Yammer Adds Departments, Teams

Yammer, the workstreaming startup, today announced that they have added support for departments or teams:

[via email]

Yammer is pleased to announce the release of Groups, our most requested feature since launching two months ago.

You can use Groups to:

• Form company teams
• Join your department
• Post updates to a specific group of people
• Have private discussions with your team
• Reduce noise by following only the groups you care about

The Yammer website, Desktop application, iPhone app, and BlackBerry app have all been updated to let you quickly access group feeds.

Every group in your network has its own email address @yammer.com so you can send messages to the group by email.

Members of a group can also choose to receive group messages by email, SMS, or IM.

Somehow mentioned (Laura Fitton?) at Defrag that this was a critical and missing capability in workstreaming apps.

Personally, I think this is the wrong direct to take. I would focus on groupings — which are the chance associations of people’s interests around concepts represented by tags, as in following all tweets tagged “finance” or “marketing” — and project support.