At the Web 2.0 Expo in New York City this week, a new service called Present.ly launched, which takes aim at Yammer by allowing businesses to quickly create a microblog tool that lets employees send short updates to each other in a manner that’s practically identical to Twitter.
Yammer, the TechCrunch50 victor, performs the same basic functions as Present.ly, but the latter adds a few extras that may entice some companies to switch.
According to the company, Present.ly supports file attachments so employees can send important documents back and forth without using email, and it lets companies segment groups so management can have its own portion of the site and others can have their section.
Present.ly doesn’t require all users to have the same email domain, which is one of the major issues users are complaining about in Yammer.
Present.ly also lets companies deploy the service on existing IT infrastructure if the organization is concerned with security. That said, it’s not available in all versions of Present.ly, which could prove troublesome to the company if its users are only looking for a free solution. And unfortunately, that free solution isn’t too useful for major companies.
Present.ly has five basic offerings that the company claims, will appeal to any size organization, but I’m not so sure that’s true.
Present.ly is free for up to five users. In order to increase the number of users to 15, companies will need to pay $14 per month and 100 users will cost $99 per month. Additional users on lower plans will cost $1 per user per month if companies don’t need to jump to the next plan.
Only the top plan, Enterprise, will offer all the features Present.ly has to offer. Aside from a mobile interface, Twitter API, and group integration, which is available on all plans, the Enterprise level adds internal deployment, enterprise integration, and full support. The price for the Enterprise plan is currently listed as “on request” and the media sharing capacity is set to “pay-as-you-go.” Present.ly is offering a 60-day free trial for those companies that are interested though.
From a feature perspective, Present.ly is more capable than Yammer on paper and offers some of the elements that Yammer users have been asking for since its launch. But companies will have to pay for those extra features. All in all, Yammer still offers a more painless way for employees to get started on their own and will be adding new, requested features over time. Since Yammer’s launch last week, 50,000 people have signed up. The new competition should mean better features for both services as they race to outshine each other. Which one would you rather use?
Comment