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Workplace by Facebook opens to sell enterprise social networking to the masses

213 points by Yodoshi 10y ago

troygoode 10y ago
Here is a more direct look at the actual features: https://fbatwork.files.wordpress.com/2016/09/workplace_3min_tour.mp4 https://fbatwork.files.wordpress.com/2016/09/workplace_3min_...
- dingaling 10y ago
  Thank you, that was useful. An horrifically cluttered UI, but having evaluated many of these workplace collabortaion tools in the past it's actually pretty par for the course. For some reason our HR partners always wanted everything on one page, like a massive disfunctional sci-fi spacecraft dashboard with lights flashing everywhere.
CGamesPlay 10y ago
Is it actually $3 for the organization? It isn't clear if this is per-seat or per-organization.
- juliuss 10y ago
  I imagine it's 3$ per user, seeing as the pricing decreases based on how many users you have. It's also what TechCrunch seems to have assumed: https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/10/facebook-workplace/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/10/facebook-workplace/
- markwillis82 10y ago
  This is buried in the faq as I was interested in this too: https://workplace.fb.com/faq/ https://workplace.fb.com/faq/ == How much does this cost? The pricing model is based on a monthly fee per active user
benevol 10y ago
So now employers are being told to have their employees put business data (potentially even sensitive or secret) on US servers that are "owned" by the US government (see PRISM, etc.), while everybody today knows that NSA surveillance data is being used to gain economic advantages for the country. How stupid do you think the rest of the world is?
- lettergram 10y ago
  You'd be surprised. Google recently bought API.ai for the exact same reason, albeit API.ai has raw data and Workplace would be companies internal interaction data.
- dangoor 10y ago
  Google Apps for your Domain (G Suite now, I guess) is already like this, right?
- prostoalex 10y ago
  Considering that the door was wide open with Google Docs (err, Suite), Microsoft Office 365, respective e-mail offerings (Google Apps, Microsoft Outlook), Yammer, Github, Box, Dropbox and Slack, I don't know if "now" is an appropriate term to use.
- linkregister 10y ago
  > everybody today knows that NSA surveillance data is being used to gain economic advantages for the country. I didn't know that, can you give some examples of this? I heard about the US government making a WTO claim over bribery by Airbus in Saudi Arabia ostensibly discovered by electronic surveillance (not PRISM-related), but this is in the gray area.
  - JumpCrisscross 10y ago
    The American surveillance infrastructure was deployed, allegedly for corporate espionage, against targets in France [1], Germany and Brazil [2]. The IMF, the World Bank and the EU antitrust commissioner, amongst others, were likely targeted to help politically-connected companies [3]. [1] http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/wikileaks-enthuellung-nsa-soll-auch-franzoesische-wirtschaft-bespitzelt-haben-a-1041268.html http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/wikileaks-enthuellung-... [2] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150629/16134031494/nsa-despite-claiming-it-doesnt-engage-economic-espionage-engaged-economic-espionage.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150629/16134031494/nsa-d... [3] https://theintercept.com/2014/09/05/us-governments-plans-use-economic-espionage-benefit-american-corporations/ https://theintercept.com/2014/09/05/us-governments-plans-use...
deleted 10y ago
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heydenberk 10y ago
I dread one day having to limit job searches to places that don't make me use my private social networking account to do business.
- kikkak 10y ago
  I dream of the day where I'm not followed around by my data exhaust. It's just wishful thinking. I feel that the marginal benefit of social media systems has peaked. It's begun to make interactions less human and less personal; the gain over using email is negligible. I don't need to see your picture, I just want to know when I'll have VPN access.
  - waspleg 10y ago
    I'd wager a large portion of the readers of this site are too young to know what it as like to not have your entire life under 24/7 surveillance. I hope the back lash is enormous. Security = Privacy = Democracy; you can't have one without the others. Chilling effects brought on by "you should be careful what you say (and to whom)" is the death of freedom of speech, and with it "free" society.
- lazzlazzlazz 10y ago
  The Workplace account exists completely separately of your private Facebook account. Can you point to specific evidence that suggests they're the same/linked or do you just "feel" like they would be?
  - meira 10y ago
    Understanding software systems, there are any evidences that says it's separated? They use data from instagram and whatsapp, which they still call different companies. What would make us believe they aren't going to exploit it the same way they already do?
- spicyj 10y ago
  "Workplace" accounts are completely separate, with the exception of an optional link to your personal account to make it easier to log in. To my knowledge, no other data is shared. Your employer owns the data, not Facebook. See https://workplace.fb.com/trust/ https://workplace.fb.com/trust/.
bhaumik 10y ago
No thanks. Slack is distracting enough as is. Why would I want the rest of my social circle affecting my productivity?
- sp332 10y ago
  Companies probably wouldn't allow it in if it involved being distracted by your social "circle". That's why it doesn't. It's a completely separate account.
  - bhaumik 10y ago
    Ah, misinterpreted. Ignore my note then.
- laurentdc 10y ago
  > Slack is distracting enough as is. cmd-q, alt-f4, whatever you use. Feel free to shut down all IM when you need to focus on something.
theuri 10y ago
Is this driven by the digital collaboration at work trend started by Slack, or intended to be an entirely different beast?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- DamnYuppie 10y ago
  I find it hard to believe that people believe Slack started the trend. There have been countless such services in the past. Back in the terrible dark ages of the internet, pre-2000, we used AIM to have those type of discussions. Was very valuable as we had development teams all over the country and was a quick way to determine who the expert was for a given question and get them into a conversation. If it was too cumbersome to hash out with them via messaging we would, god forbid, pick up the phone and have a chat.
  - pavel_lishin 10y ago
    IRC and a wiki used to be the tools of the trade.
  - sanderjd 10y ago
    People in "normal" non-techy workplaces are aware of and interested in Slack. Mainstream workplace group messaging in these sorts of organizations (which make up a lot more of the economy than the ones in our bubble) is a fairly new trend, which Slack deserves a lot of credit for. This is a common mistake - the existence of technology is not the same as mainstream adoption.
    - DamnYuppie 10y ago
      Are you saying AIM wasn't widely adopted?
andrewvijay 10y ago
you add whatever ching ting and ting tong music to show it is very friendly, I'm not really buying that shit cause I simply cannot trust facebook.
- ktamiola 10y ago
  you got me on ching ting and ting tong
dbg31415 10y ago
Yes, just what I want... more crap from Facebook. I've been so very satisfied with how much of my personal data they sell to marketers thus far, I really want them to start tracking me at work too. Hopefully they will pair the launch with an aggressive sales campaign targeted at people in HR so I won't get a say in the matter and it'll just be rolled out for my coworkers without our input. That would be just swell.
- gjolund 10y ago
  Are you from the future?
  - dbg31415 10y ago
    Facebook seems like exactly the company we want to trust with SSO and performance reviews and internal corporate communications. It's coming and it's going to be amazing! Would you like to know more?
- blahi 10y ago
  Hey, I'm wondering, how exactly does facebook selling ads against your data affect you negatively?
  - gjolund 10y ago
    Advertising is brainwashing, it is the art of thought manipulation. Right now it is heavily focused on consumerism. Facebook has already shown it is can easily identify depression, radicalization, political associations, and other "aberrant" behaviours. I do not trust Mark Zuckerberg as an individual, nor FB as a company to fill that role in society.
    - blahi 10y ago
      You are being manipulated constantly, 24/7. By your friends, co-workers, family, acquitances, movies, songs, books, by yourself. This isn't really a valid reason, IMO.
timanglade 10y ago
Considering the backlash against Slack [0], it’ll be interesting to see if Messenger’s model of more “atomic” conversations will create less interruptions. Slack (much like IRC) really contributes to an expectation of continuous conversation throughout the day/night (although not all people deal with it that way). In comparison, Messenger (and other chat apps like WhatsApp, iMessage, etc.) seem to be more designed towards short chats about specific topics, while still allowing for deeper, longer conversations (even larger groups) if needed. Could be a huge win. Beyond that, am I the only one surprised at Live being half-heartedly pushed as part of Workplace? The use-cases they give seem liminal at best, and even the mockups they made are really half-assed. Seems like even Facebook Inc doesn’t believe in Live’s potential in the workplace, which seems narrow-sighted. Sure, Live might not be a great internal corporate tool, but it could be a great replacement for external webinars, webcasts & trainings. [0]: http://www.slacklash.com/ http://www.slacklash.com/
- matwood 10y ago
  I guess I do not really understand the backlash at Slack. I think it is more of highlighting broken company cultures. If someone expects an immediate response for any communication does it matter if it is Slack, the phone, your office, your email (plus follow up email and/or phone call)? For me Slack has cut down immensely on people randomly showing up in my office. Just forcing someone to write something down, and think about needing an immediate response cuts down frivolous questions. The biggest plus between it and email is that Slack pushes using public chats. I like this because I can go through during my work mental downtime and stay aware of other things going on.
  - linkregister 10y ago
    I agree; Slack includes features to disable notifications outside of working hours. An @here message will trigger a pop up with "sure you want to wake up the people outside of your time zone?" I have been fortunate enough to not be compelled to answer messages outside of working hours, even with 10-hour variance between time zones in a remote team. Can anyone describe a situation where the introduction of Slack changed their company's culture to an "always on" mode?
0xmohit 10y ago
... so we don't lock you into a long-term contract We simply change the service terms that enable us to share your personal information with WhatsApp or anybody else that we deem appropriate!
r00fus 10y ago
So Facebook wants into the space occupied by Slack, SFDC/Chatter and others? Does it potentially interoperate with your company's ecosystem (suppliers, customers, partners)?
- ChrisBland 10y ago
  As someone who has used Chatter since 2011, it is a half baked product at best. My daily digests are mostly junk, it has no way to filter out, Uploading images looks like you went back to '99. Try uploading multiple images to one comment. Try replying to comments to create a thread... Want to view that image someone just added, no mouse over to zoom, you must click and leave the entire page to view. The feed if expanded takes up massive real estate on the screen to the point the rest of the page is unusable. I could go on, while their Lightning is a better take on it, it will take YEARS to move the bigger companies over to the LEX as they all have custom pages and solutions developed using the old styles, plus LEX is not fully baked yet, still some features missing.
BinaryIdiot 10y ago
I don't get the negativity. This is kinda awesome! News feeds will be good to monitor what's going on across many groups / teams, groups can help your team post and communicate across various topics (same with messaging). Honestly the live video streams on demand is kinda huge; this isn't always something easy for companies to do especially large companies but Facebook can pull this off and make it look great for thousands of users. Overall this seems like a great tool for a workplace. Trouble is it has to compete with Slack and, arguably, things like Confluence.
- gjolund 10y ago
  The last place I want to have work related conversations stored is FB servers.
  - Pamar 10y ago
    I work in an European company. I doubt this will get any traction outside of US.
    - cheriot 10y ago
      It was made in London. At least until someone triggers article 50 it's more European than American :) More to your point, the article mentions getting the privacy/security certifications that companies look for. And if you're paying for the product, there's not the privacy concerns as when you are the product, etc. I'm actually impressed with this thing so far.
      - Pamar 10y ago
        I am in Germany. The NSA debacle made a lot of important people quite unhappy here, not to mention the current tensions between DBank & DOJ and so on... - so I am afraid we would interpret this a bit like Apple's labels, except in this case we would read: Designed in NSA - Made in UK.
        10y ago
Shank 10y ago
The link should really be changed to: https://workplace.fb.com/ https://workplace.fb.com/ Linking to TC really isn't the best way to deliver what it is, and linking to Workplace directly is a much more 'HN' style submission.
mahyarm 10y ago
The lack of slack/irc style large chatrooms is what killed fb@work adoption at my work. If fb wants to compete I think they will need to add that.
- nashadelic 10y ago
  I believe that is deliberate and if Facebook wants to succeed beyond tech companies, it will do well not to add any programmer-happy / commands, @usernames and single-threaded chatrooms
  - benatkin 10y ago
    Yep, that reminds me – :slack: actually comes with the :neckbeard: emoji. While I like Slack's quirky emojis I think it illustrates the point!
- dan15 10y ago
  This is what I see groups for. Chat for small groups, Facebook groups for larger groups and long-form posts that require more in-depth discussion. This is what we do internally at Facebook and it works pretty well.
  - mahyarm 10y ago
    We didn't find the response time good enough compared to chat rooms and notifications were vague. Group chats being limited to 50 people was limiting for many use cases and there was no discoverability for people find chat groups since they were all private. Inviting people into group chats didn't work as well and I think there was a group chat history problem with new joiners. I'm also not quite sure if general file attachments worked. Basically we wanted the single threaded chatroom with people mentions, we didn't want web forums which is what groups are. If FB@Work really wants to compete, they will eventually have to make the slack/irc style rooms app. I also think you guys use IRC right? Other people who say lack of single threaded chat rooms is a feature, not a bug smell like apple saying you don't need X until they release it themselves. You of course can 'make do' with whatever communication medium you have, but for us we found the chatroom useful. Nobody ever used FB@work, while natural adoption for slack in the corporation was very fast. TBH I think google is probably slacks biggest possible competitor. Google makes a pretty good set of business apps with gmail, calendar, contacts, docs, slides, spreadsheets, google drive, small group chats & video. A lot of big corps already use them. They just need to add corporate slack-style chatrooms and forums (not email lists/ groups) and they will probably take a chunk out of slack & co quickly.
tschellenbach 10y ago
Interesting, there is definitely a market for this. Some of our customers at getstream.io use the API to build their own Facebook style apps for within their organizations. Building your own in-house social networks is of course quite a bit of work. Facebook should be much easier to get up and running. The pricing seems really low for small firms and extremely expensive for larger ones. That sounds like a challenging position for the sales team working on this project. I wonder if this comes with the full range of personalization algorithms for the feed. Also wonder how they will handle the extensive customization that most enterprise customers will request. It's a solid idea though, pretty similar to what Slack is trying to achieve.
- bobbles 10y ago
  My company was part of the prerelease program and its basically just like using a more professional version of Facebook. Like linkedin but internal only. it's actually great to have a more social way of catching up with people. The main driver for us was pulling all the 'coffee machine is broken' type emails out of our 'work system' (email) and also let people share pictures of their pets and different social events going on around the world. Plus the advantage is that there was massive uptake super quickly since everyone already had built in knowledge of how to use it from facebook. Plus I can say stuff on there without my parents commenting on every single post i ever make which is nice...
  - tschellenbach 10y ago
    sounds pretty good, think i'll try it out at some point :)
JangleBarney 10y ago
2nd try it always works!
gjolund 10y ago
Perfect, I was just thinking that I need another messanging app in my life.
- dexterdog 10y ago
  Soon I'll have one for each person I communicate with. Then it will make sense for each person to run his own.
  - tzakrajs 10y ago
    Oof, that is too real.
nashashmi 10y ago
Similar software: Knowledge Architecture built on top of yammer.
optim_cynic33 10y ago
(Throwaway because this includes inside baseball theory and it's not appropriate to comment as my usual self) The technical document https://developers.facebook.com/docs/workplace/account-management/api https://developers.facebook.com/docs/workplace/account-manag... includes an example to create a new user via an authenticated POST request. Previously facebook had a party line that each human had at most one facebook account (which was in contrast to its competitors where some humans had more than one account, e.g. @HistoryInPics), and creating an account required a few more hurdles than a single POST request. Now that businesses can create users it looks like that line has subtly disappeared. If workplace takes off, I would expect faster growth in monthly active users because both the numerator will be larger and now business will be paying people to log in to facebook, and those users will also likely want to glance at their personal accounts, as well. Plus, this move makes it harder for corporate firewalls to block facebook altogether, hits against google suite, and makes browsing facebook at work defensible... super interesting.
- wodenokoto 10y ago
  I think each workplace by facebook will have seperate users and separate domains, so the user-count of facebook-proper will not be affected by companies have bulk access to account creation. This should also keep facebook proper blockable. I didn't catch the baseball theory part of your comment advertised in the beginning.
  - B1FF_PSUVM 10y ago
    It was a curve ball, probably he spit on it.
  - Spooky23 10y ago
    Microsoft said that too about O365, and its true -- for Exchange and Outlook only. The reality is that to access all O365 products, you need to have access to CDN domains and live.com authentication infrastructure, and you need to constantly monitor errors in the network because cloud scale services change IPs all of the time. I'm sure FB will be similar.
- 10y ago
meira 10y ago
This is called: despair. Lost of monthly active users, Lost of daily engagement. I bet it'll fail, although everybody automatically think that it Will suceed.
- d33 10y ago
  Do you have sources to back this up?
  - meira 10y ago
    If I had, Nasdaq would crash. And Facebook will do a lot before it happens. But is a economic natural Law: what doesn't grow, shrink. Facebook reached its limits, and it was delayed a lot by Instagram and whatsapp.
    - lotso 10y ago
      Isn't Facebook still growing?
- scient 10y ago
  Except the numbers are going up, not down, the revenue is going up, not down, the stock is going up, not down. Keep on living in your delusions.
- matwood 10y ago
  > despair Huh? FB has the expertise in connecting people to each other and information. In hindsight, it looks like an obvious next step.
negamax 10y ago
Their competitor is not Slack but Salesforce. Salesforce is a leader in enterprise CRM. Facebook with apps, messenger and cloud infrastructure is way ahead on tech and usability front. This move if for getting users from entreprise.
- unclebucknasty 10y ago
  >Their competitor is...Salesforce Don't forget Microsoft/LinkedIn.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
meira 10y ago
"hey guys, Facebook is banned on our intranet, but you can replace it with this..." Nope, not gonna happen.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
driveman 10y ago
Seems like it's not yet open to everyone - new companies have to apply to create an account. What am I missing?
mbesto 10y ago
What has changed about that market that makes this more appealing to businesses than Yammer? OR what about the product makes it more compelling than Yammer?
- nickpsecurity 10y ago
  Particularly, Facebook's history of unethial actions regarding private data. It should almost be criminal for IT shop to put confidential info on a Facebook service.
- draaglom 10y ago
  "More compelling than Yammer" does not strike me as a high bar.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- Spooky23 10y ago
  From the description, it sounds like Yammer before they grafted SharePoint to it. I suppose that makes it better than Yammer by default. :)
peterkshultz 10y ago
As others have said, this feels very similar to Yammer. Microsoft has made a strong pivot to enterprise software over the past couple of years, whereas this feels like Facebook's first foray. Although I don't doubt Facebook's agility, I give other enterprise software companies the advantage sheerly due to their head start.
- j2bax 10y ago
  The benefit Facebook has is hundreds if not thousands of hours of familiarity with their overall interfaces (per user). When I viewed their demo videos, it all looked extremely familiar to me, having used Facebook since about 2006. Whether or not this is the case, it made the design feel good and pleasing. When I look at Yammer or other services that are totally fresh, I am not at all familiar. I'm totally willing to learn new interfaces and get familiar, but there are a lot of people that would prefer to stick with what they are familiar with.
pmlnr 10y ago
https://workplace.fb.com/trust https://workplace.fb.com/trust Sure. Also: Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard Zuck: Just ask Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS [Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one? Zuck: People just submitted it. Zuck: I don't know why. Zuck: They "trust me" Zuck: Dumb fucks Just keep remembering that as well, please.
- themodelplumber 10y ago
  So does the Mark Zuckerberg of today still have the ability to directly access that kind of information? What, if any, safeguards are in place? Asking because it seems kind of an obvious issue.
- _RPM 10y ago
  This is equivalent to what Trump was caught saying about women.
- trendia 10y ago
  I just want to give a shoutout to the subreddit "Stallman was right." [0] Because if there's one thing that Stallman has consistently predicted, it's that if you give your private data to a firm, they will absolutely use it however they want. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/StallmanWasRight https://www.reddit.com/r/StallmanWasRight
  - wNk6A23YB 10y ago
    He also predicted that the stuff that grows on your feet is really tasty. The jury is still out on that though.
  - Borating 10y ago
    Check https://www.reddit.com/r/AntiFacebook https://www.reddit.com/r/AntiFacebook
- swivelmaster 10y ago
  Facebook is now twelve years old. If it's not clear that Zuckerberg has matured into a responsible leader since FB started, then I don't know what you've been reading. And I'm saying this as somebody who has had major gripes with FB in the past, having worked on social games and had to deal with the platform and Credits. IMO your comment is not constructive discussion.
_RPM 10y ago
Trump matured too. He doesn't really still want to sexually assault women. He's changed. Edit: The parent of my comment has completely morphed his original comment into what it is now.
- throwaway070707 10y ago
  Good for you, that you equate maturing of a teenager to maturing of 60 year old to 70 year old.
- DominikR 10y ago
  Sexual assault? He said "they let you do it if you are rich and famous". Now that's real news. He didn't say that he'd force himself on them against their wishes. You might feel it's scummy to think that way but claiming this is sexual assault is ridiculous.
  - jacalata 10y ago
    "They let you do it" is not consent, it's the absence of fighting back. A woman does not have to physically fight her attacker for it to be assault. Consider the phrasing "they let you do it if you hold a gun to their head".
    - dracht 10y ago
      Ridiculous analogy. Being rich and famous (=high status, attractive mate) is nothing like holding a gun to someone's head (=threat of violence). A fairer comparison might be "they let you do it if you look like Brad Pitt". Is that less sexual assault-y in your book?
    - DominikR 10y ago
      Apparently you have difficulty reasoning objectively about this issue. Let's agree to disagree and move on with life. For you it's sexual assault because you imagine him attacking women without any warning while I on the other hand have no reason to believe that he isn't escalating sexually in a normal way, leaving room for women to say no or move a step back to signal a no. Edit: When I think about it then I must be a sexual predator according to your definition. I cannot remember to have ever explicitly asked a women if I may kiss her.
jamesniro 10y ago
Facebook remains of early days of yahoo, one day we will live in a world without facebook which will be a beautiful world
bogomipz 10y ago
Has anyone used it? Is it completely ad free?
- lkozloff 10y ago
  I deployed it for our non-profit last month as part of the early-access program. It's really ad free.
kriro 10y ago
Down the road, this should also integrate well with their VR plans. There's quite a few companies they will not be able to sign up unless they provide an on premise solution (which I doubt they are interested int) and I have a feeling that even if they push the message hard it'll not be trivial to not have carry over privacy concerns (pretty important for enterprise software). My gut tells me they should have released this as a completely separate entity to avoid fragmentation (I suppose this would also be the default positioning argument). As an outsider it's also an interesting case of make vs. buy (MS-Yammer vs. Workplace).
sergiotapia 10y ago
Not a chance baby. I won't link my facebook to my work life.
spectrum1234 10y ago
This is brilliant. No was is talking about the most interesting part. Marketplace products are the ONLY thing Facebook can do that it's direct competitors can't. And they nailed it.
ndesaulniers 10y ago
Previous job used Yammer. People spent most of their time on the site complaining about the company there. Daily notifications by default containing a ton of garbage. After reading Corporate Confidential by Cynthia Shapiro I figured it was a tool for HR to hold opinions against individuals, so I deleted my account and kept my opinions to myself.
lkozloff 10y ago
We deployed this last month, taking part in the early access program. On the whole it's been of net cultural benefit for our non-profit. Our staff seem more engaged with the overall mission, better informed about what's going on and more likely to share information that they might have been reticent to share over email. I really like that it's completely separate from my 'personal' Facebook, and it seems with the rebranding from "Facebook at Work" they're trying to emphasize that separation even more.
a_imho 10y ago
I can totally see Facebook doing a Google with this one.
CombatCode 10y ago
Anyone know what technology stack stay behind that?
pmlnr 10y ago
Is it just me or is this somewhat a contradiction? "Your Workplace account is separate from your personal Facebook account." https://workplace.fb.com/trust/ https://workplace.fb.com/trust/ How do I create a separate username and password for my Workplace account? To separate your personal account from your Workplace account: Go to your Security Settings and click Sign Up Manually Enter and confirm a New Password Click Unlink Account Note: Once your Facebook accounts are unlinked you'll have to log in separately to your Workplace account." https://www.facebook.com/help/work/1581273578811546?helpref=search https://www.facebook.com/help/work/1581273578811546?helpref=...
- charlesdenault 10y ago
  See other comments regarding employer being able to create an account via POST request. I'd assume that's the only way to create clean separation, even then I don't doubt they'll be able to fill in that gap!
pmlnr 10y ago
Let's count. According to https://workplace.fb.com/pricing/ https://workplace.fb.com/pricing/, it's $1-$3 per user. A cheaper server is ~$7k. It means that a company of of 9k personnel ( which is not too small ) will produce $18k per month. That can buy 2 servers per month and maybe cover some of the bandwidth costs. To get a rack of servers - which I believe is the minimum to actually serve a company of this size - you'll need to have them on board for about 2 years (!) before profit starts to flow in. Unfortunately by that time you'll need start replacing the servers, since they have ~3 years of warranty these days. For me this looks like no profit, which could mean two things: 1. The pricing is deliberately low, so it's either going to be raised later or it's covered from other parts of the company, and this is a step only to buy into an area currently covered by others. 2. The will use the data you provide for other purposes. ( 3. Both. ) With the first scenario, this will probably not live too long; a few years, maybe, but it's hard for me to believe that they would just pump money into this, just to eliminate others, but you never know. With the second scenario... corporate espionage becomes obsolete.
- em3rgent0rdr 10y ago
  Could use something like GNU social, and then could keep the network self-hosted and private, and not worry about being locked into possible future price-hikes. https://gnu.io/social/ https://gnu.io/social/
- onion2k 10y ago
  According to their 2015 SEC filing, FB own about $3.6b in networking equipment (servers, switches, etc). This new way of using Facebook code will very likely just fit in to their existing infrastructure so they're using it a bit more efficiently. The cost in terms of hardware and connectivity is, essentially, already paid.
jaxn 10y ago
I own 3 retail stores and am excited about this. We have used GroupMe for a few years, but I am dissatisfied with how limited it is. Our team is not sitting at a computer all day and mostly needs to share information efficiently. With 3 locations, it needs to be digital. With 2 shift blocks per day, 7 days per week, it is hard to keep everyone working collaboratively on things like promotions, social media marketing efforts, etc. I also like that it includes the opportunity to work with other companies. I am also a SaaS software vendor for retail store owners like me. I could definitely see integrating this into our app (ResaleAI.com) and had considered Slack and others. So yeah, I signed up to play with it internally first. I am cautiously optimistic.
awatlits 10y ago
Anyone find it weird that workplace.fb.com is a wordpress blog...

213 points by Yodoshi 10y ago

Here is a more direct look at the actual features: https://fbatwork.files.wordpress.com/2016/09/workplace_3min_tour.mp4 https://fbatwork.files.wordpress.com/2016/09/workplace_3min_...

dingaling 10y ago
Thank you, that was useful. An horrifically cluttered UI, but having evaluated many of these workplace collabortaion tools in the past it's actually pretty par for the course. For some reason our HR partners always wanted everything on one page, like a massive disfunctional sci-fi spacecraft dashboard with lights flashing everywhere.

CGamesPlay 10y ago

Is it actually $3 for the organization? It isn't clear if this is per-seat or per-organization.

juliuss 10y ago
I imagine it's 3$ per user, seeing as the pricing decreases based on how many users you have. It's also what TechCrunch seems to have assumed: https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/10/facebook-workplace/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/10/facebook-workplace/
markwillis82 10y ago
This is buried in the faq as I was interested in this too: https://workplace.fb.com/faq/ https://workplace.fb.com/faq/ == How much does this cost? The pricing model is based on a monthly fee per active user

benevol 10y ago

So now employers are being told to have their employees put business data (potentially even sensitive or secret) on US servers that are "owned" by the US government (see PRISM, etc.), while everybody today knows that NSA surveillance data is being used to gain economic advantages for the country. How stupid do you think the rest of the world is?

lettergram 10y ago
You'd be surprised. Google recently bought API.ai for the exact same reason, albeit API.ai has raw data and Workplace would be companies internal interaction data.
dangoor 10y ago
Google Apps for your Domain (G Suite now, I guess) is already like this, right?
prostoalex 10y ago
Considering that the door was wide open with Google Docs (err, Suite), Microsoft Office 365, respective e-mail offerings (Google Apps, Microsoft Outlook), Yammer, Github, Box, Dropbox and Slack, I don't know if "now" is an appropriate term to use.
linkregister 10y ago
> everybody today knows that NSA surveillance data is being used to gain economic advantages for the country. I didn't know that, can you give some examples of this? I heard about the US government making a WTO claim over bribery by Airbus in Saudi Arabia ostensibly discovered by electronic surveillance (not PRISM-related), but this is in the gray area.
- JumpCrisscross 10y ago
  The American surveillance infrastructure was deployed, allegedly for corporate espionage, against targets in France [1], Germany and Brazil [2]. The IMF, the World Bank and the EU antitrust commissioner, amongst others, were likely targeted to help politically-connected companies [3]. [1] http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/wikileaks-enthuellung-nsa-soll-auch-franzoesische-wirtschaft-bespitzelt-haben-a-1041268.html http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/wikileaks-enthuellung-... [2] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150629/16134031494/nsa-despite-claiming-it-doesnt-engage-economic-espionage-engaged-economic-espionage.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150629/16134031494/nsa-d... [3] https://theintercept.com/2014/09/05/us-governments-plans-use-economic-espionage-benefit-american-corporations/ https://theintercept.com/2014/09/05/us-governments-plans-use...

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

heydenberk 10y ago

I dread one day having to limit job searches to places that don't make me use my private social networking account to do business.

kikkak 10y ago
I dream of the day where I'm not followed around by my data exhaust. It's just wishful thinking. I feel that the marginal benefit of social media systems has peaked. It's begun to make interactions less human and less personal; the gain over using email is negligible. I don't need to see your picture, I just want to know when I'll have VPN access.
- waspleg 10y ago
  I'd wager a large portion of the readers of this site are too young to know what it as like to not have your entire life under 24/7 surveillance. I hope the back lash is enormous. Security = Privacy = Democracy; you can't have one without the others. Chilling effects brought on by "you should be careful what you say (and to whom)" is the death of freedom of speech, and with it "free" society.
lazzlazzlazz 10y ago
The Workplace account exists completely separately of your private Facebook account. Can you point to specific evidence that suggests they're the same/linked or do you just "feel" like they would be?
- meira 10y ago
  Understanding software systems, there are any evidences that says it's separated? They use data from instagram and whatsapp, which they still call different companies. What would make us believe they aren't going to exploit it the same way they already do?
spicyj 10y ago
"Workplace" accounts are completely separate, with the exception of an optional link to your personal account to make it easier to log in. To my knowledge, no other data is shared. Your employer owns the data, not Facebook. See https://workplace.fb.com/trust/ https://workplace.fb.com/trust/.

bhaumik 10y ago

No thanks. Slack is distracting enough as is. Why would I want the rest of my social circle affecting my productivity?

sp332 10y ago
Companies probably wouldn't allow it in if it involved being distracted by your social "circle". That's why it doesn't. It's a completely separate account.
- bhaumik 10y ago
  Ah, misinterpreted. Ignore my note then.
laurentdc 10y ago
> Slack is distracting enough as is. cmd-q, alt-f4, whatever you use. Feel free to shut down all IM when you need to focus on something.

theuri 10y ago

Is this driven by the digital collaboration at work trend started by Slack, or intended to be an entirely different beast?

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
DamnYuppie 10y ago
I find it hard to believe that people believe Slack started the trend. There have been countless such services in the past. Back in the terrible dark ages of the internet, pre-2000, we used AIM to have those type of discussions. Was very valuable as we had development teams all over the country and was a quick way to determine who the expert was for a given question and get them into a conversation. If it was too cumbersome to hash out with them via messaging we would, god forbid, pick up the phone and have a chat.
- pavel_lishin 10y ago
  IRC and a wiki used to be the tools of the trade.
- sanderjd 10y ago
  People in "normal" non-techy workplaces are aware of and interested in Slack. Mainstream workplace group messaging in these sorts of organizations (which make up a lot more of the economy than the ones in our bubble) is a fairly new trend, which Slack deserves a lot of credit for. This is a common mistake - the existence of technology is not the same as mainstream adoption.
  - DamnYuppie 10y ago
    Are you saying AIM wasn't widely adopted?

andrewvijay 10y ago

you add whatever ching ting and ting tong music to show it is very friendly, I'm not really buying that shit cause I simply cannot trust facebook.

ktamiola 10y ago
you got me on ching ting and ting tong

dbg31415 10y ago

Yes, just what I want... more crap from Facebook. I've been so very satisfied with how much of my personal data they sell to marketers thus far, I really want them to start tracking me at work too. Hopefully they will pair the launch with an aggressive sales campaign targeted at people in HR so I won't get a say in the matter and it'll just be rolled out for my coworkers without our input. That would be just swell.

gjolund 10y ago
Are you from the future?
- dbg31415 10y ago
  Facebook seems like exactly the company we want to trust with SSO and performance reviews and internal corporate communications. It's coming and it's going to be amazing! Would you like to know more?
blahi 10y ago
Hey, I'm wondering, how exactly does facebook selling ads against your data affect you negatively?
- gjolund 10y ago
  Advertising is brainwashing, it is the art of thought manipulation. Right now it is heavily focused on consumerism. Facebook has already shown it is can easily identify depression, radicalization, political associations, and other "aberrant" behaviours. I do not trust Mark Zuckerberg as an individual, nor FB as a company to fill that role in society.
  - blahi 10y ago
    You are being manipulated constantly, 24/7. By your friends, co-workers, family, acquitances, movies, songs, books, by yourself. This isn't really a valid reason, IMO.

timanglade 10y ago

Considering the backlash against Slack [0], it’ll be interesting to see if Messenger’s model of more “atomic” conversations will create less interruptions. Slack (much like IRC) really contributes to an expectation of continuous conversation throughout the day/night (although not all people deal with it that way). In comparison, Messenger (and other chat apps like WhatsApp, iMessage, etc.) seem to be more designed towards short chats about specific topics, while still allowing for deeper, longer conversations (even larger groups) if needed. Could be a huge win. Beyond that, am I the only one surprised at Live being half-heartedly pushed as part of Workplace? The use-cases they give seem liminal at best, and even the mockups they made are really half-assed. Seems like even Facebook Inc doesn’t believe in Live’s potential in the workplace, which seems narrow-sighted. Sure, Live might not be a great internal corporate tool, but it could be a great replacement for external webinars, webcasts & trainings. [0]: http://www.slacklash.com/ http://www.slacklash.com/

matwood 10y ago
I guess I do not really understand the backlash at Slack. I think it is more of highlighting broken company cultures. If someone expects an immediate response for any communication does it matter if it is Slack, the phone, your office, your email (plus follow up email and/or phone call)? For me Slack has cut down immensely on people randomly showing up in my office. Just forcing someone to write something down, and think about needing an immediate response cuts down frivolous questions. The biggest plus between it and email is that Slack pushes using public chats. I like this because I can go through during my work mental downtime and stay aware of other things going on.
- linkregister 10y ago
  I agree; Slack includes features to disable notifications outside of working hours. An @here message will trigger a pop up with "sure you want to wake up the people outside of your time zone?" I have been fortunate enough to not be compelled to answer messages outside of working hours, even with 10-hour variance between time zones in a remote team. Can anyone describe a situation where the introduction of Slack changed their company's culture to an "always on" mode?

0xmohit 10y ago

... so we don't lock you into a long-term contract We simply change the service terms that enable us to share your personal information with WhatsApp or anybody else that we deem appropriate!

r00fus 10y ago

So Facebook wants into the space occupied by Slack, SFDC/Chatter and others? Does it potentially interoperate with your company's ecosystem (suppliers, customers, partners)?

ChrisBland 10y ago
As someone who has used Chatter since 2011, it is a half baked product at best. My daily digests are mostly junk, it has no way to filter out, Uploading images looks like you went back to '99. Try uploading multiple images to one comment. Try replying to comments to create a thread... Want to view that image someone just added, no mouse over to zoom, you must click and leave the entire page to view. The feed if expanded takes up massive real estate on the screen to the point the rest of the page is unusable. I could go on, while their Lightning is a better take on it, it will take YEARS to move the bigger companies over to the LEX as they all have custom pages and solutions developed using the old styles, plus LEX is not fully baked yet, still some features missing.

BinaryIdiot 10y ago

I don't get the negativity. This is kinda awesome! News feeds will be good to monitor what's going on across many groups / teams, groups can help your team post and communicate across various topics (same with messaging). Honestly the live video streams on demand is kinda huge; this isn't always something easy for companies to do especially large companies but Facebook can pull this off and make it look great for thousands of users. Overall this seems like a great tool for a workplace. Trouble is it has to compete with Slack and, arguably, things like Confluence.

gjolund 10y ago
The last place I want to have work related conversations stored is FB servers.
- Pamar 10y ago
  I work in an European company. I doubt this will get any traction outside of US.
  - cheriot 10y ago
    It was made in London. At least until someone triggers article 50 it's more European than American :) More to your point, the article mentions getting the privacy/security certifications that companies look for. And if you're paying for the product, there's not the privacy concerns as when you are the product, etc. I'm actually impressed with this thing so far.
    - Pamar 10y ago
      I am in Germany. The NSA debacle made a lot of important people quite unhappy here, not to mention the current tensions between DBank & DOJ and so on... - so I am afraid we would interpret this a bit like Apple's labels, except in this case we would read: Designed in NSA - Made in UK.
      - 10y ago

Shank 10y ago

The link should really be changed to: https://workplace.fb.com/ https://workplace.fb.com/ Linking to TC really isn't the best way to deliver what it is, and linking to Workplace directly is a much more 'HN' style submission.

mahyarm 10y ago

The lack of slack/irc style large chatrooms is what killed fb@work adoption at my work. If fb wants to compete I think they will need to add that.

nashadelic 10y ago
I believe that is deliberate and if Facebook wants to succeed beyond tech companies, it will do well not to add any programmer-happy / commands, @usernames and single-threaded chatrooms
- benatkin 10y ago
  Yep, that reminds me – :slack: actually comes with the :neckbeard: emoji. While I like Slack's quirky emojis I think it illustrates the point!
dan15 10y ago
This is what I see groups for. Chat for small groups, Facebook groups for larger groups and long-form posts that require more in-depth discussion. This is what we do internally at Facebook and it works pretty well.
- mahyarm 10y ago
  We didn't find the response time good enough compared to chat rooms and notifications were vague. Group chats being limited to 50 people was limiting for many use cases and there was no discoverability for people find chat groups since they were all private. Inviting people into group chats didn't work as well and I think there was a group chat history problem with new joiners. I'm also not quite sure if general file attachments worked. Basically we wanted the single threaded chatroom with people mentions, we didn't want web forums which is what groups are. If FB@Work really wants to compete, they will eventually have to make the slack/irc style rooms app. I also think you guys use IRC right? Other people who say lack of single threaded chat rooms is a feature, not a bug smell like apple saying you don't need X until they release it themselves. You of course can 'make do' with whatever communication medium you have, but for us we found the chatroom useful. Nobody ever used FB@work, while natural adoption for slack in the corporation was very fast. TBH I think google is probably slacks biggest possible competitor. Google makes a pretty good set of business apps with gmail, calendar, contacts, docs, slides, spreadsheets, google drive, small group chats & video. A lot of big corps already use them. They just need to add corporate slack-style chatrooms and forums (not email lists/ groups) and they will probably take a chunk out of slack & co quickly.

tschellenbach 10y ago

Interesting, there is definitely a market for this. Some of our customers at getstream.io use the API to build their own Facebook style apps for within their organizations. Building your own in-house social networks is of course quite a bit of work. Facebook should be much easier to get up and running. The pricing seems really low for small firms and extremely expensive for larger ones. That sounds like a challenging position for the sales team working on this project. I wonder if this comes with the full range of personalization algorithms for the feed. Also wonder how they will handle the extensive customization that most enterprise customers will request. It's a solid idea though, pretty similar to what Slack is trying to achieve.

bobbles 10y ago
My company was part of the prerelease program and its basically just like using a more professional version of Facebook. Like linkedin but internal only. it's actually great to have a more social way of catching up with people. The main driver for us was pulling all the 'coffee machine is broken' type emails out of our 'work system' (email) and also let people share pictures of their pets and different social events going on around the world. Plus the advantage is that there was massive uptake super quickly since everyone already had built in knowledge of how to use it from facebook. Plus I can say stuff on there without my parents commenting on every single post i ever make which is nice...
- tschellenbach 10y ago
  sounds pretty good, think i'll try it out at some point :)

JangleBarney 10y ago

2nd try it always works!

gjolund 10y ago

Perfect, I was just thinking that I need another messanging app in my life.

dexterdog 10y ago
Soon I'll have one for each person I communicate with. Then it will make sense for each person to run his own.
- tzakrajs 10y ago
  Oof, that is too real.

nashashmi 10y ago

Similar software: Knowledge Architecture built on top of yammer.

optim_cynic33 10y ago

(Throwaway because this includes inside baseball theory and it's not appropriate to comment as my usual self) The technical document https://developers.facebook.com/docs/workplace/account-management/api https://developers.facebook.com/docs/workplace/account-manag... includes an example to create a new user via an authenticated POST request. Previously facebook had a party line that each human had at most one facebook account (which was in contrast to its competitors where some humans had more than one account, e.g. @HistoryInPics), and creating an account required a few more hurdles than a single POST request. Now that businesses can create users it looks like that line has subtly disappeared. If workplace takes off, I would expect faster growth in monthly active users because both the numerator will be larger and now business will be paying people to log in to facebook, and those users will also likely want to glance at their personal accounts, as well. Plus, this move makes it harder for corporate firewalls to block facebook altogether, hits against google suite, and makes browsing facebook at work defensible... super interesting.

wodenokoto 10y ago
I think each workplace by facebook will have seperate users and separate domains, so the user-count of facebook-proper will not be affected by companies have bulk access to account creation. This should also keep facebook proper blockable. I didn't catch the baseball theory part of your comment advertised in the beginning.
- B1FF_PSUVM 10y ago
  It was a curve ball, probably he spit on it.
- Spooky23 10y ago
  Microsoft said that too about O365, and its true -- for Exchange and Outlook only. The reality is that to access all O365 products, you need to have access to CDN domains and live.com authentication infrastructure, and you need to constantly monitor errors in the network because cloud scale services change IPs all of the time. I'm sure FB will be similar.
10y ago

meira 10y ago

This is called: despair. Lost of monthly active users, Lost of daily engagement. I bet it'll fail, although everybody automatically think that it Will suceed.

d33 10y ago
Do you have sources to back this up?
- meira 10y ago
  If I had, Nasdaq would crash. And Facebook will do a lot before it happens. But is a economic natural Law: what doesn't grow, shrink. Facebook reached its limits, and it was delayed a lot by Instagram and whatsapp.
  - lotso 10y ago
    Isn't Facebook still growing?
scient 10y ago
Except the numbers are going up, not down, the revenue is going up, not down, the stock is going up, not down. Keep on living in your delusions.
matwood 10y ago
> despair Huh? FB has the expertise in connecting people to each other and information. In hindsight, it looks like an obvious next step.

negamax 10y ago

Their competitor is not Slack but Salesforce. Salesforce is a leader in enterprise CRM. Facebook with apps, messenger and cloud infrastructure is way ahead on tech and usability front. This move if for getting users from entreprise.

unclebucknasty 10y ago
>Their competitor is...Salesforce Don't forget Microsoft/LinkedIn.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

meira 10y ago

"hey guys, Facebook is banned on our intranet, but you can replace it with this..." Nope, not gonna happen.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

driveman 10y ago

Seems like it's not yet open to everyone - new companies have to apply to create an account. What am I missing?

mbesto 10y ago

What has changed about that market that makes this more appealing to businesses than Yammer? OR what about the product makes it more compelling than Yammer?

nickpsecurity 10y ago
Particularly, Facebook's history of unethial actions regarding private data. It should almost be criminal for IT shop to put confidential info on a Facebook service.
draaglom 10y ago
"More compelling than Yammer" does not strike me as a high bar.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
Spooky23 10y ago
From the description, it sounds like Yammer before they grafted SharePoint to it. I suppose that makes it better than Yammer by default. :)

peterkshultz 10y ago

As others have said, this feels very similar to Yammer. Microsoft has made a strong pivot to enterprise software over the past couple of years, whereas this feels like Facebook's first foray. Although I don't doubt Facebook's agility, I give other enterprise software companies the advantage sheerly due to their head start.

j2bax 10y ago
The benefit Facebook has is hundreds if not thousands of hours of familiarity with their overall interfaces (per user). When I viewed their demo videos, it all looked extremely familiar to me, having used Facebook since about 2006. Whether or not this is the case, it made the design feel good and pleasing. When I look at Yammer or other services that are totally fresh, I am not at all familiar. I'm totally willing to learn new interfaces and get familiar, but there are a lot of people that would prefer to stick with what they are familiar with.

pmlnr 10y ago

https://workplace.fb.com/trust https://workplace.fb.com/trust Sure. Also: Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard Zuck: Just ask Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS [Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one? Zuck: People just submitted it. Zuck: I don't know why. Zuck: They "trust me" Zuck: Dumb fucks Just keep remembering that as well, please.

themodelplumber 10y ago
So does the Mark Zuckerberg of today still have the ability to directly access that kind of information? What, if any, safeguards are in place? Asking because it seems kind of an obvious issue.
_RPM 10y ago
This is equivalent to what Trump was caught saying about women.
trendia 10y ago
I just want to give a shoutout to the subreddit "Stallman was right." [0] Because if there's one thing that Stallman has consistently predicted, it's that if you give your private data to a firm, they will absolutely use it however they want. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/StallmanWasRight https://www.reddit.com/r/StallmanWasRight
- wNk6A23YB 10y ago
  He also predicted that the stuff that grows on your feet is really tasty. The jury is still out on that though.
- Borating 10y ago
  Check https://www.reddit.com/r/AntiFacebook https://www.reddit.com/r/AntiFacebook
swivelmaster 10y ago
Facebook is now twelve years old. If it's not clear that Zuckerberg has matured into a responsible leader since FB started, then I don't know what you've been reading. And I'm saying this as somebody who has had major gripes with FB in the past, having worked on social games and had to deal with the platform and Credits. IMO your comment is not constructive discussion.

_RPM 10y ago

Trump matured too. He doesn't really still want to sexually assault women. He's changed. Edit: The parent of my comment has completely morphed his original comment into what it is now.

throwaway070707 10y ago
Good for you, that you equate maturing of a teenager to maturing of 60 year old to 70 year old.
DominikR 10y ago
Sexual assault? He said "they let you do it if you are rich and famous". Now that's real news. He didn't say that he'd force himself on them against their wishes. You might feel it's scummy to think that way but claiming this is sexual assault is ridiculous.
- jacalata 10y ago
  "They let you do it" is not consent, it's the absence of fighting back. A woman does not have to physically fight her attacker for it to be assault. Consider the phrasing "they let you do it if you hold a gun to their head".
  - dracht 10y ago
    Ridiculous analogy. Being rich and famous (=high status, attractive mate) is nothing like holding a gun to someone's head (=threat of violence). A fairer comparison might be "they let you do it if you look like Brad Pitt". Is that less sexual assault-y in your book?
  - DominikR 10y ago
    Apparently you have difficulty reasoning objectively about this issue. Let's agree to disagree and move on with life. For you it's sexual assault because you imagine him attacking women without any warning while I on the other hand have no reason to believe that he isn't escalating sexually in a normal way, leaving room for women to say no or move a step back to signal a no. Edit: When I think about it then I must be a sexual predator according to your definition. I cannot remember to have ever explicitly asked a women if I may kiss her.

jamesniro 10y ago

Facebook remains of early days of yahoo, one day we will live in a world without facebook which will be a beautiful world

bogomipz 10y ago

Has anyone used it? Is it completely ad free?

lkozloff 10y ago
I deployed it for our non-profit last month as part of the early-access program. It's really ad free.

kriro 10y ago

Down the road, this should also integrate well with their VR plans. There's quite a few companies they will not be able to sign up unless they provide an on premise solution (which I doubt they are interested int) and I have a feeling that even if they push the message hard it'll not be trivial to not have carry over privacy concerns (pretty important for enterprise software). My gut tells me they should have released this as a completely separate entity to avoid fragmentation (I suppose this would also be the default positioning argument). As an outsider it's also an interesting case of make vs. buy (MS-Yammer vs. Workplace).

sergiotapia 10y ago

Not a chance baby. I won't link my facebook to my work life.

spectrum1234 10y ago

This is brilliant. No was is talking about the most interesting part. Marketplace products are the ONLY thing Facebook can do that it's direct competitors can't. And they nailed it.

ndesaulniers 10y ago

Previous job used Yammer. People spent most of their time on the site complaining about the company there. Daily notifications by default containing a ton of garbage. After reading Corporate Confidential by Cynthia Shapiro I figured it was a tool for HR to hold opinions against individuals, so I deleted my account and kept my opinions to myself.

lkozloff 10y ago

We deployed this last month, taking part in the early access program. On the whole it's been of net cultural benefit for our non-profit. Our staff seem more engaged with the overall mission, better informed about what's going on and more likely to share information that they might have been reticent to share over email. I really like that it's completely separate from my 'personal' Facebook, and it seems with the rebranding from "Facebook at Work" they're trying to emphasize that separation even more.

a_imho 10y ago

I can totally see Facebook doing a Google with this one.

CombatCode 10y ago

Anyone know what technology stack stay behind that?

pmlnr 10y ago

Is it just me or is this somewhat a contradiction? "Your Workplace account is separate from your personal Facebook account." https://workplace.fb.com/trust/ https://workplace.fb.com/trust/ How do I create a separate username and password for my Workplace account? To separate your personal account from your Workplace account: Go to your Security Settings and click Sign Up Manually Enter and confirm a New Password Click Unlink Account Note: Once your Facebook accounts are unlinked you'll have to log in separately to your Workplace account." https://www.facebook.com/help/work/1581273578811546?helpref=search https://www.facebook.com/help/work/1581273578811546?helpref=...

charlesdenault 10y ago
See other comments regarding employer being able to create an account via POST request. I'd assume that's the only way to create clean separation, even then I don't doubt they'll be able to fill in that gap!

pmlnr 10y ago

Let's count. According to https://workplace.fb.com/pricing/ https://workplace.fb.com/pricing/, it's $1-$3 per user. A cheaper server is ~$7k. It means that a company of of 9k personnel ( which is not too small ) will produce $18k per month. That can buy 2 servers per month and maybe cover some of the bandwidth costs. To get a rack of servers - which I believe is the minimum to actually serve a company of this size - you'll need to have them on board for about 2 years (!) before profit starts to flow in. Unfortunately by that time you'll need start replacing the servers, since they have ~3 years of warranty these days. For me this looks like no profit, which could mean two things: 1. The pricing is deliberately low, so it's either going to be raised later or it's covered from other parts of the company, and this is a step only to buy into an area currently covered by others. 2. The will use the data you provide for other purposes. ( 3. Both. ) With the first scenario, this will probably not live too long; a few years, maybe, but it's hard for me to believe that they would just pump money into this, just to eliminate others, but you never know. With the second scenario... corporate espionage becomes obsolete.

em3rgent0rdr 10y ago
Could use something like GNU social, and then could keep the network self-hosted and private, and not worry about being locked into possible future price-hikes. https://gnu.io/social/ https://gnu.io/social/
onion2k 10y ago
According to their 2015 SEC filing, FB own about $3.6b in networking equipment (servers, switches, etc). This new way of using Facebook code will very likely just fit in to their existing infrastructure so they're using it a bit more efficiently. The cost in terms of hardware and connectivity is, essentially, already paid.

jaxn 10y ago

I own 3 retail stores and am excited about this. We have used GroupMe for a few years, but I am dissatisfied with how limited it is. Our team is not sitting at a computer all day and mostly needs to share information efficiently. With 3 locations, it needs to be digital. With 2 shift blocks per day, 7 days per week, it is hard to keep everyone working collaboratively on things like promotions, social media marketing efforts, etc. I also like that it includes the opportunity to work with other companies. I am also a SaaS software vendor for retail store owners like me. I could definitely see integrating this into our app (ResaleAI.com) and had considered Slack and others. So yeah, I signed up to play with it internally first. I am cautiously optimistic.

awatlits 10y ago

Anyone find it weird that workplace.fb.com is a wordpress blog...