Microsoft Purchases Yammer

Today we had a major announce for Office 365 and SharePoint which I am very excited about. Microsoft announced that we had reached a definitive agreement to buy Yammer, a leading provider of enterprise social networks.

• Press Release - http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/Press/2012/Jun12/06-25MSYammerPR.aspx
• Kurt DelBene’s Blog - http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_blog/archive/2012/06/25/microsoft-acquires-yammer-to-accelerate-enterprise-social-networking.aspx

Why am I excited about this?
I think we have a great partner portal and social computing solutions in SharePoint Online today; however the addition of Yammer makes our story even stronger and resilient. Yammer is a best-in-class enterprise social networking solution and Microsoft plans to utilize Yammer with SharePoint, Office 365, Dynamics and Skype. Microsoft has stated they do not plan to disrupt Yammer’s current business and there will be focus to bring the Yammer services into the products I just mentioned.
It is my job to talk with customers about all of our Office 365 services and I had several customer conversations this year where having a solution like Yammer would have been very helpful.
With Yammer, you have a simple, clean, direct user experience where group workspaces and collaboration areas can be quickly created with tons of business social solutions such as profiles, organization charts, praise, question, messaging, feeds, announcements, member directories, expertise management, leaderboards, events, polls, shared group areas, content collaboration, and tons of additional solutions.