Announced earlier today on the company blog, Yammer has released two new features to its enterprise microblogging solution: a visual organization chart and a link bookmarklet.

Visualize your Coworkers

Remember when you first joined Yammer and it asked for your reports and your superiors? Now Yammer can take that information and organize it into a visual organization chart for your company. The org chart for Microblink isn’t very impressive, as its just the three of us with nobody reporting to anyone. If you’ve got a large group on Yammer and would like to share a graphic (with faces/names blurred of course), please let us know.

Bookmarklet for Links

In addition to the org chart, Yammer has also made it much easier to share links and articles with your corporate network. Bookmarklets have existed in the regular microblogging world for some time, acting as bookmarking shortcuts for specific applications or websites.

The new Yammer bookmarklet allows you to quickly post any page (or highlighted text) you are looking at to your colleagues on Yammer. This saves you time because you don’t need copy the link, open an application, paste the information in, etc. Just click the bookmark, post and go.

It’s exciting to see Yammer continuing to grow and always adding new features as requested by their users.

Though the enterprise microblogging space seemed to be heating up several months ago, one company in particular continues to run ahead of the pack. Yammer made the announcement yesterday that in addition to their Software as a Service (SaaS) model, a new self-hosted version of their software is now available to be licensed and installed behind the corporate firewall.

Many have talked up the security features of Yammer’s SaaS model (and they’ll be happy to forward you a list of references if that’s what you need), yet some are still wary of an outside entity capturing all of that sensitive company data. Other large enterprises simply have policies in place that require all company content be maintained behind the corporate firewall or prefer to host communications software themselves.

The new self-hosted version of Yammer is something competitors had bested the TechCrunch 50 winner at before, but now the tides have turned and Yammer returns with the upper hand. The importance of this model to Yammer is that it opens up an entirely new market of companies to attract, including what could produce some of the largest contracts.

If you’re already using the SaaS model and bringing it in-house could grow your company’s adoption rate, Yammer says companies can easily upgrade to the self-hosted version of Yammer. The transfer of network information between the SaaS and self-hosted version can be completed at the company’s request. Yammer also makes the statement that “in both cases, Yammer offers directory integration with company-maintained directories of employees, as well as easy integration with the company’s intranet or other internal systems.”

Will we see increasing adoption amongst larger corporations with this new model available? It’s hard to postulate, but the price of other messaging systems available and the features Yammer provides, it’ll be tough to turn them down if you’re in the market for this type of tool.

Is your company using Yammer internally? Will this new self-hosted model win over supporters in your organization? Let us know what you think in the comments below.

In this month alone we’ve seen some substantial cash thrown in several different directions. Here’s a list of who’s getting what – and from whom.

Yammer

After exhausting its $50,000 prize for winning top honors at TechCrunch50, Yammer has raised an additional $5 million in series A financing from the Founders Fund and Charles River Ventures. The Founders Fund is a seed fund comprised mainly of ex-PayPal execs.

TweetDeck

TweetDeck is a single-man development operation run by Iain Dodsworth. TweetDeck rapidly rose toward the top of the charts as one of the most used third-party clients. On January 16th, it was announced that nearly $500,000 in angel funding from Betaworks was secured. In the past, Betaworks also invested in Summize, TipJoy, and StockTwits.

Identi.ca

The open-source icon of microblogging recently received somewhere between $120,000 and $320,000 of funding from a Montreal-based VC firm called Montreal StartUp.

Yammer continues to add on to the microblogging house that Twitter built by adding features and redesigning its interface to make things easier for business users.

In its latest update, Yammer has added a number of updates to unclutter the site and to make things easier for new users jumping in with their organization’s early adopters.

Profiles

As part of the update profile pages have been tweaked to clean up space and show essential information at a glance. This includes links to the groups the user is a part of along with files and links they have shared.

Groups

Group management went through a small update as well. Most important of the updates includes a profile image that works as a visual queue to easily identify the group.

Following

The most significant change in the Yammer update was focused around the following model. When new users sign up they will no longer see all public messages as the default. In its place users will be given recommendations of who to follow and which groups to join based on reporting relationships.

For larger organizations this is a much needed feature to reduce the noise and help new users use Yammer to focus in on their work instead of getting lost in other happenings of the org.

Yammer is Still King

Yammer is making updates and tweaking its platform to work best with its users. Unlike others in this space, Yammer is constantly growing its feature set and taking advice from users to improve their experience. And although Yammer has published its own API, almost all of the platforms developments have come from inside the company’s own walls.

As one of the first microblogging services with a true business model, Yammer continues to stay ahead of the pack as its competitors start to explore premium features (Twitter and tumblr) and other platforms look to open-source and roll your own deployment (Motion and Jaiku).

We at Microblink love Yammer. Internally, we’re using it as our primary microblogging solution. We love that you can “Yam” from your iPhone, desktop, or from the web interface – but we love even more that more apps are being built for the platform. A recent entrant into this group is YammerFox, an addon for Firefox.

YammerFox adds a small Yammer logo in the lower right corner of your Firefox browser (think of it as Firefox’s system tray). When new messages arrive, you’ll be notified with a small window with the message as well as an audio snippet that just cracks me the hell up (YAM!). Clicking the icon will display a list of the last twenty messages and give you the option to reply or post new messages.

You can set the interval for getting updates, how long popups display, and a few notification options. The addon handles authentication by asking Firefox if you’re logged in. Once you log in, your feed will start coming in and the rest is pretty much automatic. If you don’t have the option of installing the desktop client, you should consider using the addon.

Having trouble selling Yammer to your coworkers or management team? We’ve raved about how they won the Tech Crunch 50 this year and how much we like the service, but maybe that’s not enough.

If you can at least get your team inside the app and get them to start playing with it, chances are they will come around. If you’re still having trouble, send them to Lee Aase’s (@leeaase) Social Media University, Global for a free series of posts on the basics of Yammer.

Lee walks through everything from ‘Yammer for the Enterprise‘ and ‘Getting Started with Yammer‘ to ‘Making Yammering Effortless‘ and ‘Avoiding Yammer Email Overload‘. Each series of posts breaks things down very simply and makes it easy to understand, which might be just the thing you need to get your team on board.

Last week I received an email from Yammer letting me know about the new “Company Groups” feature they’ve rolled out, but there is actually much more than that going on in the Yammer camp these days. Here’s a rundown on the new things I’ve picked up on lately:

• Updated web interface – new graphics, drag-and-drop feed tabs, simplified right nav

  

• Groups – create a group for a department in your company and create a stream of messages specific to group members Read the full story

Though the site looks seemingly similar to Yammer, QikCom (apparently unrelated to Qik, the video streaming website) has a different take on enterprise microblogging and takes a stab at its competitors by pointing out that there service is completely free.

Consumer Microblogging First, Now Enterprise Microblogging

Microblogging has taken consumers by storm, but now it’s time for the enterprise. The team of experienced tech and UI design guys behind QikCom are dedicated to making it easier for businesses to communicate and believe that microblogging is indeed the answer.

QikCom is free for employees to sign up (similar to most other enterprise services) and it’s also free to become an admin and to secure/control the network. This second point is obviously a dig at Yammer, which allows an admin to exist on the network, but if they want to delete messages or remove users, the company must pay the $1/user/month fee to take control. Read the full story

Though its impossible to know by browsing their website, Yammer has released a new update for their Adobe AIR desktop client. If you already use the desktop client, you should have been prompted with an update window that asked you to update the app. Being on the Adobe AIR platform, updating apps is a snap and can be done in less than 30 seconds and a few clicks.

Updates and changes to the client include:

Optional new designs (found in preferences–the wrench icon in upper right)

Though the new dark and light themes are nice to have from a user’s perspective, I still find the default theme to be the most appealing.

What I would really love to see would be user and/or admin customization of the interface colors. This would allow company admins to design interfaces that fit in with their corporate color scheme.

Made it easier to resize window (drag bottom or right edges)

Corrected tab order (all, following, received, sent) to match website

Performance and memory improvements

Ability to close application without logging in

I noticed on the original version that with the “start Yammer upon loading” option selected, it would never actually log me in. With the new update, it works flawlessly, allowing me to get started with Yammer first thing in the morning.

Added “from Desktop”, “from Blackberry”, etc. to messages display

This feature falls in line with how services like Twitter state which source the message is originating from. It’s not critical information, but it is neat to see how different employees or peers are using the service.

To determine which version you are running (current version of this writing is v100101), click on the wrench icon in the upper right and it is displayed near the bottom.

When you update the app a link is given to the release notes, something fairly common in software and application development, but you’ll need to save that link if you want to go back later and check on other updates, as the release notes are not linked to from anywhere on the Yammer website.

Tech Crunch reports that the Yammer platform has grown tremendously in its first week since winning top prize at TC50. Yammer CEO David Sacks says there are now 10,000 networks and 50,000 users on the platform.

In an attempt to prove their worth to many naysayers in the blogosphere, Yammer is now launching an API that will allow third-party developers to incorporate Yammer functions into their applications. The API is the same as what was used by Yammer’s own engineers to create the iPhone, BlackBerry and Adobe AIR clients, so there should be no doubts that it will work.

It seems that many people were upset with Yammer winning TC50 this year, citing the company as “a Twitter clone,” but the way in which Yammer is using the microblogging platform and the adaptations they have made to take it inside the corporate environment are what really set it apart.

With the release of the official Yammer API, Seesmic has announced it will be building support into its Twhirl desktop app, which thousands of users are already using to access services like FriendFeed and platforms like Twitter and Identica.

We created a network on Yammer after the TC50 event and have been using it to debate story ideas and pass links around. Our three members have posted 42 messages so far.