Even though networking has emerged as a major online trend, many corporate entities outside of the Web periphery have been a bit wary and slack in terms of adopting the social sites as handy workplace tools. There may be close to 850 million people connecting with their colleagues and friends on Facebook, and millions more on LinkedIn, Twitter etc, relatively less people check into in-house social networks for collaborating with their co-workers. But that may also be changing…

According to the Gartner Research Director, Nikos Drakos, social business is not any longer for early adopters alone; it’s fast emerging as a mainstream phenomenon. The market is rapidly evolving, which calls for powerful solutions for real business problems. It offers an effortless and effective collaboration experience by seamlessly merging into day-to-day workflows.

Yammer, one of the popular enterprise social networks boasts of around 4 million users. It raised $85 million of funds in a round including Charles River Ventures, DFJ Growth, and Founders Fund among others. It has secured $142 million from VCs so far. An official note on the site mentions:

“Yammer brings the power of social networking to the enterprise in a private and secure environment. It’s as easy to use as great consumer software like Facebook and Twitter, but designed for business collaboration. Connect people, content, and conversations across all of your business applications with productivity software that employees love to use.”

UserVoice integration with Yammer

• Meanwhile UserVoice, a customer service solution online, has gone in for new technology integration with Yammer.
• It pushes feedback gathered from customers or employees in UserVoice into the Yammer Ticker directly as part of a real-time activity stream.
• Yammer has also opted for several enhancements to its ESN software, comprising updates in aspects like search, groups and mobile, apart from expanded integration with certain third-party products (for example, the Microsoft Dynamics enterprise applications).
• An updated Universal Search feature lets users sift through Yammer content from within pre-integrated 3rd party software like SAP, Salesforce.com, and Microsoft SharePoint.

But Yammer is not the lone dominant player in the domain! Another popular enterprise social network, Jive Software, which was listed in December, claims a user base of 17 million. Jive also claims to be among the first to fuse the innovation of the new-edge consumer web with the enterprise domain by breaking down the barriers that separate employees, partners, and customers.

Jive claims to extend social business capabilities

It has recently unveiled its ‘next-generation’ interface, incorporating many new business-friendly features and introducing a new, cutting-edge social business technology. The new Jive Software platform is available immediately in the cloud. A user can access multiple Twitter accounts as well as Facebook, including specific company-owned fan pages with Jive Software that spans the whole Social Business Software implementations life-cycle.

Jive Anywhere extends social business capabilities to the web at large, letting business owners easily access social functions from any site or web application. Another feature enables users to invoke business-friendly applications and seamlessly merge them into the social business workflow.