Microsoft today laid out its grand strategy for Yammer, the social enterprise startup it bought over the summer for $1.2 billion.
Step 1: Slash prices.
Step 2: Bake it into Microsoft's cloud-based software.
Step 3: Convince people to use it.
Microsoft announced the changes as part of its SharePoint Conference 2012, which kicks off today in Las Vegas.
Yammer had four pricing plans. Microsoft cut those down to two, a freebie version most companies use, and the "enterprise network" plan, which costs $3 per user a month. It used to cost five times that—$15 per user a month.
More importantly, Microsoft has made Yammer a feature in two of its cloud software products. Those are SharePoint Online, a cloud-hosted version of Microsoft's content-management software, and Office 365, the cloud version of its Microsoft Office suite, which includes SharePoint Online.
However, Microsoft will only sell the Yammer-SharePoint combo to companies who already have an Enterprise Agreement, the standard way Microsoft sells software to big businesses, says Jared Spataro, senior director, Office Division.
It's less clear how Microsoft intends to integrate Yammer with the standard version of SharePoint, which generally runs on customers' servers or servers maintained by a third-party provider. The recently released SharePoint 2013 has its own Yammer-like news feed. But even before the acquisition, Yammer was integrating its software into SharePoint, and recently announced software tools should make it easy to deepen that integration.
SharePoint Online, Office 365, and Yammer will have a "unified identity, integrated document management, and feed aggregation." Yammer recently unveiled tools for taking its identity and feeds to other Web-based software, so it seems likely those unified offerings will be based strongly on Yammer's products.
Microsoft is also answering criticisms that people don't want a version of Facebook for work—a common caricature of Yammer. Instead of a way for sharing frivolous-seeming updates, they want tools that will measurably help them be more productive.
"If you want to realize the potential of social networking, you have to get people to participate," Spataro said. "They can't just sign up and walk away. They have to use it." He added that Microsoft thinks Yammer's social feed combined with SharePoint's document handling is the ticket to success.
One thing we can't expect: Any word of how Yammer will integrate with another Microsoft acquisition, Skype, the video-chat and instant-messaging service, reports Mary Jo Foley at ZDNet.
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