UPDATED 17:28 EDT / OCTOBER 10 2016

NEWS

Look out, Slack: Facebook Workplace brings social media to the enterprise

Facebook Inc. has been eyeing the enterprise for some time now, and today the social network has made its first big play with the launch of Workplace by Facebook.

Previously known as Facebook At Work, it’s an intra-office communication platform that mixes some of Facebook’s most popular social features with new tools designed specifically for the workplace.

“I’m very excited for the launch of Workplace by Facebook. We’ve been using this product inside Facebook from the very beginning of our company,” said Dan Rose, Facebook’s vice president of partnerships. “It’s a key pillar of our transparent culture, and it’s been a critical driver of productivity and collaboration for us.”

Workplace essentially functions as an internal Facebook for a company, with a personalized news feed, intra-office voice and video chat, custom user groups and more. The platform includes a dashboard with analytics and integrations with other software, and Workplace also offers identity providers that allow it to integrate with your company’s existing IT systems.

Perhaps one of Workplace’s most interesting features is the ability to create multi-company groups, which allows employees from different companies to collaborate with one another. Facebook says that this allows different companies to work together in “a safe and secure way,” making it easier to work on joint projects with vendors or partners.

Workplace went through a lengthy beta phase during which it was used by more than 1,000 organizations. According to Facebook, these included businesses on every continent except Antarctica, and the company noted in its announcement that the top five countries that have used Workplace the most are India, Norway,the US, the UK and France.

Workplace is now available worldwide on the web, iOS and Android, and the platform is priced on a sliding scale from $3 per monthly active user for the first 1,000 users to $1 a month for 10,000 or more. Facebook is also offering a three-month free trial for businesses interested in trying out Workplace.

The changing workplace

To get more businesses using Workplace, Facebook has also launched a new Workplace Partner Program, which teams up with a number of major technology and professional service organizations to help businesses transition some of their existing integrations to Workplace more smoothly.

One of these partners includes cloud storage provider Box Inc., which is building its own integrations for Workplace, and today Box CEO Aaron Levie published a blog post on why he believes Workplace is an important tool for the modern business climate. Levie also noted that some of the Workplace integrations coming to Box include the ability to share large files with Workplace groups, as well as the ability to automatically add news feed posts and other content to Box.

Should Slack be worried?

Workplace shares many similarities with Slack, another popular business-focused messaging platform that also supports a variety of software integrations, including Salesforce, Quip, IFTTT and more. Like Workplace, Slack also offers both web and mobile apps, and it supports a number of powerful chatbots that can be used to automate a number of tasks, such as expense reporting and recruiting.

While Workplace will offer a few integrations out of the box, it does not seem to have nearly the same variety as Slack, which supports a few hundred integrations across multiple industries.

That’s why some observers are skeptical of Facebook’s ability to take on Slack and other enterprise communications services right away.

Forrester Research Inc. analyst Craig LeClair, for one, a number of challenges Workplace faces. For one, “Facebook has never been about getting work done — in fact it’s always been quite the opposite,” he said in an email. The company also will have to prove it can provide enterprise-grade security and advanced administrative and other features. Not least, it simply has to overcome resistance by information technology departments to yet another collaboration app.

Of course, a multibillion-dollar company like Facebook will probably not have any trouble building up many of those features to rival Slack’s. With Facebook’s global name recognition and powerful partnerships, it certainly seems like Slack will have some major competition on its hands.

Image courtesy of Facebook

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