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A statement from Microsoft (News - Alert) has analysts speculating that Yammer’s enterprise social media platform will soon integrate with Office 365 and other applications as Microsoft continues to push its way into the cloud.

“Yammer will continue to develop its standalone service and maintain its commitment to simplicity, innovation and cross-platform experiences,” the statement revealed. “Moving forward, Microsoft plans to accelerate Yammer’s adoption alongside complementary offerings from Microsoft SharePoint, Office 365, Microsoft Dynamics and Skype (News - Alert).”

Yammer will join Microsoft’s Office division to develop alongside products like Office 365. Yammer’s platform is currently utilized by five million corporate customers and is leveraged by approximately 85 percent of all Fortune 500 companies.

Yammer’s cloud-based emphasis converges easily with Microsoft’s expansion into the cloud environment with services like Office 365 and SkyOffice. Kurt DelBene (News - Alert), president of the Microsoft Office group, shared a vision for Yammer’s development into a comprehensive enterprise social networking platform that combines Sharepoint with Office 365.

“I picture people being able to use Yammer to manage and expand their professional relationships, share and collaborate on Office documents, stay informed about content updates, and to seamlessly move from status updates and feeds into voice and video conversations,” said DelBene, discussing how the $1.2 million Yammer acquisition will converge Yammer with programs like Office 365.

In addition to its absorption of Yammer, Microsoft plans to integrate its new Windows 8 operating system with its SkyDrive cloud storage. Through SkyDrive cloud storage and Office 365 collaboration, Windows 8 users will be able to access and collaborate on documents and other activities from any PC, notebook or mobile device.

“Over time, we fully expect the Metro style app and SkyDrive.com to ‘converge’ on functionality so there won’t be a question of which experience someone should use,” SkyDrive Program Managers Omar Shahine and Mike Torres wrote in a blog entry. “When using Windows 8, the SkyDrive Metro style app will be the best way to browse and manage your SkyDrive.”

Currently, SkyDrive has about 17 million users and stores approximately 10 petabytes of data. However, that’s only about one-third of the number of users who upload their documents, videos and photos to free cloud service Dropbox (News - Alert).

Analysts speculate that, if Microsoft does integrate Yammer with Office 365 and other applications, the big reveal won’t come until 2013. Microsoft’s buyout of Yammer still has to go through the regulatory approval process.

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