Yammer has released the first major upgrade to its enterprise social media and microblogging service. The Yammer 2.0 release adds a number of applications to the core product, including Polls, Events and Links, and opens up the platform to independent developers to plug into.

The new version also includes several enhancements, including the ability to message more than one colleague directly and add others to the discussion at any point in the conversation. The Yammer platform now also includes enhanced "presence" to let users see who is online and how they are connected to Yammer (i.e. via website, desktop client or a mobile client.)

Yammer also said it's enhanced the analytics in Yammer 2.0, giving network administrators interactive charts designed to track engagement.

Several more "coming soon" features are currently in private beta. These include:

"Questions" is a way for co-workers to quickly find answers to questions in a searchable database; "Tasks" is a kind of mini-project manager for assigning tasks that come from a Yammer conversation and tracking the job through to its completion and "Translation" lets users translate Yammer messages into over 100 different languages.

Open to developers

A number of software developers have released programs that integrate with Yammer 2.0. Crocodoc (a document mark up and review application) and Zendesk (a customer support app), are now both available.

Crocodoc is a collaborative app that lets users highlight and comment on PDFs, Word documents and attachments to Yammer messages. Yammer said Box.net (enterprise content management) and Expensify (online expense report management) are both working on versions of their software that will integrate with Yammer 2.0

"Our view is that there's a whole range of enterprise applications that could be made to work with Yammer," Steve Apfelberg, vice president of marketing at Yammer, told InternetNews.com. "We have a million plus users, so you look at a company like Expensify in the small to medium market and they're looking at our footprint and saying 'Wow, they're in a lot of places we're not.'"

Apfelberg also noted that Yammer's own applications are open source, enabling third-party developers to see how they were done, which could help in developing their own applications.

"By adding Yammer and partner applications that address a variety of business functions, Yammer becomes the internal communications hub for customers," Yammer CEO David Sacks said in a statement.

Yammer 2.0 continues the company's "freemium" model pricing. Anyone in a company or organization can sign up to get Yammer for free and get all the standard features, while there is a per-user charge for additional features including certain customization (e.g. integration with Microsoft's SharePoint) and security options. There are two levels of pricing for those additional features; the Silver level is $3 per user, per month, while the Gold level is $5 per user, per month.

David Needle is the West Coast bureau chief at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.