Microsoft is to integrate sales staff from its Yammer acquisition into its Offcie 365 sales team. The integration will take place later this summer.
On its Office blog, the firm said that the integration is part of its vision to "bring enterprise social to all businesses by weaving these capabilities into the apps people use every day."
"Realising this vision requires close alignment in product development, sales and marketing," the company said.
It said that from an engineering perspective, it had made "great strides" in a short timeframe bringing together Yammer and Office 365 teams to deliver regular updates against its roadmap.
"Right now our teams are actively focused on foundational work around identity, content and messaging that will drive seamless connected experiences across Office 365 and other applications," the firm said.
It said that from 1 March, it began offering Office 365 and Yammer together as part of Enterprise Agreements.
"We will further simplify the customer buying experience and increase global scale by fully integrating our sales teams this summer. We're going from about a hundred sellers at Yammer to several thousand Microsoft sellers around the world bringing customers the benefits of enterprise social," Microsoft said.
The company purchased Yammer for $1.2 billion (£780,142) eight months ago and said that it would continue to "invest aggressively" in Yammer and would also hire staff in sales, engineering, customer engagement and marketing this year.
The news follows on from its integration roadmap set out last year that detailed how Yammer would co-exist with SharePoint and Office 365. Microsoft has announced that it is to launch a cloud-based version of SharePoint. The current users of SharePoint Online will be able to upgrade to the new version soon, ‘four weeks prior at least’ according to Microsoft.
The new cloud-based SharePoint will feature Yammer and allow SharePoint users to more eaily to connect with each other. They will also be able to access SkyDrive Pro if they have Personal Site Use rights.
