Dell ready to help enterprises move Jive content into Yammer

That's where Dell is aiming to help. The company's new Migration Manager for Enterprise Social, launched Monday, lets organizations consolidate Jive content into Microsoft Yammer. In so doing, Dell says it can help eliminate the cost and burden of supporting redundant social networks, including the challenge of keeping track of duplicated content.

As a Microsoft partner, Dell's goal also includes helping organizations maximize their investment in Office 365 and Yammer.

In a nutshell, the new Migration Manager for Enterprise Social helps companies discover the content they want to move and then migrate that content from Jive to Yammer while retaining permissions, metadata and rich text.

A number of features are in place toward that end. A discovery dashboard feature, for instance, helps the migration team determine what should be moved and what can be eliminated by illuminating the entire Jive environment, including places, discussions, documents, attachments and metadata such as author, size, creation date and modification date.

A data-fidelity feature, meanwhile, is designed to smooth the transition by facilitating the migration of discussions and documents from Jive places to Yammer groups with high fidelity.

Security is the focus of another piece, which preserves user and document permissions by mapping Jive accounts to Yammer user accounts.

Dell's Migration Manager for Enterprise Social is available now; pricing starts at $10 per migrated user.

Of course, while Dell bills its new tool as the first enterprise social migration solution to market, "the world of social technology isn't binary -- it isn't just Jive and Yammer," said T.J. Keitt, a senior analyst with Forrester Research.

Most of Microsoft's competitors, including IBM, Salesforce.com and SAP, have social offerings that make their way into companies as departmental deployments or enterprisewide sales -- much the way Yammer does, Keitt pointed out.

"So, for this to be universally useful," he said, "Dell is going to need to quickly create similar migration pathways for other popular services."