jonh
In my day job – that as a web developer and graphics designer for a Portland Oregon church – one tool that I’ve experimented with and have found more and more use for is something called Yammer. It was a recent winner of the TechCrunch50 award, which is one of the larger yearly events that recognizes the best web tools being developed by cutting edge companies around the world.
Why Yammer? One of the great challenges in any organization with teams of people working on projects is communication. Essentially, what Yammer provides is Twitter-like services to organizations so you can track your team – what they’re working on plus anything they want to pass along – via a simple web interface and/or a desktop application (available for all platforms). The service itself is domain-name based which means that it’s limited to JUST your organization and only users with an email account under your domain name can be a part of your Yammer network.
Example: If I ran a cool company like “Snowboarding Year-Round, Unlimited” and our domain name was “snowyearround.com” – I can create a Yammer network for my domain name and add anyone in my organization to the network like “joe@snowyearround.com” and “katie@snowyearround.com” and even “slacker@snowyearround.com” to make sure he stays on task.
Cost? It’s free unless you want some of the advanced features such as the ability to add a logo and do some other higher level management tasks. The free version is more than ample to accomplish the tasks we need.
Side-note – for all you fellow geeks out there, this was a bit of a controversial choice for TechCrunch because Yammer shares a LOT of similarities with the already popular Twitter. Many were upset that they didn’t pick a company doing something truly “new” and “unique”… Personally, I just like it when people see a need and set out to fill it. Good job Yammer…
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