This wee
k in my review of Yammer, the private social networking platform revealed several things. First, the power of search technology is moving at faster speeds now in the business world.
Yammer's Universal Search was rolled out this past spring to enable Yammer users to access any business data from their enterprise applications.
This remarkable search functionality for business will help to unlock the databases housed in corporate data centers. But these new capabilities present challenges to teams, namely finding the right data and analyzing its relevancy to their current business opportunities as quickly as possible.
In a recent article by David Pogue, technology columnist for The New York Times gave us a sampling of the new search features that Google and Bing recently launched and some still to come.
Google's best intentions are to satisfy your search in one stop with information about the subject they call the Knowledge Graph, displayed in a wide right column.
Now Bing calls its similar new search feature, Snapshot. But Microsoft takes search a step further to the far right Sidebar, which can surface your Facebook friends and other social network connections who may help you find relevant information about the subject.
In these lessons from the search rivals, we also learn that the search technologies in the workplace are now taking a much deeper dive into business data that hopefully will reveal the jewels of the social enterprise--customer data. This seems like we've just come full circle.