Business social network Yammer gained a good deal of attention with its explosive year of growth, a notable $85 million in funding in early March, followed by the acquisition of Scottish startup oneDrum.  Today brings Yammer’s first major update since the deal, integrating third party enterprise products to its business-ready social networking software and expanding its search, groups and mobile footprint.

Yammer has unveiled a new Universal Search feature that allows enterprise users to search Yammer content from within pre-integrated third-party software, including Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce.com, SAP and Microsoft SharePoint.  The activity data from these and other business software offerings are also displayed on a ticker.

The universal search feature will work both in cloud and behind the firewall, and comes with an API for custom integration.  Yammer’s social networking software now integrates with AffinityLive, Badgeville, Box, NetSuite, Planview, Salesforce.com, Expensify, GageIn, Kindling, Microsoft SharePoint 2010, SAP, Sparqlight, Spigit, Subscribe-HR, TripIt and Zendesk.

The addition of Microsoft Dynamics on the social software enables updates and events within Yammer’s activity streams. The Dynamics plug-in allows users to record activity around accounts, campaigns and opportunities in Yammer search results.

Integration with SAP ERP Central component allows updates from SAP’s software to appear as activities in Yammer’s Ticker.  SAP customers who have installed the SAP Connector will see updates of all components, including HR, ERP and CRM.

“By continuing to integrate with the best-in-class enterprise applications employees rely on to get work done, Yammer is delivering on its vision to be the social layer across all systems of record,” said David Sacks, CEO of Yammer. “With this robust partner ecosystem, we’re providing our users with the ultimate collaboration experience.”

In addition, Yammer has a new Analytics Dashboard that will allow customers to easily manage participation, conversations and activities across their Yammer networks. The dashboard provides statistics like the number of affected members, messages, best performing groups and log data.

Other improvements include the introduction of slide-out navigation in Yammer iPhone and Android mobile apps for easier access to features such as user profiles and groups and access to more file types.

A Better Way to Collaborate with Customers

Spending on social communication and collaboration tools is expected to grow at a compound annual rate of 61 percent through 2016, as reported by Forrester Research. The market is expected to reach $6.4 billion by 2016 compared with $600 million in 2010.

Social vendors are assimilating their social apps with broader collaboration platforms, such as Microsoft, IBM, Cisco, Salesforce.com, Oracle and SAP to boost external interaction with customers and partners.

Yammer’s Yammer Pages, Yammer Files and Yammer Ticker collaboration tools are integrated with Microsoft SharePoint to store, edit and discuss files within Yammer in real time.

Other enterprise social networking providers have been pushing new features of their own.  Jive Software recently introduced the Jive Social Intranet Solution, a collaboration tool offering full-featured, internal social networks for businesses. Its suite of applications collaborate various business tasks such as group discussions, document-sharing, blogging, polls and more.