Microsoft's Various Integrations

Microsoft Office 365 and Yammer integration

Summary: Microsoft is providing more dates and details about how it is integrating its Yammer enterprise social-networking technology with Office 365.

On March 19, day one of Microsoft's annual Convergence conference, company officials shed more light on how Yammer's enterprise social-networking technology will be integrated into Office 365 and SharePoint in the coming year-plus.

Microsoft officials originally shared a roadmap regarding this integration in November 2012. But today, officials provided more dates and more details around the integration of Yammer feeds into SharePoint.

Last fall, Microsoft officials said in the "immediate future" Yammer and SharePoint would be unified via a single ID/sign-on, shared document-management capabilties and feed aggregation. In the longer term, the Softies said, the two would be integrated from an email, IM and video-conferencing perspective.

Here's what we know now about the updated Yammer integration roadmap:

• The ability to replace the SharePoint/Office 365 newsfeed with Yammer is coming this summer. According to Microsoft, some customers have been unsure as to whether they should use Yammer or SharePoint for their news feed. As of today, Microsoft's answer is "go Yammer" if possible, whether using Office 365 and/or SharePoint Online in the cloud or SharePoint on-premises.
• Microsoft will provide guidance on how to replace the SharePoint newsfeed with the Yammer newsfeed in SharePoint Server on-premises this summer.
• Single sign-on is coming this fall as part of an Office 365 update.
• The user experiences of Office 365 and Yammer start to converge this fall. (A fairly blurry mock-up of what this means is embedded in this post above.) This is also when the new Yammer experience will add "rich document capabilities" and integration of the Office Web Apps' editing/coediting of Word, PowerPoint and Excel documents

As of 2014, Microsoft is going to be updating Office 365 with "new social enhancements" every 90 days. Office 365 already is on a quarterly (or more frequent) update schedule. These social enhancements will include integration between social and collaboration/email/IM/voice/video and line-of-business appsAnd for those wondering when and whether any Yammer components will ever be hosted on Windows Azure, the answer is "nothing to share today."

Microsoft bought enterprise social-networking vendor Yammer for $1.2 billion in June 2012. At that time, Microsoft officials said they would integrate Yammer's technology with Office, Office 365, Dynamics (CRM) and Skype. Microsoft also committed to continue to provide Yammer as a standalone cloud service.

Microsoft expected to update its full suite of built-in Windows 8 apps

Summary: Microsoft appears ready to roll out the set of expected updates to its full set of core, Microsoft-developed Windows 8 applications, as rumored earlier this month.

It looks like Microsoft is poised to update almost all of its core Microsoft-developed apps that shipped with Windows 8.At the start of this month, I posted that Microsoft was expected to provide updates to everything, from Windows Mail to Xbox Music, some time in March.On March 22, Windows SuperSite editor Paul Thurrott discovered a stack of updates that are "installation ready" for Windows 8. These include:

• Microsoft.BingTravel
• Microsoft.Camera
• Microsoft.Bing
• Microsoft.Reader
• Microsoft.BingNews
• microsoft.windowsphotos (Photos)
• Microsoft.BingFinance
• microsoft.microsoftskydrive
• Microsoft.XboxLIVEGames
• Microsoft.ZuneVideo
• Microsoft.BingWeather
• Microsoft.ZuneMusic (Xbox Music)
• microsoft.windowscommunicationsapps (Mail, Calendar, People, Messaging)
• Microsoft.BingMaps
• Microsoft.BingSports

My original tipster said these apps would also be updated and made available for Windows RT this month. I've tried to find mention of pending updates on my Surface RT and so far cannot. (Wondering if anyone out there with a Windows RT device can see these. Chime in if so.)

Update: It appears this same batch of updates is also coming to Windows RT. Brad Pelletier (@bardo77n) just sent me this screen shot from his Surface RT:

I asked Microsoft again today for comment on when/if these major updates are going to be rolled out. I got a fresh, new "no comment."

Microsoft officials have acknowledged publicly that the Windows team is aware that the first-party apps on Windows 8 and Windows RT have room for improvement. Many users have been especially disappointed in the Mail and Music apps for the product, claiming they feel more like betas than full, featured, polished products. Even though they're free, many of us Windows 8/Windows RT users feel that these apps, developed by the Windows team, just aren't very good. (The Windows 8/Windows RT apps built by the Bing AppEx team, on the other hand, have been quite solid and usable.)

Microsoft is expected to deliver another set of major updates to all its core apps when it rolls out the Blue update for Windows 8 and Windows RT late this summer.