In my mind Yammer could:

1.) Offer an opt-out capability that is allow a user from a company to request that they block users from their company, when someone from @email tries to sign-up they get an email with the person’s message who requested that they “block” sign-ups for the company. This way the person could still engage with the individual to determine proper usage etc.

2.) Would be to simply provide all management features with a limited number of users, say 50/100 users.

In my mind Yammer could:

1.) Offer an opt-out capability that is allow a user from a company to request that they block users from their company, when someone from @email tries to sign-up they get an email with the person’s message who requested that they “block” sign-ups for the company. This way the person could still engage with the individual to determine proper usage etc.

2.) Would be to simply provide all management features with a limited number of users, say 50/100 users.

The best model depends of the size and business of the company I think. For
large companies or companies in sensitive industries, the claiming model you
have and Present.ly adopted is a negative. For small and medium businesses,
it can be — wrongly in my opinion — appealing. So in the end, what matters
for the start-ups in this space are the respective market size of the 2
markets.

I actually agree 100% with your last point, especially for social enterprise
software. Without directory integration, my reasoning is: employees can’t
talk about business critical issues and if Yammer just used for casual
points, not much more value than twitter.

We agree on the fact that employees should be the ones adopting an
application. IT functions need to give them the means to do it.

To facilitate this process, I think adopting the right pricing model is
critical. I have described one possible model here:
http://www.macroprinciples.com/2009/02/how-to-p...

I would be really interested in your feedback on this point…

Many thanks for the stimulating points!

Best regards,
- Julien

Yammer now offers directory integration / SSO. We are piloting it with some early customers and then it will become part of our basic admin tools package on the website.

Since your original article, Present.ly copied our approach of letting employees sign up with a company email address first, before the company claims the network. Obviously they did not believe that their model was the superior one.

Seriously, what’s the harm in letting employees test drive a product before the company buys it? Isn’t that better than the alternative? How many times has IT purchased expensive software only to see no one adopt it? Yammer lets the employees prove the need before the company buys it.

Regards,

David

PS: I like your idea of an enterprise TweetDeck. We will support it.

I have sent them an email to get more details on the specifics, as they do have an history of inflating their claims, but it looks certainly much better than before.

As Yammer announced that the Yammer software can be installed inside the company firewalls, does this change your views?
http://blog.yammer.com/blog/2009/02/yammer-exte...

IP filtering: some remote access solutions cannot be allowed with this. This
is not the most important point however: a large part of the value derived
from Twitter-like applications stems from their accessibility via SMS, from
any computer, etc. I don’t see the point of deploying this if it can only be
used from the company’s network or assets. Do I want to open my company
laptop and connect via VPN each time I want to update my status? Not at all.
This workaround limits too much the value of the application, especially as
a mobile application accessible on the go.

So, no, until you offer SSO, Yammer doesn’t handle former employees well. In
fact, claiming that is misleading because former employees can easily slip
through the manual monitoring and remain on the network for quite some time.

Regarding the value of Yammer for security reasons over email, again this is
misleading, since you encourage the employees to create content that
companies will want to control, and you make companies pay afterwards. I
could go on and on. As Stowe Boyd found
out<http://www.stoweboyd.com/message/2008/12/presently—cre.html>as
well,
Present.ly is a much more attractive Twitter-like application for companies,
with a much cleaner business model.

Adopting an aggressive tone by arguing my “slandering of Yammer is
preposterous” won’t change the fact that your business model is essentially
based on a new twist of racketing companies to take back the control over an
unsecure discussion space.

PS: And when you will have SSO, you will again make companies pay for the
privilege to have SSO implemented on their network. I stand by my position,
and would advise anyone to ban access to Yammer from the corporate network,
make it against policy to contribute to it, while at the same time implement
an alternative like Present.ly where price and control can be managed
properly.

PPS: Reminder of my disclaimer: as anything on this website, this is my
personal opinion, not a professional one nor is it related in any way to the
positions or actions of my employer.

In contrast to your assertions, Yammer handles the case of former employees well. First of all, company admins can easily remove former employees. The community can also police itself by requiring any user to re-confirm their company email address at any time. For large companies, Yammer plans to add single sign-on / directory integration shortly.

Companies can also restrict access to their Yammer network to a particular IP range, such as their VPN. You fail to explain why this would not keep out former employees.

Yammer also provides a huge advantage over traditional communications like email: former employees can easily take company emails with them, or forward them to someone outside the company. Yammer content stays within the company’s network on Yammer, where it can be controlled, deleted, or exported by company admins.

Your claim to advance the interests of SaaS by slandering Yammer is preposterous.

Regards,

David Sacks
CEO, Yammer