Yammer

The book I read to research this post was Yammer Starter by Ralph Roberts which is a very good book which I read at

http://safaribooksonline.com

This book is a bit on the short side but is on an interesting subject and I think alot of the information is quite relevant especially to IT people in businesses. Yammer is the original corporate network solution and there is a free version along with a premium and enterprise versions. For most businesses all they need is the free version. It integrates with Microsoft Dynamics CRM & MS Sharepoint and obviously there is probably going to be hosting fees involved if it doesn't run on a company server. Microsoft bought the Yammer company for $1.2 billion several years ago with a view to promoting Dynamics & Sharepoint. You can't have subgroups in Yammer but you can have 1 big corporate group and then lots of separate smaller groups. Obviously when you join a group you need your company email address and this has to be authorized by the network administrator as an allowable member. Of course there are alternatives to Yammer like Chatter & other companies like Sugar CRM & Salesforce.com are eager to promote their own CRM solutions.Also Yammer integrates with Twitter & Facebook and has things like newsfeeds which are similiar to the latter. I think a lot of the program which is downloadable from Yammer.com is quite intuitive especially if you have experience of Facebook. I did quite enjoy reading this book although I thought it's a bit short.