Microsoft strikes Yammer e-discovery partnerships

Microsoft has targeted Yammer at businesses that need to keep tabs on employees for legal reasons by linking the enterprise social networking tool to e-discovery products from security vendors including Symantec.

Yammer can now be integrated with Symantec's Clearwell e-discovery tool, allowing IT professionals to turn over employees' electronic activity and communications for forensic examination to export their Yammer data directly into Clearwell prior to e-discovery.

"Our mission is to maintain the safety of company information and to have advanced security controls in place over every user, application and system," Yammer director of security engineering Josha Bronson said in a Microsoft statement.

Further tabs can be kept on employees' use of Yammer through the Smarsh Software-as-a-Service product, which now captures virtually all Yammer communications, according to the Microsoft statement. These interactions can be stored and searched for e-discovery compliance purposes.

Yammer data files can now be exported in line with the Electronic Discovery Reference Model, an e-discovery standard.

In a move linked to e-discovery, Yammer has been integrated with identity and access management products from Okta, which can be used to provision and deprovision users from Yammer.

In addition, Microsoft announced on Monday the Yammer 'Enterprise Graph', a platform and app directory that offers standard components to build Yammer feeds, profiles, followers and likes into applications.

This article originally appeared at scmagazineuk.com