Workplace, to start off, is a desktop website and mobile application that functions exactly like Facebook does conventionally. However, in this case, you’ll be interacting with only your co-workers or employees of any other company in a group (to be added in the future). The news feed will contain company updates, events, and various other posts. It also inherits chatting features, individual groups, live streaming, one-on-one as well as group video calls, reactions, search and trending items. Facebook says the launch is the result of positive feedback from thousands of organizations around the world who were already using Workplace in beta. Interestingly, the top five countries using the service are India, the US, Norway, UK, and France.
Furthermore, Facebook has added a few Workplace-only features such as a dashboard with analytics and integrations with single sign-on, in addition to identity providers that allow companies to more easily integrate Workplace with their existing IT systems. The pricing model has been also tweaked in order to attract large-scale businesses and smaller startups. Workplace starts at $3 per user for companies with fewer than 1,000 monthly active users, $2 per user for companies with 1,001 – 10,000 monthly active users and lastly, $1 per user for companies with 10,000+ monthly active users.
Currently, Workplace falls way behind the competition which includes Slack (which costs $6.67 per user per month) that was recently valued at $4 Billion, Microsoft’s Yammer and more. It also misses out on third-party integrations or a productivity suite such as Office 365. Not to mention the fact that you’ll need to install and maintain two (actually four if you install Messenger too) separate applications for personal and workspace accounts which do sound quite cumbersome, however, Facebook might change things up in the future. If you’re interested, head over to this link for getting started.
