Workplace: Working Better Together

30th May 2023 By Adosphere

The way we work is evolving quickly – it’s becoming faster, mobile, more complex. At Workplace, we believe that being connected at work means you can get more done and work better, on-the-go.

How We Got Started

Long before Workplace existed, people started using Meta to do work. Here at Meta, we’ve used Meta to get work done for years. Using Meta to collaborate helped us work better, faster and build our culture as we scaled. Soon, other companies were curious about how we used Meta to work and scale, so we built a version of Meta for work, to be used outside our company. The response was great. In the process we also added important enterprise security features such as single sign-on, two-factor authentication and third party security certifications to the many Meta features you already know – News Feed, Groups, Search, Chat, Live and so on. But what really gets us out of bed every day is hearing about the ways organizations are using Workplace to transform how they work.

At Starbucks, Kevin Johnson, the company’s CEO, and other senior leaders live stream their town hall meetings on Workplace to thousands of store managers in order to share their vision with them and hear directly from people on the ground, even if they are hundreds or thousands of miles away. Starbucks store managers had always been able to build community with their local teams, but with town halls streaming through Workplace on their mobile devices, they now find themselves a part of a much larger community – their entire company.
Before Workplace, Save the Children struggled to share knowledge and information quickly and effectively, on a global scale, with all of their humanitarian employees, who provide relief and support to children in areas impacted by crisis and disaster. Workplace allows Save the Children to reach people quickly on their mobile devices with the information they need to keep doing the important work they do everyday to ensure children are protected in crisis.
Deliveroo, a UK-based food delivery service, has operations across 150 cities and 12 countries, and is growing quickly. That means they are also hiring quickly. They use Workplace to scale their unique culture across global offices, onboard new people, and to build a company that feels smaller and more connected. Workplace has helped replace internal mailing lists, newsletters and an intranet.

It’s humbling to hear these stories, and it inspires us to keep improving Workplace. So today, we’re announcing new integrations and partnerships for companies to improve their day-to-day workflows, ensure regulatory compliance and enable richer communication using Live video.

New Integrations

Files, documents and CRM are a critical part of daily work life. As Workplace becomes the primary place where people in organizations go to share information and have discussions, we needed to make working with these technologies fast and reliable for a better work experience. New integrations with some of the world’s leading enterprise services make it easier to share, preview and organize files, documents and work with customer records. With these integrations, we’re making it simpler for teams to share ideas and collaborate inside Workplace.

Build Custom Workflows with Bots

Bots have become a simple and powerful way for people to interact with services they use day-to-day. Starting today, Workplace customers can build custom bots for their organizations, that allow people to interact with other tools and services from within Workplace. People can interact with Workplace bots in groups as well as in chat. In groups, you can @mention a bot to initiate a task or workflow. The bot can take action and reply back with relevant information. In chat, you can message a bot to request information or take an action. Bots can also start conversations to send you important notifications. Our own teams have built over 100 bots to improve day-to-day workflows at Meta. Here is an example of a bot a company could build to log a repair at a factory.

To make it easy to build bots for Workplace, we have a number of bot platform partners who are launching support for Workplace. Security and Compliance Integrations

Workplace is trusted by companies with confidential business information, so it’s important that organizations have the tools to manage security and access control. That’s why, right from the beginning, we had support for the major enterprise identity providers. For companies who don’t use these systems, we recently added support for two-factor authentication so that people’s accounts are better protected from compromise. We also want to make it even easier to let companies export, backup and store the critical conversations that happen in Workplace, so we’re announcing partnerships with several of the industry’s leading cloud compliance, e-discovery and data loss prevention providers. And companies with more specific business requirements can now subscribe to webhooks to manage activity on Workplace in real-time.

Workplace Live API for Streaming Video

Live video is fundamentally changing how companies communicate. We’ve seen teams broadcast their weekly meetings, companies move training and webinars into Workplace and CEOs stream live Q&As to their entire workforce. Sometimes, these events need higher production value than a smartphone can provide. So today, we’re announcing support for streaming Live into Workplace over RTMP. Because the Workplace Live API is based on the Meta Live API, it’s already supported by a wide range of hardware and software encoders. Using this API, BlueJeans is making it possible for their customers to stream video meetings directly to Workplace. We’re also announcing Live Production Partners. These partners bring deep expertise in producing professional quality live streams.

Every Continent, including Antarctica

Workplace is being used on every continent, including Antarctica, in 77 languages, by more than 14,000 organizations. But today is simply the next step we’re taking to connect everyone at work. At Meta, we often remind ourselves that we’re only 1% done. At Workplace, we’re just getting started. Join us at facebook.com/workplace.

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