editable by those
                users simultaneously.
            --  Character-by-character changes appear as colleagues make edits to
                the file, while color-coded cursors identify different users
                collaborating in the document.
            --  Edits appear in real time when working online, while offline edits
                synchronize effortlessly when connectivity is re-established.

Security and Control Yammer offers robust security and admin controls for content, including:

        
        --  Data in motion will be encrypted using 256-bit SSL/TLS and data at
            rest will be encrypted using 256-bit AES.
        --  Viewing permissions are based on group access, so when a user is
            removed from a group or network, access to files is revoked
            accordingly.
        --  Admins can mark content as read-only, restricting who can edit a file.
        --  A version history tracks all changes to a document and allows a
            previous version to be reverted.

Yammer will begin introducing oneDrum functionality by Summer 2012 as a desktop client download, with no plug-ins to Microsoft Office required.

The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. All of oneDrum’s employees will join Yammer, with CEO Jasper Westaway leading the integration of the two products.

Additional Comments “Yammer was built to be social from the ground up, so it’s natural for it to be the platform for maximizing content value. I’m proud that we’ll become part of the pioneer and leader in enterprise social networking to make our vision a reality.” — Jasper Westaway, founder and CEO, oneDrum

“… the technologies many enterprises look to for online collaboration (email and documents) are based on objects considered personal property of their creators, making collaboration using these mechanisms difficult and reuse of this information next to impossible.” — Gartner, The Post 2.0 Era: Social in the Context of My Work, Dec. 2011.

“It should be incumbent upon to the social network and content management vendors to provide services wherever the document is being used, rather than forcing people to collaborate around a storage location.” — Gartner, The Post 2.0 Era: Social in the Context of My Work, Dec. 2011

Resources Watch the demo video: http://vimeo.com/40128698

Come to Yammer on Tour San Francisco on Tuesday, April 24 to learn more about Yammer and oneDrum. Register here: https://www.yammer.com/tour/sf.html

About oneDrum oneDrum is a software-development company that is creating a unique collaboration engine that at present includes an intuitive peer-to-peer desktop application that brings Google Docs functionality and more to Microsoft Office applications. oneDrum is a simple yet highly effective tool that boosts workplace productivity by enabling seamless social collaboration on documents between colleagues. Allowing users to work in their native Microsoft Office application environment, oneDrum takes the compromise out of collaboration and is the only application that lets users have shared documents on-hand, and up-to-date, at every moment.

About Yammer, Inc. Yammer ( www.yammer.com ) is the leading provider of Enterprise Social Networks, enabling organizations to make transformative changes quickly by empowering employees to collaborate across departments, geographies, content and business applications. The basic version of Yammer is free, and customers can pay to upgrade their network to receive additional administrative and security controls, priority customer service and a dedicated customer success manager. Companies and organizations from across the globe, including more than 85 percent of the Fortune 500, are using our award-winning Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution to improve employee productivity and engagement. Visit our blog to see how our customers are benefiting from Yammer.

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SOURCE: Yammer, Inc.