Microsoft Office Online Document Collaboration Expands With Yammer Integration

Microsoft has beefed up its Web offerings by expanding Office Online support in business collaboration portal Yammer. Users will now be able to open and edit Office files directly from within Yammer.

Clicking the "Edit File" link within Yammer now opens up a full-screen document view, which automatically saves changes. Users can then search through auto-saved versions of the documents to choose a version and mark "official." These changes replace the functionality previously provided by Crocdoc.

While real-time collaboration is not possible for the moment, the Office team says in a blog post that this functionality is coming in the future. The blog post also promises Bing Translate integration in the future, supporting more than 30 languages.

Yammer now also supports document collaboration with external participants. Customers can work on files using external messaging, allowing for cross-business collaboration on documents. The collaboration process is reported to have improved, with boosts to reliability and performance resulting from the work done to bring Yammer into Office 365.

"Our latest innovations bring documents to life by making it easy for teams to engage with and capture the thought process behind each piece of content," said the Office team. "And because Yammer is open by default, others at your company can discover, use and build on that knowledge -- ensuring that your team’s work lives on."

Yammer was bought by Microsoft in 2012 for $1.2 billion. While at the time the Yammer team reported to co-founder David Sacks, a July 2014 shake-up resulted in the team integrating with the Office 365 team, and Sacks leaving the company.