Tech giant looks to boost platform’s social appeal with new Yammer features
Microsoft could be set to make collaboration in the workplace a whole lot more efficient with its latest announcement.
No doubt to the delight of many, the company is finally moving some of the popular features of Yammer over to its cloud-based productivity suite, Office 365. Office Graph is leading the changes and can be used to keep track of the tasks completed by employees.
The software can map things like social contact between colleagues or even something as simple as uploading documents; it then puts it all into a graph to show how employees interact.
What this means is that office managers across the UK will be able to see how well their team members work together. If they don’t like what they see, they’re in a better position to make adjustments to sort things out.
There’s little doubt that Microsoft has taken inspiration from the way social media has impacted life on a mainstream level. Social networks like Facebook and Twitter are
effectively based on the relationships between people and information; it’ll be interesting to see how Microsoft applies this to the business world.
Office Graph is expected to work in collaboration with a number of new apps. One of these will be Oslo, which is set to improve Office 365’s social capabilities further by giving users the power to search for and discover more about the people and information around them.
While social is the most obvious focus with these changes, it’s pretty obvious that Microsoft is doing all it can to help businesses harness the power of big data. Updates like this should also help in convincing more firms to migrate to the cloud.
