Yammer originally set out to improve companies’ and organizations’ internal communication.  We wanted to make it easier for employees to collaborate and share ideas and knowledge. As the leading “enterprise micro-blogging” product on the market today, Yammer remains committed to improving internal communication. 

At the same time, many companies and organizations that are benefitting from the use of Yammer for internal communication have asked us if they can additionally utilize Yammer to collaborate with their external business network, including customers, partners, suppliers, and vendors.  Until now, this wasn’t possible as Yammer required all members of a Yammer network to share a common, work email domain. 

To address this need, we’re now pleased to announce the availability of Yammer Communities. This new product feature enables companies and organizations to create a new type of Yammer network that is not restricted to a common email domain.  Yammer Communities provide companies with a secure, private, and separate space to communicate with their external business contacts.  Membership, messages and other data in the Community are completely separate from membership, messages and data in the parent company network; users must toggle between networks to access these separate Community networks.  As before, access to company networks remains restricted to employees with a verified company email address.

Just as Yammer offers a comprehensive set of features for the Admins of email domain-based networks, Yammer provides the Admins of a Community with robust functionality to control who can join the Community, which features are enabled, what the design of the Community looks like, whether it uses the Following model, which notifications are enabled by default, and many other areas.  Additionally, we have increased the controls available to the Admins of email domain-based Yammer networks, allowing company Admins to determine whether Communities appear at all in their networks, which Communities appear, and who can create them.  The Admins of companies that do not want to participate in Communities can disable the feature.

Communities follow our current “freemium” pricing model, under which organizations enjoy a basic level of service for free (including the ability of admins to create Communities and manage members) and can upgrade to our premium tools for additional features. As always, discounts are available for large organizations; if you have questions, please contact sales.

Additional Resources:

Yammer Communities Product Overview Presentation

Yammer Communities Comprehensive FAQ

Yammer launched its solution in September 2008 and has experienced rapid user growth with over 60,000 organizations globally having adopted the solution. Drawing on this momentum, Yammer will use the proceeds to accelerate product innovation and increase sales coverage.

“Yammer is revolutionizing the way employees communicate and collaborate, filling a need that email has failed to deliver,” said Jason Green, general partner at Emergence Capital. “Yammer has a passionate and proven executive team, a compelling freemium business model, a loyal customer base and a huge market opportunity. We are thrilled to be joining them in the next phase of their rapid growth.”

Companies and organizations of all sizes across a wide range of industries benefit from Yammer. They use Yammer for a multitude of reasons, including improving workforce productivity, connecting a geographically dispersed team, getting new employees up to speed, and increasing the flow of content and knowledge.

“Yammer is focused on improving the way employees communicate and stay connected to critical information about their company and job,” said David Sacks, founder and CEO at Yammer. “We’re pleased with the rapid growth and market adoption we’ve achieved and are poised to accelerate it with exciting enhancements to our product and with broadened sales coverage. We’re eager to work with Emergence Capital and leverage their expertise in building world-class Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies and are gratified that proven technology investors such as SV Angel and Charles River Ventures are also participating in the funding.”        

See the official Press Release here

One of Yammer’s greatest benefits is the unlimited amount of internal messaging archived over time, creating a company-wide knowledge base. This knowledge base is a quick way for users to reference previous discussions around topics, keywords, and hash-tags. Not only can current employees take advantage of this feature, it is especially effective to on-board new employees, bringing them up to speed on what’s going on within the organization.

Yammer has consistently implemented features to more easily tap into this vital knowledge base. Since introducing full-time search capabilities, we have also added Advanced Search functionality so that users can specify their queries by particular users, dates, and/or groups. To make searching even better, Yammer has now improved its search speed by two magnitudes – or in other words, search just became a whole lot faster. Users will be able to search and access discussions quicker, leading to more internal knowledge and more efficient productivity.

Try it out for yourself and tell us what you think! Don't forget to follow us on Twitter for more updates.