Microsoft’s experimental Office Labs group says it’s testing a new microblogging service called OfficeTalk—which “applies the base capabilities of microblogging to a business environment, enabling employees to post their thoughts, activities, and potentially valuable information to anyone who might be interested.” It’s an experiment but the Office Labs group does say that OfficeTalk has been one of its most popular internal tests to date and it’s therefore inviting interested outside firms to try it out.

By far, the leader in the enterprise microblogging space right now is Yammer, which has raised $15 million in funding, but if Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) were to ultimately bundle the microblogging product with Office, as the OfficeTalk name and Office Labs connection appear to imply, Microsoft could easily make itself dominant in this still new market.

This isn’t Microsoft’s first venture into microblogging. In December, it launched a Twitter-like service in China
but it had to pull it from the market less than a month later among accusations that it had blatantly copied a competitor’s own microblogging service (Microsoft said that a Chinese vendor had done the work).

The OfficeTalk tests follows several other new enterprise-oriented social networking initiatives at Microsoft lately. In October, the company set up a new research group to ramp up its efforts in “social computing” and Microsoft has also been integrating social networks—beginning with LinkedIn—to Microsoft Outlook.

• Microsoft Launches A Twitter-Like Service In China