The enterprise social network Yammer has bought oneDrum, a UK company that specialises in corporate file-sharing and collaboration tools. Our mission is to create a social layer across the enterprise, bringing together people, content, and conversations across all business applications.
The enterprise social network Yammer has bought oneDrum, a UK company that specialises in corporate file-sharing and collaboration tools.
Our mission is to create a social layer across the enterprise, bringing together people, content, and conversations across all business applications.
– David Sacks, Yammer
The deal will allow Yammer users to share file folders across multiple desktops and work together on Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents, the companies said in a statement on Wednesday. All of oneDrum's employees will join Yammer, and the new features will start to become available by the summer.
"Employees spend a huge amount of time working with files, especially in Microsoft Office," Yammer chief David Sacks said in the statement.
"Through oneDrum, Yammer will incorporate all of that content into the enterprise social graph, making it discoverable and collaborative," Sacks added. "Our mission is to create a social layer across the enterprise, bringing together people, content, and conversations across all business applications."
The oneDrum features will effectively bring Dropbox- and Google Docs-like functionality to Yammer, which says it is the "leading provider of enterprise social networks".
Once oneDrum's capabilities have been absorbed into Yammer, users who are members of Yammer groups will see shared subfolders on their desktops for each one of those groups. Files dragged and dropped into those folders will be automatically synced to other group member's desktops, and files can be worked on offline.
The files in those folders will also get unique URLs and will become fully text-searchable on Yammer. Microsoft Office files in the folders will be able to be opened and simultaneously edited by multiple users.
Yammer began in 2008 as a Twitter-like microblogging service that companies can use internally, although it has since developed into a fuller social networking service. Its big differentiating factor from the likes of LinkedIn and Viadeo is that it is designed for internal collaboration, rather than as a business-minded alternative to Facebook.
The financial terms of the oneDrum purchase were not disclosed.
