Yammer unveils single sign-on and embeddable feeds with Yammer Connect

Enterprise social networking site Yammer today unveiled Yammer Connect, a new JavaScript application programming interface (API) that adds a single sign-on “Connect” button and embeddable streams to third-party enterprise software websites.

Yammer is working with a number of third-party enterprise software providers to add a connect button similar to Facebook’s that verifies an employee’s identity. The company wouldn’t disclose what companies it is working with right now but told VentureBeat that it already had a number of agreements in place.

“As employees are increasingly going out and signing up for third-party applications, we want those applications to incorporate Yammer Connect as a way to seamlessly integrate Yammer across those sites,” Yammer chief technology officer Adam Pisoni told VentureBeat.

The company also announced today that its embeddable activity feeds feature is entering a beta and will be available in the third quarter later this year. That feature is an open API that lets businesses add news feed widgets to other websites using HTML coding. It will give employees a way to view important information in Yammer without actually visiting the website.

“It’s really such a big part of our strategy to make sure Yammer is this social horizontal layer across all business applications,” Pisoni said. “I still see Yammer.com as where people go to see their aggregate stream, and we’re gonna continue to add functionality to yammer.com that will only be there.”

Yammer has 3 million verified corporate users and around 80 percent of the largest companies in the world on the Fortune 500 list have deployed the enterprise social network. It’s one of a number of stars in the enterprise 2.0 market — along with companies like collaboration service Huddle and cloud storage provider Box.net — that are taking lessons learned from web 2.0 applications like Twitter and Facebook to the enterprise.