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Workplace by Facebook<\/a> has been in general release for just two months<\/a> now, but it\u2019s clear that Facebook has big plans for its enterprise social product. Just this week, at TechCrunch Disrupt in London, the company announced a new platform<\/a> to integrate enterprise applications with Workplace, putting it in direct competition with Slack, the enterprise social\u00a0darling of the moment<\/a>.<\/p>\n But Workplace hopes to differentiate itself from the enterprise social pack by being more than a tool for teams of knowledge workers to share information. Sean Ryan, VP of platform partnerships at Facebook, says Facebook\u00a0wants Workplace in use across the organization from the warehouse to the front office. \u201cWe look at it this way: we try to connect whole companies. Other products try to connect teams,\u201d he said \u2014 taking a swipe at Slack and Microsoft\u2019s recently announced Teams <\/a>app.<\/p>\n Just as Facebook\u2019s consumer mission is to connect the world, Ryan sees Workplace\u2019s mission to connect all employees in all companies, many of whom might not have traditionally used these kinds of tools. \u201cWe\u2019re bringing a set of tools to employees who never had them. Most companies [in this space] are not focused on that area,\u201d he says. It only makes sense from a social network building standpoint in Ryan\u2019s view. The more people you have using the system, the more valuable the network \u2014 and you can\u2019t achieve that with siloed systems.<\/p>\n That\u2019s all well and good, says analyst Alan Pelz-Sharpe from Digital Clarity Group, who has been following enterprise social since its earliest days, but this is an approach that previous\u00a0generations of enterprise social products tried and failed. \u201cNo doubt Facebook does want to be a social tool for the entire company \u2013 but so did Jive, Yammer and countless others,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n While he acknowledges that Facebook has a strong brand and a familiar interface\u00a0in its favor, it doesn\u2019t insulate it from the same problems those earlier companies faced with this approach. \u201cNormally, those challenges appear in the form of governance, administration and security. Viral growth of an application throughout an organization is good for Facebook but can bring in its wake, all [kinds] of complexity and confusion for the organization itself.\u201d<\/p>\n On the positive side, we\u2019ve\u00a0always known that enterprise social tools flatten hierarchies as employees have direct access to everyone in the company, regardless of their role. It strips away the layers of management and gives everyone the power to share their ideas. This gives employees a much greater sense of involvement \u2014 and indeed, Ryan says in an early test with a grocery chain, they found much greater employee satisfaction when using Workplace.<\/p>\n The application integration announced this week, takes that to the next step. As much as employees want to communicate, they don\u2019t want to flitter from application to application. By building integration points \u2014 APIs \u2014 into Workplace, Facebook is providing the means to bring work product into the tool.<\/p>\n If like many people using Facebook in their personal lives, people start living much of their day in Workplace at work, that could prove to be very convenient.<\/p>\nReaching all the people, all the time<\/h2>\n
Integration is key<\/h2>\n