I’ve blogged before that I thought that a Twitter clone aimed at the enterprise world would be a stupendous idea for improving team communication and collaboration. (I prefer to call this form of communication conversation clouds, because that’s what they are in my opinion–a distributed conversation with a broad surface area.) Today I got to take the concept for a spin, and it didn’t disappoint.
Of course, I wasn’t the only one with that idea, and a company called Yammer
has implemented it and launched at TechCrunch50 yesterday. While not
an enterprise-grade product yet, Yammer is a FANTASTIC proof of concept
of the idea of a distributed corporate messaging system. It allows you
to join a company-specific conversation cloud (based on your email
address, similar to LinkedIn’s authentication model), and provides the
Web and desktop clients you need to jump right in. I signed up today
and enjoyed having a big, distributed, brainstorming session with Cisco
folks I’ve never even heard of before in our own private conversation
cloud.
Think about that: I was collaborating with Cisco employees I’ve
never even heard of before today… how cool, and how VALUABLE is
that? I think that a lot of people are going to grasp the power of
this communication model, very soon. I am completely convinced that
this is the future of collaboration.
The real value add here is the ambient information this makes
available to people–information that doesn’t demand your attention,
but may be valuable. Teams can communicate as if they were all sitting
in a room together, and can be freed from the archaic idea that they
need to physically be in the same place to work together. Cut costs,
go green, be more efficient, leverage as many buzzwords as you can
shake a stick at. It would also be great for letting managers see what
their team is doing at a glance, and getting new team members into the
mix quickly.
Unfortunately, I can really only consider Yammer a proof of concept
at this point. A few items companies like Yammer will need to address
before they can make a real push into the enterprise:
- Security. Unless they’re bought or backed by a large
company like Salesforce.com, I expect that they’ll have to provide a
premise-based solution. The trust just isn’t there for a SaaS startup
to store confidential enterprise conversations. - Corporate directory integration. Yammer does provide some
type of Org Chart functionality, but in reality this just won’t work
unless it’s synchronized with the corporate Active Directory or LDAP
server. Again, this probably means that it needs to be premise-based. - Corporate profile integration. Right now profiles are
hosted at Yammer, which means that I can’t click on somebody and be
taken to their internal employee profile. This is not acceptable, and
again, means that it needs to be premise-based.
Marc Benioff thinks it’s such a great idea that he wants to buy
Yammer. I think if he can pick Yammer up cheap enough (it’s almost
trivial to build) it would be a brilliant idea.
UPDATE: Yammer took the top prize for the TechCrunch50 conference.
Based on the fact that it’s not yet ready for actual deployment at mid
to large businesses, and that TechCrunch50 was supposed to be a LAUNCH
event, I have assume that the rest of the entries were crap-tastic.
