Yammer planning location and mobile push in product overhaul

Yammer plans to launch a revamp of its user interface and offer new location services for mobile users within the next 12 months, V3 has learnt.

Yammer chief technology officer and co-founder, Adam Pisoni, told V3 that his engineers are currently developing two distinct areas of the social network: furthering its integration with Microsoft Office products, and creating growth and engagement within the Yammer product itself.

Microsoft bought the Yammer social networking firm in June 2012 for $1.2bn, and until now the two companies have largely focussed on of the integration of their businesses and product portfolios.

But Pisoni said Yammer engineers are now focussed on developing the service to make it more engaging and relevant to customers, with offices in London key to this work.

"You'll see some big changes on the interface side in the next year. Our London team are working on some of the most exciting developments," he said.

"We want to encourage open conversation within the network but at the same time make the content more relevant from a workflow perspective. We've got well defined ideas of how to get there and have figured out what they key aspects of being social in a company are."

Meanwhile, on the mobile side, Yammer plans to launch location services to users as well as a host of other mobile features, possibly involving photo sharing capabilities, across all major mobile platforms.

"There are features that are specific to mobiles, like location awareness capabilities and camera settings. At the moment we don't track where messages are coming from. So we plan to launch Yammer features that will only be available to mobile users in the next year," said Pisoni.

"We are increasing our investment in mobile and aim to get mobile development to go as fast as web development, so we can think about product development across all platforms at once. At the moment Yammer is primary a website but soon we aim to have Yammer as primarily a service."