Top 10 Enterprise Social Software

Latest news about Enterprise Social Software

2023. Microsoft ditches Yammer brand and goes all-in on Viva Engage



Microsoft has confirmed that it’s finally killing off Yammer, the enterprise social network it procured more than a decade ago for $1.2 billion. Despite Microsoft’s best efforts to bring Yammer to the masses by integrating it into its core Office suite of products, Microsoft has set about developing tangential communication tools such as Microsoft Teams, which the company integrated with Yammer in 2019. And then two years ago, Microsoft launched Viva, pitched as an “employee experience platform” that was something akin to the corporate intranet of yore. In the intervening months, Microsoft has been turbo-charging Viva, and last year it launched Viva Engage, which it said at the time was an “evolution of the Yammer Communities app.”


2022. Happeo lands $26M to provide a central intranet portal for employees



Happeo, a startup developing intranet software to connect employees with company tools, has raised $26M. Happeo aims to connect teams and people in an “organic way”, letting them create channels and pages around projects and mutual interests. The platform brings resources and apps together in a searchable home portal, with a launcher that allows employees to jump into different software. Happeo’s “federated search” capability can search across a company’s various internal tools. Beyond this, the service — which integrates with Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace — offers a place to host shared files and documents. On the back end, an analytics dashboard shows metrics like channel, page and post engagement, as well as search activity (e.g., the most searched keywords).

2020. Facebook’s Workplace, now with 5M paying users, adds drop-in video Rooms and more



Facebook announced a number of new products coming to Workplace, its enterprise-focused chat and video platform, including Workplace versions of Rooms (its Houseparty video drop-in clone) and Work Groups (basically smaller groups you could create on Facebook to chat directly to your colleagues outside of your wider circle of friends). The key element of Rooms that will stand out for Workplace users is that those who are on Workplace already can use it to create links that others can use to drop in, even if they’re not a part of the user’s Workplace group or on Facebook itself. Like Zoom or the others, essentially it’s a URL link that will let anyone with a camera, a microphone, a browser and a connection link in. Workplace now has 5 million paying users (and millions more using it for free)


2020. Workvivo, a platform for employee culture, raises a $16M



Workvivo, an employee communications platform founded only three years ago, has raised $16 million in a Series A funding. Workvivo has taken a different approach from Jive or Facebook Workplace to creating an internal communications platform designed to engage and connect with employees. The platform is known for creating a sense of community and belonging to the organization, the kind of which you might get from a highly engaged Facebook group that you were a fan of. Through web, desktop and a mobile app, Workvivo allows employees to read and post content to an activity feed, as well as ‘like,’ share and comment in the same way they might on Facebook. It’s in the same ecosystem as Slack, but where Slack doesn’t do “culture” so well. Netgear, TELUS International and Cubic Telecom are among the many companies now using it.


2020. LumApps raises $70M for its social intranet



LumApps, the cloud-based social intranet for the enterprise, has closed $70 million in Series C funding. LumApps develops what it describes as a “social intranet” for enterprises to enable employees to better informed, connect and collaborate. The SaaS integrates with other enterprise software such as G Suite, Microsoft Office 365 and Microsoft SharePoint, to centralize access to corporate content, business applications and social features under a single platform. The central premise is to help companies “break down silos” and streamline internal communication. LumApps customers include Airbus, Veolia, Valeo, Air Liquide, Colgate-Palmolive, The Economist, Schibsted, EA, Logitech, Toto, and Japan Airlines, and the company claims to have achieved year-on-year revenue growth of 100%.


2019. Google launched Currents to replace Google+ for business



Google+ for consumers is officially dead, but it’s still alive for enterprise users. Even better, it has a new name - Currents. Like before, Google+/Currents is meant to give employees a place to share knowledge and provide them with a place for internal discussions. Maybe this move will also allow the remaining developers on the project to leave the failed legacy of Google+ behind and try something new. As the only focus is now on business users, that should be fairly easy, even though the code base surely still reflects a time when Google’s leadership thought that social search was the future.


2018. Google+ for G Suite lives on and gets new features



While Google’s social network Google+ is closing for consumers, the business version will live on for the foreseeable future — and it’s getting a bunch of new features. Google+ for G Suite isn’t all that different from the Google+ for consumers, but its focus is very much on allowing users inside a company to easily share information. The new features that Google is announcing today give admins more tools for managing and reviewing posts, allow employees to tag content and provide better engagement metrics to posters. Tags now make it easy for employees to route content to everybody in the company, no matter which group they work in. G Suite customers who keep their reporting structure in the service will be able to provide analytics to employees so they can see how their posts are being viewed across the company and which teams engage most with them.


2018. Zoho Connect gets Projects integration, board templates


Zoho Connect, the platform for social collaboration, got Zoho Projects integration, so you can now convert your conversations into actions. You can create new tasks in Projects, directly from any of your Connect conversations, and start tracking their progress. You can also view and access tasks from all your Projects portals in Connect. Zoho Connect also got ShowTime integration to deliver your presentations and training. Another new feature - board templates - allow to simply pick any of your existing project boards and re-use them anytime you want.


2018. Facebook Workplace gets 50 new app integrations



Facebook has added to its Workplace business software with 50 new app integrations from the likes of ServiceNow, Atlassian’s Jira Cloud and Microsoft Sharepoint. Workplace had only a handful of integrations at first, including Office 365, Salesforce and OneDrive. The new integrations mean that it is extending its focus from collaboration to automation and IT integration, The integrations are available through the new Workplace app discovery portal that include also SurveyMonkey, Cornerstone onDemand, Workday, and Smartsheet.


2017. Collaboration software company Jive acquired by Aurea



Jive, a community collaboration software company, is acquired by ESW Capital’s Wave Systems for $462 million. It will become part of the Aurea family of companies. The plan is to integrate Jive into Aurea’s customer experience management platform. The acquisition gives Aurea a tool for creating internal and customer-facing communities, a key piece in today’s customer service environment. It also gives them access to Jive’s customer base, which includes T Mobile, Schneider Electric, McAfee and EMC.


2017. Facebook introduced bots into Workplace



Facebook announced a bunch of updates to its Workplace by Facebook team communications tool. The company is also introducing bots into the Workplace experience in both Messenger and Group chat, which puts it on par with what Slack has been doing for some time. These bots are powerful entities, which you can call upon to help out. For instance, if there is an equipment problem, you could call on @repairbot to find someone to fix it. Developers can build bots for work chat and for Groups to do tasks like help order food or order a Lyft.  Workplace also gets new integrations with Box, Microsoft and Quip/Salesforce. That means when you share a file in a Facebook group, instead of just a link, you’ll see a thumbnail and when you click it, you go directly to the file for editing or commenting.


2017. Microsoft retires Yammer as stand-alone service



Microsoft is replacing the stand-alone enterprise social network Yammer in favor of deeper levels of integration with Office 365 services. Last year Microsoft turned on Yammer by default for all eligible Office 365 customers. Since then, the vast majority of Yammer customers use it as part of an Office 365 subscription. The new customers that want to use Yammer will have to sign up for an eligible Office 365 plan. In a notice about Yammer, Microsoft explained it was "strengthening Yammer integration" with various Office 365 collaboration tools including SharePoint, OneNote and Planner.


2016. Facebook Workplace will open app store to compete with Slack



One of the success secrets of the super-popular collaboration service Slack is its ability to easily integrate third-party business apps. For example, it lets your team quickly discuss the new deal pulled from CRM system or process the new ticket that came from Helpdesk or add to discussion a customer that is using Skype. Facebook has found out this secret and now wants to replicate it in its new enterprise social network Workplace. For this they are launching a platform for developers that enables easy integration with other apps. Then these integrations will appear in the Workplace app store. For now the network features integration with Google's G Suite, Microsoft's cloud Active Directory and with single sign-on services Okta and OneLogin.


2016. Facebook launched enterprise social network Workplace


After two-year testing Facebook at last opened the enterprise version of its social network called Workplace. It's the copy of Facebook, but separate for each company. Employee accounts are not linked to their Facebook accounts. Otherwise it provides the same social tools: profiles, newsfeed, groups, chat, live-presentations, video-calls. The pricing starts from $3/user/month. The product will fit large companies that intend to build a team from hundreds and thousands of employees that don't know each other. Of course it's not the first internal social network on the market, but may be Facebook knows some secret ingredient and will revolutionize the Enterprise (like iPad, that wasn't the first tablet on the market). For example, if many companies deploy Workspace, and Facebook adds inter-corporate social tools - it may give interesting results.


2016. Yammer now allows to create External groups



Microsoft announced the new external groups feature in Yammer, enabling you to include people outside your company in a Yammer group—making it easier for extended teams to work together. External groups allow team members with appropriate permissions from outside your organization to fully participate in projects and initiatives by providing access to all the conversations and content in the group. The external groups capability builds on the existing ways to work with people outside your company, such as external networks and external messaging, which enables you to add people outside your organization directly to a thread in your organization’s Yammer network.


2015. Salesforce adds shopping layer to its Community Cloud



Customers of Salesforce Community Cloud will soon be able to add their own buy buttons. The Community Cloud allows businesses to build sites where customers can interact with the company and with each other. For example, Avid Technology, which makes audio and video production tools, has used these Community Cloud capabilities to support its Artist Community, where users can buy and sell sound effects, stock footage and other music and video clips from each other. Other early customers include Neil Young’s PonoMusic and the Deloitte Digital Hub. Mike Stone, the senior vice president of marketing for Salesforce Community Cloud, said that the Customer Cloud can automatically recommend the right product that’s relevant in a given discussion: “We’re really using the social graph and what we understand about how the community is evolving to go and make those recommendations.”


2015. 3 new Jive workstyle apps aim to simplify workplace collaboration



Social collaboration software Jive unveiled three new workstyle apps: Jive Daily, Jive Chime and Jive People. Jive Daily helps to get the word out, drive conversations and analyze communications impact in real time. Because it’s an app, workers can check in easily to see what the company brass or colleagues have to say and to find out about what’s going on at the company that’s relevant to them. Jive Chime is a vehicle for communicating from your mobile device with text or instant message like experiences without sacrificing access to your personal cell phone number or personal IM identity. And Jive People a company directory 2.0 with workplace graph. When you identify the person you want to talk to, all you have to do is hit a button to reach out to them via e-mail, phone call or Jive Chime.


2014. Jive integrates with Office 365



Enterprise social collaboration provider Jive has built software connectors for Microsoft Office 365, including Outlook Online, Office Online, SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business. What this means for Jive users is that it will be nearly effortless to create and collaborate on documents, spreadsheets and presentations, as well as email, whether they are working with Office on premise, in the cloud or somewhere in between. And because enterprises are unlikely to move everything to Office 365 at


2014. Micro Focus buying Novell, Suse Linux owner for $1.2 billion



In a move that will collect a lot of infrastructure software under one roof, English mainframe software provider Micro Focus has started proceedings to merge with Attachmate Group, owners of Novell and Suse Linux, for approximately US$1.2 billion. Micro Focus will get four software product portfolios: Novell (software for employee productivity, printing and networking software), Attachmate (software for terminal emulation, legacy modernization and managed file transfer), Suse (Linux and Linux-based cloud software), NetIQ (identity, access and security management software). A merger of the companies makes sense given that both are established enterprise software vendors with global marketing reach and little overlap in either products or customers.


2014. Salesforce launches Community Cloud


Salesforce.com launched its 4th cloud (after Sales, Marketing, Service Clouds) - Salesforce1 Community Cloud. Essentially it's a remake of Salesforce Communities product released in June 2013. Unlike Chatter, that is focused on internal networking and collaboration, Community Cloud allows customers or partners to interact with one another and with company personnel if required. So it's something like a private LinkedIn. Community members can follow topics and people and identify their areas of expertise. Community cloud is linked to Service Cloud (unanswered or difficult questions can be escalated) and to Sales Cloud (new community memebers become leads,).  Features in today's launch become available in October. The Salesforce1 Community Cloud starts at $500 per month.


2014. Zoho Connect allows to create external networks



Zoho's enterprise social network solution Zoho Connect gets new feature - External networks? that enables businesses to extend collaboration capabilities to their partners, suppliers, agents, franchises or contract workers. Zoho Connect’s external networks are no different from the internal network for employees. They have the same interface and tools. With external networks, businesses can leverage the collective knowledge and creativity of partners or vendors and arrive at smarter solutions. Additionally, Zoho also added newer features to Zoho Connect to enhance collaboration capabilities for businesses. Chatroom, events, network analytics, AD integration are the new features.


2014. Zoho Connect gets hashtags



Enterprise social networking service Zoho Connect makes searching and organizing posts easier with new feature - Hashtags. Hashtags allow to organize your news feed and help you easily find threads and stay updated on the latest. With hashtagging, you can easily browse through large chunks of archived conversations across your organization. Search and follow tagged conversations. This way, you can look for conversations around a particular topic, and also get email notifications every time someone uses a tag you follow.


2014. Yammer adds conversations to OneDrive and SharePoint Online files


Microsoft has unveiled today the new social feature for Office 365 - document conversations – which embeds the social collaboration capabilities of Yammer into the Office apps. Here’s how document conversations work. When you open a file in your browser from your cloud store, you see the file on the left with a contextual Yammer conversation in a pane on the right. You can collapse and expand the Yammer pane as needed. You can do more than join in a conversation from the Yammer pane. You can also post a message, @mention your coworkers, and publish to a Yammer group—either public or private. Because it’s Yammer you can also view and participate in conversations outside your document, on your mobile device, in Microsoft Dynamics CRM or any app where a Yammer feed is embedded. Document conversations are progressively being rolled out to our customers during the course of this summer where it will then be available across all sites within a tenant.


2014. Bitrix24 launches inter-company social messenger



Social collaboration tool Bitrix24 is launching a new, free instant messenger called Bitrix24.Network, that enables communication and collaboration between users from different companies (think "Skype for business"). It allows users to create free collaboration workspaces with private and group chats, audio and video calls. File sharing, online document editing and other tools already available in Bitrix24 will be added to the network in the coming months. Besides, Bitrix24 added internal email server, powered by Yandex Mail. It allows to create mailboxes in domain @bitrix24.com (or your own domain) for each employee and add business mail to the portal menu.


2014. Convo adds GIF and in-stream Doc support



Convo, a social platform that lets workers post messages to and chat with others in their company in real time, has added support for GIFs and significantly improved document support. Users are now able to start highlighting and annotating certain passages in documents that they upload to Convo, viewing full files from within the app, and linking to files in the cloud via Dropbox and Box. The whole app is also speeding up in terms of how long it takes to a person to view images and files within the desktop and mobile apps. Convo competes with Yammer, Slack, Hipchat and some other enterprise social networks, that provide extensive real-time and mobile features.


2014. Cisco-Jive and 5 other Unified Collaboration leaders



Large enterprise customers have become so impatient. They want one thing in one place — right now, in real time - the solution that provides collaboration and social interactions and communications and doesn't require long integration project. That's why, software vendors invented the new term "Unified Collaboration" and now sell their solutions under this sauce. Of course, not any IT giant can build such system. Sometimes they need to unite. In particular, the unified communications leader Cisco recently partnered with social networking provider Jive and announced that now it has the best solution on the market. However, experts note that Cisco has five strong competitors: Microsoft (Yammer + Lync), IBM (IBM Connections + IBM Sametime), Citrix (GoToMeeting + Podio), Siemens (Unify + Ansible), Salesforce (Chatter + DimDim). However, the last two vendors are currently only potential because their UC solutions are not quite ready yet.


2014. Unison - virtual rooms for collaboration and discussions



The new service Unison - is an interesting combination of intranet chat, internal social network and video-conferencing. It allows to create virtual rooms in which you can invite colleagues and communicate with them in format of activity stream, as well as via voice and video chat. In the sidebar you see co-workers that are currently in this room or online (in other rooms). It's possible to speak to co-worker personally via Gmail-like chat. Unison provides a mobile version so it's possible to communicate and collaborate from your phone.  The service has a free version for 5 users, which includes also audio and video calls. Paid version starts from $8/month per user. You can also buy the system in a box to install on your own server.


2013. Video: How to work remotely if you are Boss


Here it is - the dream of any executive - working effectively and managing company from home or elsewhere (out of office). We already reviewed some telepresence systems that allow CEO to remotely work in the office using a robot on the wheels. Remember Anybots or Botiful for example. But the guys from Double Robotics (or rather, their fans from Mashable) most correctly realize what robot would be ideal for CEO and how it should work in the office. Watch this cool video. By the way, this robot costs $2,499, not including the iPad, which is used as the robot head. But for such pleasure - you probably won't mind to spend such money.


2013. Google+ is not for ads. Ads are for Google+



Google still hasn't added ads to its social network Google+. You can't neither promote posts or pay for sidebar ads like on Facebook. But why? After all, Google - is the King of advertising and it has millions of advertisers ready to pay? Because Google already for two years is (unsuccessfully) trying to attract users from Facebook and doesn't want to scare them with ads. And you know what they invented? They decided to open ads service to Google+. And this services allows to turn any post (or Hangout) into ad block. But these blocks will be shown not on Google+, but on all the external sites in Google's advertising network (Adsense). This block will be like a window to Google+ on the third-party site and will attract users not only to the promoted post, but also to Google's social network. For now this Google+ advertising service is available only for big brands like Toyota (watch the video above).


2013. Bitrix24 adds VoIP-webphone, live CRM stream, collaborative folders



Bitrix24, the multi-functional social intranet service, is launching the new version. It allows to call customers right from the system web-interface using webRTC-softphone. The calls are registered in the customer profiles. Optionally, you can also store call records. Bitrix24 uses Zingaya as VoIP-provider and its VoIP fees are even lower than Skype. Before now Bitrix only allowed to make internal calls to collegues within company and use any other desktop IP telephony application (Skype, Lync, or other) for external calls. Second new feature is a separate activity-stream in CRM section. It allows to track deals, sales-person and customer activities in real time. Besides, Bitrix24 Drive (the app that allows to sync files between the local machine and intranet) added a new collaboration feature. Until now it allowed you to store all documents and files in the "cloud ", edit them offline and sync changes when you connect the Internet. Now this scenario works not only for files, but also for shared folders.