After recently passing the 50,000 network mark, Yammer has continued adding innovative features to improve user-experience. Today we're pleased to announce two new features:

• Unread message highlighting in web and desktop clients
• Full-text search in the desktop client

Unread Message Highlighting in Web and Desktop Clients

Unread message highlighting, a popular feature of our iPhone application, is now available in the web and desktop clients! After refreshing, users can better keep track of new messages that appear in their feed via a blue dot icon which will appear next to all new messages. A horizontal gray bar will further differentiate the new messages from older ones.

The desktop client will follow the same behavior by highlighting new messages with a light-yellow background.

The read/unread status of your messages is synchronized across all supported clients, so messages you have seen on the desktop client won't be marked as unread on the web or iPhone.

Full Desktop-Client Search Functionality

Users can search for any keyword anytime through the desktop client. With full-text search functionality, Yammer becomes a greater, more invaluable knowledge-base for your company.

Yammer is continuing to develop quickly, and we have multiple projects we are excited about and working on for the near-future. Of course, we want to know what our users think about our new features, so please give us your feedback. If you have any other questions or concerns, visit our help page.

Yammer, Inc., the leader in Enterprise Microblogging, today announced that its network count passed 50,000. A network is a company or organization. Yammer launched its enterprise microblogging and social networking solution just over a year ago and has experienced strong customer adoption and viral increases in usage.

“We set out to transform the way employees communicate and collaborate,” said David Sacks, founder and CEO at Yammer. “Our rapid growth is proof that businesses see value in bringing social networking and microblogging capabilities into their companies. We believe email and IM fall short of providing the central communications hub necessary to optimize workforce productivity. Yammer fills this void. We will continue to work diligently to enhance our solution and to grow the customer and user bases.”

Yammer provides employees with a frictionless way to share information with co-workers. Companies and organizations use Yammer for a multitude of reasons, including improving workforce productivity, connecting a geographically dispersed team, and increasing the flow of content and knowledge.

Companies of all sizes across a wide range of industries are benefitting from Yammer. SunGard, one of the world’s leading software and IT services companies, is actively using Yammer across its large and geographically dispersed workforce. “We signed up for Yammer and are seeing it spread virally among our employees,” said Brian Robins, chief marketing officer at SunGard. “It is helping us accelerate collaboration and internal communications across our 20,000 employees in 300 offices in 30 countries. We’re seeing all kinds of serendipitous connections across projects, cultures and time zones.”

See the official press release here.

Click here to download.

Continuing integration with popular Microsoft products, Yammer has now added support for MS Outlook 2003 with our newly announced beta plugin.

Quickly following the arrival of an Outlook 2007 plugin, the Outlook 2003 plugin was specifically created for the many enterprise users who are using the earlier version of Outlook. The plugin offers users another way to integrate Yammer into their current work-flow to easily monitor what's happening in their network.

Since this is still a beta version of the plugin, feedback would be much appreciated. Please let us know what you think by emailing us at help@yammer.com

Part of Yammer's benefits include creating transparency in an organization, and we want to follow that motto here for an explanation to our users: Yammer experienced technical difficulties intermittently over the last night but is now back up and stable. The down-time was not due to DNS issues as has been speculated, instead, it stemmed from a hardware issue within the supervisory engine of a switch, which then affected other switches.

Our engineers have been working through the night to diagnose the problem, bring the site back up, and prevent this from happening again. Unfortunately, down-times happen to everyone at some point, whether internal company servers or external ones, but we at Yammer take particular pride in maintaining the site's availability. We want to ensure that our users always have a great and consistent experience, and we will continue taking the necessary steps to make sure this happens.

We sincerely apologize for the down-time and any inconvenience this may have caused. We know some of our users had to revert to communicating via that dreaded "E" word (okay, E-mail, we said it) but this is certainly not the norm for us.

We saw positive support from users during the down-time, and we truly appreciate that type of support for our product, and we will be continuing to improve Yammer for all users. If you have any comments or concerns, please do not hesitate to reach us at help@yammer.com.

Sincerely,

Yammer Team

iPhone 2.0

The Yammer 2.0 iPhone application is now available to download from the Apple App Store or iTunes with multiple new features, including Push.

Click here to download the app.

Here's a full list of what's new:

• Composing Updates: A ‘compose update’ button in the upper-right corner opens the new compose mode with these improvements:
  • Auto-saving of drafts until they are submitted or erased
  • Automatic wrapping of text to the next line
  • Landscape mode option for typing an update
  • A camera mode to quickly attach a photo. You can take the photo then or choose one from your existing photos.

• Push: Push notifications are now available to alert you of new messages. Customize Push notifications in the Settings tab to configure sound, sleep hours, and which feeds to Push.

• Received tab: The “Home” tab is now “My Feed” and the second tab is now “Received” so you have easy access to this important feed.

• Cached Feeds: Messages are now cached from the last update to improve performance; this is especially useful for using the app without network access. An “Updated (time)” banner shows the last time your feed was successfully updated. The Feed and Directory lists are also now cached.

Yammer is pleased to announce the addition of Sean Parker to Yammer's Board of Directors.

Parker co-founded four category defining Internet companies by the age of 28 --Napster, Plaxo, Facebook and the Causes application on Facebook-- transforming the way people across the world interact and share information. He is currently the Chairman of Causes and a Managing Partner at Founder's Fund, a venture capital firm based in San Francisco.

Sean was the founding president of Facebook from 2004-2005, turning a social-networking start-up into an industry giant.

In 1999, at the age of 19, Sean co-founded Napster Inc. and changed how people think about and share music. In 2001, Sean co-founded Plaxo, pioneering viral engineering technology for updating contact information. Sean served as Plaxo's president until 2004, at which time he joined Mark Zuckerberg to launch Facebook.

Parker's past experience will undoubtedly help drive Yammer's success to the next level.

David Sacks, CEO of Yammer, comments on Parker's addition by stating, "Sean is one of the pioneers of consumer social networking, so he deeply understands the concepts we are now applying to the enterprise space."

"I look forward to helping Yammer hone their already strong vision," commented Parker.

Mr. Parker joins current Yammer Board members George Zachary, Partner at Charles River Ventures; Keith Rabois, Vice President, Strategy & Business Development at Slide; Adam Ross, Chairman & CEO of Goldcrest Investments; David O. Sacks, Founder and CEO of Yammer, Inc.; and Adam Pisoni, Vice President of Technology at Yammer.

Yammer is looking forward to being a Silver Sponsor at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in San Francisco from November 2-5 and we would love to see you there too!

As a sponsor for the event, Yammer gets the privilege of giving you the ability to attend the conference at 30% off for a Conference Pass where we will be speaking, or a free Expo Pass where we will have a booth.

After having a successful presence recently at TechCrunch50, the Enterprise 2.0 Conference will give you an added opportunity to hear and see the direction Yammer is taking and how far we've come as a product.

Here's a brief overview of what the conference will offer:

"Enterprise 2.0 Conference takes a strategic perspective, emphasizing the bigger picture implications of the technology and the exploration of what is at stake for organizations trying to change not only tools, but also culture and process."

You can also find out more about the conference in general here.

We would love to see new and familiar faces alike, so come by our booth and say hi!

Yammer has added new features we are excited to share with you:

• Google Apps Sign-Up
• Popular Tags List
• 'More' Link On Messages: Bookmark, Email, Delete
• Ability to reply to replies in threaded mode
• Direct Messages feed
• Threaded mode toggle
• Collapsed Group UI

Google Apps Sign-Up

This eliminates the need to confirm your Google Apps based email address. New users just go through the normal sign-up flow but the email verification process is taken care of, saving you time and hassle.

Popular Tags List

The most popular tags in your network will be displayed in a list on the right of your feed. This lets you quickly see and access the most popular discussions in your organization.

'More' Link On Messages: Bookmark, Email, Delete

A 'More' link on messages allows you to quickly add an update to your 'Bookmarked' feed, receive the update as an email, or delete the message.

Ability to reply to replies in threaded mode

You can now reply to other users within the same thread. Just click on 'Reply' to any message and Yammer will clearly display exactly who you are replying to.

Direct Messages feed

A dedicated DM feed makes it easy to send and peruse Direct Messages. Typing in a user's name will display a drop-box so you can quickly select who you want to Direct Message, while the feed will show your archived messages.

Threaded mode toggle

Toggle between Threaded and Stream modes by clicking on the icon at the top-right hand corner of your feed. Get conversational context in Threaded mode, or Twitter-like updates in Stream mode.

Collapsed Group UI

The new interface includes an organized Group drop-down menu which allows you to quickly access your groups' feeds and profiles, or add another group.

In case you missed it, Yammer also released an Outlook 2007 Plug-In and Windows Mobile App last week. We are working quickly to also have an Outlook 2003 Plug-In soon so stay tuned!