All the rest of the stuff that clogs in-boxes — mass e-mails sharing a link to an article, for example, or notifications of company events — makes e-mail less efficient. He wants to move all that to Yammer.
Mr. Sacks believes that Yammer can rise above all that. "If we're successful, ultimately people will see e-mail and I.M. as simply delivery channels for Yammer content," he said.
On a recent day at Yammer, for example, one employee sent around a link to an article about a new social networking experiment at Yahoo. The company's lawyer wrote that he was working on employee stock option agreements and several employees responded with questions about the options package. Someone announced that the catered lunch menu included California rolls and chicken kebabs.
Yammer is free for anyone with a company e-mail address. Mr. Sacks hopes that it spreads within companies and catches the eye of the higher-ups. At that point, a worried I.T. employee or executive usually calls Yammer and asks about the security features. Those include limiting the I.P. addresses that can read a company account, requiring passwords, cutting off ex-employees and removing certain messages. Once a company administrator takes over, Yammer charges $1 per user per month.
Mr. Sacks hopes to skirt the I.T. department and empower employees. "Instead of the most jaded person about new technology in the company making the decision, the most forward-thinking person in the company can do it," he said. People are itching to use the Web tools they use at home in the office, he said, and this is a way to speed the process. It also saves Yammer money on an expensive enterprise salesforce.
Some people have complained that this strategy is tantamount to blackmail, Mr. Sacks said, because it forces companies to sign up to control it since their employees are already using it. He disagrees — an I.T. department can always block Yammer's Web site, he pointed out.
In the first six weeks, 60,000 users have signed on, and 4,000 of them have convinced their companies to pay. People at Cisco Systems, Xerox and Hewlett-Packard use it. Mr. Sacks has received calls from a farm equipment supplier with thousands of remote sales reps, a motion picture company that already has 400 employees using Yammer and a casino company that has 25,000 employees in other countries.
Yammer is a new way to do a lot of stuff we already do at work. Social enterprise software like Clearspace from Jive Software and SharePoint from Microsoft offer some of these features. Companies already use Twitter and Facebook to communicate with co-workers. For many years, instant messaging has been solving a lot of the problems that Mr. Sacks has with e-mail.
What do you think? Do workers need a new way to communicate? Or will Yammer be yet another inbox to keep up with in an already cluttered digital world?
