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SAN FRANCISCO — Oct. 29, 2012 — Yammer, Inc., a best-in-class Enterprise Social Network and part of the Microsoft Office Division, today announced a new App Directory and platform at its first customer conference, YamJam ’12. The platform offers standard components to more easily build social networking features, such as feeds, profiles, following and likes, into business applications. This approach not only helps save developers time, it also enables enterprise customers to seamlessly connect people, conversations and data across their business applications — an experience Yammer calls the “Enterprise Graph.”

The key components of the new platform include the following:

• Embeddable feeds. Yammer now offers embeddable feeds for virtually any business object, such as a record, document, opportunity or other piece of data. Previously, Yammer offered embeddable feeds only for Groups and individuals. The new object feeds allow applications to easily include conversations about business data in context.

• Embeddable Follow and Like buttons. You can now embed Follow and Like buttons inside virtually any business application to track updates from business objects.

• Pages. Similar to Profiles for people, Pages are profiles for business objects. Pages show recent activity, followers and conversations. By using Yammer Embed, the same information appears on the business object’s Web page in the original application. (A note-taking application in Yammer previously called Pages has been renamed Notes.)

• App Directory. Third-party applications that take advantage of the Yammer platform now appear in the App Directory after they have been reviewed by Yammer to ensure they meet certain privacy and security criteria. It is now easier than ever for enterprise users to discover and install apps inside Yammer.

The Enterprise Graph

Realizing the power of social networking, a growing number of enterprise applications are including social features such as profiles, feeds and connections in their software. Although the new software provides a higher level of usability than traditional enterprise applications, enterprise customers can be confronted by the problem of too many social networks inside their company, which reinforces silos and fragments internal communication.

The Yammer platform solves this problem of “social network sprawl” by creating an Enterprise Graph that provides a standard set of social components. This standardization means that all of a company’s employees and business data can be brought together in a common conversation layer.

Just as Facebook is creating a social graph for people’s personal lives, mapping the connections between people, places, music and games, the Enterprise Graph shows how employees, content and business data are connected in the workplace.

“This release standardizes enterprise social into a simple set of tools that the entire industry can use,” said David Sacks, Yammer founder and corporate vice president, Microsoft Corp. “It will not only save developers a lot of time reinventing the wheel but also create a uniform social experience for all employees across their business applications.”

“The future of business is connected, and Enterprise Social Networks are a critical part of this connectivity. Businesses should be built on the foundation of an ESN to connect people, data, content and systems,” said Michael Fauscette, group vice president, Software Business Solutions, IDC. “Effective execution on its social layer strategy is a reason Yammer was recognized as a Leader in the IDC Marketscape: Worldwide Enterprise Social Software 2012 Vendor Analysis.”1

All new features will be available to customers immediately.

About Yammer

Yammer (www.yammer.com) is a best-in-class Enterprise Social Network used by more than 200,000 organizations worldwide — including 85 percent of the Fortune 500 — to foster team collaboration, empower employees, drive business agility and socialize their intranets. Yammer’s freemium business model lets customers see the value of Yammer before upgrading to the premium offering. Founded in 2008, Yammer is now part of the Microsoft Office Division.

About Microsoft

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.

1 IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Enterprise Social Software 2012 Vendor Analysis, doc #237336, October 2012.

SAN FRANCISCO — Oct. 29, 2012 — Yammer, Inc., a best-in-class Enterprise Social Network and part of the Microsoft Office Division, today announced a native integration with Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Leveraging the power of the Enterprise Graph, this new integration allows Microsoft Dynamics CRM customers to extend Yammer’s social functionality into the application by embedding Yammer feeds, as well as Follow and Like buttons into specific CRM records. In addition, once someone takes an action on a record, a Page is automatically created in Yammer where employees can discuss, follow and collaborate on that record.

For example, when a Microsoft Dynamics CRM user updates an opportunity, a Page and activity story are created in Yammer, alerting colleagues to the status of the deal. These interactions are not only available in Yammer but also embedded in the customer record in Microsoft Dynamics CRM itself, so that anyone viewing the opportunity details will have access to the social content surrounding it.

“This new integration with Microsoft Dynamics CRM is just the first example of how you will see enhanced social experiences across Microsoft products and services,” said David Sacks, Yammer founder and corporate vice president, Microsoft Office Division. “Our platform seamlessly connects the relevant people, conversations and data across an entire organization, making Yammer the enterprise social standard and a way for companies to build a truly connected enterprise.”

Today, Yammer also launched an updated App Directory, allowing users to browse and connect third-party business applications within Yammer. New integrations include the following:

• GoodData. A leading BizData Monetization platform pulls data from Yammer and other enterprise apps to deliver meaningful business insights to customers and enable them to monetize their data. For example, conversations that happen inside Yammer about a Salesforce.com record can be analyzed alongside the corresponding opportunity details in Salesforce.com. Customers can then determine how fast a deal closes, if the sale is correlated to the related Yammer activity and how Yammer activity affects sales cycles.

• Kudos. The peer-to-peer recognition platform posts an update in Yammer’s Ticker when a colleague sends Kudos to another user, calling out their work using characteristics such as strategic, helpful, creative or reliable. Each Kudos message recognizes the colleagues sending and receiving Kudos, the level of recognition ranging from Thank You to Exceptional, key characteristics, and values demonstrated. The integration also utilizes Yammer Connect to seamlessly authenticate users based on their Yammer login credentials. With the Kudos browser add-ons, Yammer users can easily give Kudos to anyone at any time, enhancing corporate culture and improving employee engagement.

• Salesforce.com. Expanding on the existing integration, which enables updates of Salesforce.com records to appear as activity stories in Ticker, users can now embed record-specific Yammer feeds inside the Salesforce.com application. All Yammer conversations related to a given account, opportunity or campaign can now be viewed as a single feed.

• WorkSimple. The social performance management platform publishes an activity story in Ticker when an employee creates a social goal, sets a team focus or gives social recognition. Co-workers can easily share what they are working on, showcase accomplishments and offer praise. Managers also benefit by establishing a culture of feedback, recognition and results. WorkSimple is offering a Yammer edition of its product to Yammer customers for free, available in Yammer’s App Directory.

New integrations are available immediately. Customers should contact their Yammer representatives for more information.

Partner Comments About the News

“Social networking is becoming mission critical to the success of leading organizations worldwide. Yammer houses key data that can show powerful insights into employee satisfaction, productivity and engagement. Tying this rich social data to disparate systems, such as CRM, will enable companies to measure Yammer’s impact across an organization, leading to better data monetization.”

— Cody Crnkovich, vice president, Channel and Alliances, GoodData

“Our partnership with Yammer allows enterprise organizations to add our simple and effective recognition ecosystem within their enterprise social network. Kudos’ core focus is recognition, and, with our proprietary KQ visualizers, we are able to provide simple yet powerful insights on individual performance and team management. With the convenience of our browser add-ons and mobile offering, Yammer users can give Kudos easily, anywhere and at any time. By publishing Kudos messages into a Yammer network, organizations can further enhance communication and collaboration and now share and celebrate the things that make their company a great place to work.”

— Muni Boga, founder and co-CEO, Kudos

“WorkSimple and Yammer share the belief that employees will only adopt platforms that help them work better together — technology products must be simple, engaging and easy to use. Now with WorkSimple’s Social Performance Management platform, teams and companies can share social goals, give and get feedback, capture recognition, and build a results-driven culture on their Yammer networks.”

— Morgan Norman, founder and CEO, WorkSimple

About Yammer

Yammer (www.yammer.com) is a best-in-class Enterprise Social Network used by more than 200,000 organizations worldwide — including 85 percent of the Fortune 500 — to foster team collaboration, empower employees, drive business agility and socialize their intranets. Yammer’s freemium business model lets customers see the value of Yammer before upgrading to the premium offering. Founded in 2008, Yammer is now part of the Microsoft Office Division.

About Microsoft

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.

OSAKA, Japan — Oct. 29, 2012 — To support its consumer and corporate banking businesses, Bank SinoPac has adopted Windows Server and Microsoft SQL Server to run the next-generation TEMENOS T24 core banking system. This new system will help SinoPac save up to 50 percent on future annual maintenance costs over five years. With future flexibility and competitive advantages in mind, SinoPac deployed the solution to centralize its operations and support the growth of its domestic and global branch network. The new core banking system has enabled SinoPac to increase flexibility and reduce maintenance and operating costs as the bank migrated off the mainframe and to the cloud. By simplifying its systems architecture and streamlining its business processes, SinoPac was able to significantly improve its straight-through processing rate and reduce its close-of-business time by 30 percent.

Microsoft Corp. is working with Temenos Group AG, a banking software company, to offer core banking solutions that help banks achieve greater profitability, an improved customer experience, and the agility to meet future market and customer demands.

“Amid rapid market liberalization, changing financial behavior, and fierce competition from local and international counterparts, banks have to improve competitiveness and offer better customer service to be the leading player,” said Karen Cone, general manager of Worldwide Financial Services at Microsoft. “To achieve these goals, SinoPac adopted Windows Server and Microsoft SQL Server to deploy its new Temenos core banking system.”

With higher stability, scalability and availability, Microsoft SQL Server also boosts performance of next-generation hardware. SinoPac is one of the first banks to establish both front-end and back-end environments using a single Windows platform, and it also is pioneering the use of a single solution to support domestic and global branches. Because one team within SinoPac can manage all global systems, the company is lowering TCO, increasing development speed and avoiding costly maintenance issues.

“When selecting a core banking system, our first criterion was that it must run on the Windows platform because it provides the advantages of both open and closed systems,” said Robert Tsai, chief information officer, Bank SinoPac. “Windows outperforms traditional legacy mainframe systems in maintenance, investment cost and professional training, while its security and stability are way ahead of the game.”

The new core banking system has helped SinoPac reduce hardware initial costs by 40 percent and will further save the company 50 percent on software and hardware maintenance over five years. In the past, maintaining systems on different platforms required intensive training and multiple IT teams, including the support from third-party IT specialists. With a single Windows-based core banking system, the recruitment and training become much easier.

SinoPac’s new core banking system from Temenos and Microsoft is in place at 129 branches in Taiwan, with overseas locations expected to join the central hub in Taipei, Taiwan, starting at the end of 2012. With support for multiple countries, currencies and companies, the new system will enable SinoPac to speed its global market expansion.

Microsoft and Temenos are showcasing the SinoPac adoption Oct. 29 through Nov. 1 at Sibos, the world’s premier financial services event.

Microsoft and Temenos Collaboration

The long history of collaboration between Microsoft and Temenos has brought increased productivity and profitability to financial institutions through an improved total cost of ownership and uniform operational environment, which enhances time to market and overall efficiency. The result of their collaboration is a modular system designed to offer financial-industry customers a full front-to-back core banking solution on an all-Microsoft platform.

“The work we’re doing with Microsoft is changing the economics of the financial services industry,” said David Arnott, CEO Temenos. “Together, we’ve built a solution that scales from device to PC to cloud and enables a differentiated customer experience. Microsoft’s high-performance, yet cost-effective, server platform complements Temenos’ modular banking system, thereby changing the economics of banking.”

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.

Note to editors: For more information, news and perspectives from Microsoft, please visit the Microsoft News Center at http://www.microsoft.com/news. Web links, telephone numbers and titles were correct at time of publication, but may have changed. For additional assistance, journalists and analysts may contact Microsoft’s Rapid Response Team or other appropriate contacts listed at http://www.microsoft.com/news/contactpr.mspx.

REDMOND, Wash. — Oct. 28, 2012 — Microsoft Corp. today announced that Oesterreichische Kontrollbank (OeKB) has selected Microsoft BizTalk Server and Microsoft SQL Server to support its mission-critical financial messaging operations. As a result, the bank has significantly improved the performance, transparency and reliability of its core processes and reduced costs by up to 90 percent.

As a provider of financial and information services for businesses, financial institutions and the Republic of Austria, OeKB plays a critical role in the Austrian economy. The bank’s core services for capital management and trade services strengthen the country’s thriving business climate and help Austrian industries compete successfully in the global marketplace.

The bank was challenged with a myriad of complex systems that needed to be integrated with those of customers, partners and external financial networks, including SWIFT, the Society for the Worldwide Interbank Financial. Custom integration solutions for mission-critical processing are complex, expensive to build, and require unique skills for maintenance and support. Instead of building this type of platform from scratch, OeKB selected Microsoft BizTalk Server and the Accelerator for SWIFT (A4SWIFT) because of the technologies’ simplicity, affordability and reliability. The solution is underpinned by Microsoft’s high-performance and cost-effective SQL Server platform.

Integration with SWIFT requires extensive technical expertise. Formatting transaction messages from internal applications to SWIFT formats is complex and also places an annual burden of ensuring SWIFT message compliance. BizTalk Server and the A4SWIFT enable application-to-application integration, plus support for SWIFT message formats and connectivity to SWIFT software.

“A cost-efficient and, above all, a highly available solution was required. With BizTalk Server, we have a solution that gave us not only a solid transaction foundation, but also the ability to minimize our integration expenditure and drastically improve our agility at the same time,” said Michael Nedved, head of IT Development at OeKB.

“BizTalk Server, in particular, easily replaces legacy processes, creates future benefits by reducing the cost of creating new interfaces, and costs only 10 to 14 percent as much as the previous solution,” Nedved said.

In addition to the reduction in IT costs, operational costs are now at a mere 7 percent of the cost of the previous system because BizTalk Server integrates seamlessly with OeKB’s applications and server network. OeKB is also saving about 65 percent in personnel costs associated with development compared with the old system.

Karen Cone, general manager of Worldwide Financial Services at Microsoft, said, “Banks around the world seek to reduce operational and infrastructure costs. Financial messaging is complex, and integration of complex transactions demands a solution that simplifies processing and is quick to implement, yet is cost-effective in a mission-critical environment. As a result, an increasing number of banks are turning to Microsoft to achieve this.”

“The addition of BizTalk Server to our core processes has already helped OeKB succeed in its efforts to support Austrian industries, and it will continue to do so in the long term,” Nedved said.

More information about how organizations are turning to Microsoft technology is available on the Microsoft Customer Spotlight newsroom.

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.

Note to editors: For more information, news and perspectives from Microsoft, please visit the Microsoft News Center at http://www.microsoft.com/news. Web links, telephone numbers and titles were correct at time of publication, but may have changed. For additional assistance, journalists and analysts may contact Microsoft’s Rapid Response Team or other appropriate contacts listed at http://www.microsoft.com/news/contactpr.mspx.