Communication is extremely important within any company, so how do you keep in touch? Email is the most popular, but have you considered Instant Messaging?
Yammer is a popular instant messenger service used in a lot of businesses. It’s simple, quick and can be used on multiple platforms and devices. It also has an integrated search facility – always useful for hunting through all those past conversations if needs be!
The idea of Yammer is to communicate and share information with your colleagues. You will only receive updates from people you ‘follow’ & from groups of which you are a member.
For people looking to communicate with others outside of the company, Yammer now provides Yammer Communities, an add-on which allows you to create networks for use with external customers and partners.
Yammer CEO David Sacks says that revenue is now doubling every quarter and that the company now has 70,000 corporate clients, and 800,000+ users. Not not bad eh?
As with most things, you have the choice of paid and unpaid packages :-
Basic – FREE
Silver – $3 per user per month
Gold – $5 per user per month
I find the Basic package perfect for what I want, which is just a simple communication tool between my colleagues.
But as the saying goes, you get what you pay for…! The paid packages include other features including custom branding, data export and the very useful SharePoint integration.
Mobile devices
One of the great things about Yammer is that you can use it on most mobile devices including iPhone, Windows Mobile, Blackberry, Android mobile and even send it via SMS messaging. If that’s not enough, how about updates via Twitter, email & more?!
