With the big (but expected) announcement that Microsoft will purchase Yammer, Microsoft Dynamics CRM users can expect to see more social communications functions in the coming years. Yammer will find a home in the Microsoft Office Division, and according to the press release, Redmond “plans to accelerate Yammer’s adoption alongside complementary offerings from Microsoft SharePoint, Office 365, Microsoft Dynamics and Skype.”
Yammer, of course, is an enterprise microblogging service – think Twitter for the business world – that has over 200,000 corporate subscribers and 5 million users. Using Yammer to add more collaboration and social communications to Dynamics CRM is a no brainer for Microsoft.
Dynamics CRM already has real-time communication (Microsoft Lync) and basic social networking and collaboration functions–Activity Feeds and, if you stretch the definition, Connections. But Dynamics CRM current social capabilities are admittedly not as evolved as SalesForce’s Chatter. With Yammer, Dynamics CRM users will be able to extend customer service and sales functionalities by connecting them to prospects they never knew were out there.
The addition of Yammer’s social networking capabilities will go a long way toward closing this gap, and should pull in customers who were on the fence deciding between MS Dynamics CRM and SalesForce.
