Yammer + iPhone: a Twitter - Like Client Perfect for Mobile Enterprise Teams

Yammer + iPhone: a Twitter – Like Client Perfect for Mobile Enterprise Teams

by Bill French on 14/05/09 at 9:48 pm

Bill French is an information architect specializing in Internet applications. He is also the co-founder of MyST Technology Partners and Senior Editor for iPhoneCTO.

MyST Technology Partners is small, but more than a third of the team is always on the go. We all use Twitter, but it’s not a tool for business-level, secure communications and we all know that a slip on the keyboard decides what goes to the public timeline. Instant messaging is less than ideal because it doesn’t sustain conversations in a unified repository. SMS texting is handy at times, but it falls down when you need to revisit a topic or participate from a non-mobile device. Mobility for our team is critical, and knowledge sharing over iPhone is essential.

Lightweight Agile Communications System

The success of Twitter and short messaging systems underscores why this communication behavior is important for the enterprise. The trend to adopt “140 character” thinking in business is neither surprising or a new idea; the pattern is no different than enterprise adoption of instant messaging, mobile phones, or even email itself. Business people want (and need) lightweight, bottom-up, agile communications systems, and Yammer provides this, especially well for the iPhone.

Twitter for Business

Yammer is best described as a mixture of Twitter, IM, SMS, and email but with some added capabilities such as beefier security, filtered groups, and sustained (searchable) conversations. Think Twitter-on-steroids. This is a cousin of Twitter with a decided tilt for business use, and not by accident; founded by former executives and early employees of PayPal, eGroups, eBay, and Tribe. They also won the Best In Show award ($50,000) for the 2008 TechCrunch 50.

Yammer also supports desktop and native device clients for the iPhone, Blackberry, Windows, and Mac. And best of all, enterprise IT developers can use their comprehensive API to build custom applications or integrate Yammer services into any enterprise application.

Economy of Motion

The Yammer iPhone client is superb; a delicate blend of UI functionality that brings the best of Yammer to the palm of your hand. In an instant, you can gain situational awareness and respond to issues. Best of all, Yammer clients support threaded messaging and raises the bar past (way past) 140 characters. Yammer takes the philosophical idea of short messaging to a new level with a variety of features that businesses cannot live without.

Directory Integration - your company’s internal directory management services can be used to manage employee accounts.

Account Suspension – administrators can force employees to revalidate their account.

Keyword Monitoring – useful in situations where internal compliance is important or leveraging conversations for increased awareness of information capital.

IP Range Restriction – important if you need to restrict access to your office network of VPN.

Password Policy Management – critical in helping users create and sustain strong passwords.

Usage Policy Management – forces users to agree to the policy before access your private Yammer network.

Message Data Export – a clear advantage for companies that want to push conversations into internal portals, search systems, and knowledge bases.

Multi-Domain Networks – a key advantage if you have employees that must communicate across multiple domains securely.

The Wide End of the KM Funnel

iPhone is poised to play an important role in enterprise KM (knowledge management) solutions; a key success factor (as mentioned in Corporate Amnesia? Evernote for iPhone May Have the Cure) is the availability of native clients that enterprise workers actually want to use. Yammer delivers on this requirement – its simplicity and functionality makes for quick use scenarios that leave you feeling like you’re getting things done. Over time, Yammer will also help your business build a knowledge base of your conversations with hashtag support (like Twitter). Like Evernote, this tool is ideal for managing the outer edge of the KM funnel where interruptions and artifacts are flying at you from all angles and with increasing frequency.