Generally in a capitalistic market, there are two kinds of consumers: General public and enterprise and companies tend to have various products that are suited to these two diverse groups.
Facebook has been making products that are suited for the general market, from its flagship social network to others like Messenger and acquisitions like Messenger and Instagram. It only makes sense they would want to tap on the enterprise market and that is why they have announced Workplace which was previously named Facebook for Work.
Workplace has been in beta for two years now where according to Facebook, more than a 1000 organizations were using the product from 5 countries (US, UK, India, France and Norway). Late last month, it was reported that the company was to launch Workplace on October and finally they have done it where they revealed the various features.
First, Workplace will be available to everyone around the world and during the beta test, Facebook was able to witness the variety of organizations that used Workplace. Some of the features in Workplace include stuff you’ve used in the regular Facebook like News Feed, Live Video, Reactions, Trending posts and Search. Facebook also incorporated features that are only available in Workplace like analytics, integrations and identity providers that allow companies to integrate it with their IT systems. There is also Multi-Company groups which allow employees from different organizations to work together but these will be rolled out apparently in the “coming weeks”
This is not a free product as Facebook will charge companies for using Workplace. There is a free trial that would last for 3 months and then you can go ahead and choose a payment plan according to your organization size. The tiers are:
- $3 per user per month upto 1000 users
- $2 per user per month for upto 10,000 users
- $1 per user per month for more than 10,000 users
The benefits that come with paying for the service include:
- One on one support with administrators
- Single sign in (SSO support)
- Integration with G Suite Windows Azure AD, Ping, OneLogin, Okta
- Secure collaboration between companies
- Unlimited file, photo and video storage
- Unlimited team and project groups
- Live video streaming
- Monitoring tools for IT teams
The likes of Yammer and Slack should start shaping up fast thanks to the arrival of Workplace and it will be interesting to see how the latter would grow. Check more details about Workplace here.
