As it promised back in February, Microsoft has finally ditched the Yammer brand for its enterprise-based social networking and organization services. Today, the company revealed that the Yammer.com site has been renamed Viva Engage.
In a blog post, Microsoft added that other Yammer branded apps and services, including the Yammer SharePoint webpart, Yammer Embed, Outlook notifications, and Yammer mobile app are all renamed under the Viva Engage brand.
The Yammer URLs and APIs won't get changed by Microsoft until the end of 2023, but those Yammer URLs will now redirect automatically to the new Viva Engage address. Yammer will also still be shown as the email sender for Outlook notifications, but the actual emails will be shown as Viva Engage.
Yammer first launched as a startup in 2008 offering a different way for enterprise customers to create internal social networks for their employees. It eventually got 80% of Fortune 500 companies to sign up for its services. In 2012, Microsoft decided to acquire Yammer for $1.2 billion.
However, both of Yammer's co-founders decided to leave just a few years after Microsoft bought the the company. While Microsoft continued to invest in Yammer, including a major redesign that launched in 2020, it also launched its own "Employee Experience Platform" called Viva in early 2021. In 2022, it launched Viva Engage, which Microsoft admitted was an "evolution of the Yammer Communities app in Microsoft Teams."
In the end, it looks like Microsoft decided to use its own in-house developed brand and technology for enterprise customer networking in favor of the one that it bought over a decade ago. On July 11, Microsoft will hold a virtual event with the Viva Engage team as it will reveal what's next in terms of new features and improvement, and also to answer questions about the rebranding from Yammer.
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