The Office Talk interface. (Microsoft Office Labs image, click for larger version.)

Microsoft Office Labs' "OfficeTalk" project has been getting some attention over the past few days. The concept is similar to Yammer, providing users with a Twitter-style method of communicating just with other people inside their own companies. As with other Office Labs initiatives, the company is emphasizing the fact that it's a research project, not a product, but it's rolling out the test to selected customers.

Apart from its potential to influence future products, the project is interesting because it appears to have caught on inside Microsoft itself -- demonstrating the potential of "microblogging" to join email, instant-messaging, and old-fashioned phone calls as widely used forms of communication between people inside companies.

The Office Labs team calls it "one of the most popular internal concept tests to date," with hundreds of messages posted daily. In a blog post, the team says the internal Microsoft deployment has demonstrated that "even an IT managed implementation focused on business productivity can spread quickly across informal networks and create unique collaboration efficiencies and experiences."

Microsoft is careful to note that most of its Office Labs projects don't make it out of testing, but given the early response, and the popularity of Twitter, it wouldn't be a surprise to see this in a future version of Microsoft SharePoint.

See the OfficeTalk page for more info and screen shots of the application. Mary Jo Foley of ZDNet was first to spot the new project last week.