Social networking vendor Yammer is a strong contender for the "Twitter in the Enterprise" crown. However, as subscribers to our social collaboration research know, just being a micro-blogging / activity stream service (even if you are the most well-known game in town) no longer suffices. Use cases around Enterprise Conversation may seem like the low hanging fruit of the social / collaboration initiatives. As adoption and maturity of social software increases, enterprises are increasingly looking beyond these to more advanced and complex collaboration use cases.

In other words, a predominantly micro-blogging oriented software without other collaboration oriented features / applications risks becoming a social ghetto. Yammer often becomes such a social silo today: employees can take notice of different conversations happening in the enterprise, but to act upon them and to get any meaningful work done, they have to shift to different applications / systems.  In short, easy to talk, harder to act.

Now, Yammer is taking baby steps towards enabling document-centric collaboration. It has acquired oneDrum, (a UK based company with less than 10 employees) for an application that lets multiple users edit Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files at the same time. According to a Techcrunch report, the oneDrum features will get added to Yammer in a few months time.  In theory the user experience for collaborative editing will go something like this: folders corresponding to your Yammer groups get created on your desktop and any edits you make to the files in the desktop will get synced to Yammer as well as your coworkers in those groups.

In this day of the cloud and GoogleDocs with their models of centrally hosted documents, a peer-to-peer fileshare model does feel a bit quaint. Certain questions about architecture, network capacity, security, and scalability also come to mind, but I'll hold them back until we see the product in action later this year.

Essentially, this acquisition signals Yammer's intent to break out of its silo and expand its footprint into the bigger world of enterprise collaboration, where documents, workflows, and business processes rule roost. That is already a crowded field with both

• Traditional collaboration vendors, who're busy applying fresh coats of social paint to their software
• Social platform / suite vendors, who also have a head start over Yammer in this respect

Only time will tell if Yammer can acquire new stripes and become a social software suite, but it won't be an easy transition.