Today Yammer will announce a Force.com app that will allow users to pipe information from Salesforce.com to Yammer writes Arik Hesseldahl for AllThingsD. This will enable Salesforce.com users to use Yammer as a full replacement to Salesforce.com’s own social enterprise solution Chatter.

Yammer offers a hosted Facebook or Twitter-like social media application for the enterprise. It centers around microblogging, but now has other social networking features as well. The Salesforce.com integration follows Yammer’s integration with the hosted ERP solution Netsuite last May, which was Yammer’s first excursion into integrating with “real” enterprise software.

Both integrations, part of the new Activity Streams feature of Yammer, allow users to follow updates from enterprise software – such as purchase orders, customer service tickets, and new leads – the same way they might follow a Twitter or view updates from a friend on Facebook. Instead of being notified that your friend has updated the employer field on her profile, you can be notified that an employee has added a new lead to the CRM system.

This approach has particular value in mobile applications. Instead of a stream of text messages on your mobile, you could follow updates from throughout your enterprise through an activity stream – in some cases even responding to issues directly from the mobile. Yammer has apps for Android, BlackBerry and iOS as well as a mobile optimized version of its site.

Yammer competitors such as Qontext and TIBCO tibbr also offer integrations with enterprise applications such Netsuite, Salesforce.com and SAP. tibbr, Qontext, Simplybox and Socialcast (which was acquired by VMware earlier this year) also push integration the other direction: you can embed a social stream into another application.

Services Angle

We’re seeing more and more vendors use APIs to create out of the box integrations for customers, sparing those customers the burden of hiring systems integrators. This practice also created a new market for cloud integration providers such as SnapLogic.

And in those cases in which an out of the box integration is unavailable, consultants are able to use APIs to create new integrations much quicker and more easily than ever before. For example, Yammer hired Appirio to create the Salesforce.com integration according to Hesseldahl.