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Kicking off the SharePoint Conference this week, officials from email hosting provider Microsoft (News - Alert) unveiled a roadmap for its social, mobile and cloud capabilities including its pricing for integrating Yammer, the enterprise social networking vendor it acquired earlier this year.

“We envision a world in which social is woven into the apps you use every day – where people work together using new experiences that combine the power of social with collaboration, email and unified communications,” Jeff Teper, corporate vice president at Microsoft, said in a statement.

Currently, Microsoft customers can connect the two systems with Yammer (News - Alert) Web parts and the new Yammer Open Graph capabilities. As a next step, Microsoft is investing in unified identity, integrated document management and feed aggregation, company officials added.

To align with the changes, the email hosting provider also unveiled changes to Yammer packaging and pricing, consolidating Yammer’s paid services into a single offering, Yammer Enterprise, as well as reducing the price of the service from $15 to $3 per user per month. For Enterprise Agreement customers, Microsoft plans to ship Yammer Enterprise with Microsoft SharePoint Online and the Office 365 Enterprise plans with no change in price for existing customers, according to David Sacks, corporate vice president at Microsoft.

“This means customers get the best cloud productivity service and the best enterprise social service together – Office 365 plus Yammer,” Sacks commented. “These packaging changes are just a first step into a future where Yammer will power new social experiences across your business applications.”

As of March 1, 2013, Microsoft will be offering the following Yammer/SharePoint products and services at these price points:

• Yammer Basic Standalone: Free
• Yammer Enterprise Standalone: $3 per user/per month
• SharePoint Online (Plan 1) + Yammer Enterprise: $4 per user/per month
• SharePoint Online (Plan 2) + Yammer Enterprise: $8 per user/per month
• Office 365 E Plans 1-4 + Yammer Enterprise: $8 - $24 per user/per month

In June, Microsoft agreed to acquire Yammer for the sum of $1.2 billion in cash.

Yammer was founded in 2008 and its CEO, David Sacks, has continued in a leadership role as the company was absorbed into Microsoft’s Office Division. The move is helping Microsoft keep pace with other companies that are adding ESN features to their collaboration suites such as IBM, Oracle, Salesforce and Cisco (News - Alert). Other independent players in the space include Jive, SherWeb, NewsGator, Socialtext and Tibbr.