According to a new Wall Street Journal (WSJ) report, citing an unidentified source `in the know' of the proceedings at Microsoft, the software giant is working out an over $1 billion acquisition deal for software company Yammer.

While the WSJ source revealed that Microsoft is in talks with Yammer - which develops private social networks for firms - for acquiring the company, the report carried no indication about when the Microsoft-Yammer deal is likely to come through or formally announced.

The 2008-founded, San Francisco-based Yammer provides enterprise social networking services; and the networks which the company has developed facilitate communication and collaboration among corporate employees, in a manner which is fairly akin to the Facebook's mechanism for communication with friends.

Revealing that an amount of over $142 million has been raised by the company in venture capital funding, Yammer - which is backed by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel - said that it clients include counts more than 80 percent of Fortune 500 companies.

With Yammer also stating that over 200,000 companies globally use the social networks developed by it, the Thursday-published WSJ report said that it was quite possible that Yammer's social-networking functions may be added by Microsoft to its Office software suite; thereby enabling the software biggie to modernize its social-enterprise tools.