It’s interesting to see how our online communication has changed over the last 5 years. A strange side effect of this has been that business, in most cases, still are a bit behind on the social communication. In example e-mail is still the main form of communication, even though this is clearly not the best solution for everything. Furthermore we tend to use the external social sources available like Linkedin, Twitter or Facebook to expand our networks and connect better professionally as well.
This being said I still felt the need for an extra platform besides the already external tools. In my view these internal social networks need to function to prosper team collaboration, be private to the enterprise, make information easier to find and above all make work more social. These are all things that have become more important due to the fact that teams operate from different offices, work from home or are even in other countries.
I have had my eye out for these type of tools for a while, but only recently(red beginning of 2012) I came across two platforms that do exactly what I was looking for to for fill this need for the enterprise own social network. These tools are Chatter which is part of the Salesforces.com suite and Yammer. Just hit the jump to see some more in detail what these suites are about.
Yammer
Chatter
Here is a good introduction to Chatter from YouTube.
All in all I believe these type of tools are the future of our business communication. At the moment the tools are practically identical. The only key differentiating factor seems to be that Chatter can linked to your existing Salesforce CRM solution.