Today Yammer announced two public, open-source SDKs for its social enterprise communications service: one for Windows Phone 8 and one for iOS. Android, for now, remains on the outside of the Yammer love circle.
The APIs will, according to the Microsoft subsidiary, work for smartphone and tablet applications (presumably this means iPads and not Windows Phone tablets because, well, they don’t exist). The SDKs provide, critically, both read and write access to Yammer’s APIs, meaning that Yammer can be functionally integrated into third-party applications on both iOS and Windows Phone.
Microsoft is working to integrate Yammer, for which it spent $1.2 billion, into its own products and services, such as Office 365. However, and it is hardly the only company to do this sort of thing, Microsoft also understands that for its service to find maximum integration, it has to be functionally open.
Box, Dropbox and others also understand this and have made similar steps to allow for deep hooks for their services inside other applications.
Yammer competes with other companies, such as Convo, that provide internal micro-communication to teams both large and small. I don’t have a clear picture in mind of what sort of applications will want to bake Yammer into their services, but given that Yammer is a scaled enterprise, I expect there to be demand.
If you are the developing sort, you can dig into the SDKs here.