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Yammer Communities Extends Microblogging
to Customers, Partners
by Clint Boulton
Yammer Communities
Private microblogging networks help users reach out from behind their firewalls to connect with partners, customers and suppliers.
Communities Tab
The arrow points to the new Communities tab in the redesigned Yammer interface.
Communities List
Here is a sample Yammer Communities list view.
Community Creation
To create a community, users will input a network name, description and thumbnail, and invite other users by e-mail. Communities may be set up so that only an administrator or any user can invite new contacts to a Communities network.
Community Toggling
Users with multiple Communities can easily toggle back and forth between various Communities networks, creating related ties between each network. The numbers in the drop-down menu indicate how many messages users have in each separate network.
New Community
A new Customer Support Community has been created.
Communities Directory
This is how it appears in the Communities directory.
Manage Your Account
Under the account drop-down menu, users may manage their networks, applications and other settings.
Communities Are Secure
Yammer pledges free and premium security tools to help protect corporate microblogging.
Communities on the iPhone
That's right. Yammer Communities will work on Apple's iPhone at launch March 1.
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When Yammer CEO David Sacks unveiled Yammer Communities on Feb. 25, he opened a new door for companies interested in using Twitter-like status updates to communicate with customers and partners. A free service, with the potential for additional security features, Yammer Communities lets users who don't share the same e-mail domain communicate securely. Available March 1, the offering could help Yammer gain more traction as it seeks to compete with Socialtext, Socialcast and others that offer enterprise microblogging. See a tour of Yammer Communities here.