Social media giant Facebook has launched its office communication tool, Workplace by Facebook.
The new network has been in beta testing, with other 1,000 organisations including Danone, Starbucks and Booking.com trialling the product.
In a post on the company blog, Facebook wrote: “At Facebook we’ve had an internal version of our app to help run the company for many years. We’ve seen that just as Facebook keeps you connected to friends and family, it can do the same with coworkers.”
Workplace will offer many similar features to the social version of Facebook. Infrastructure such as a news feed, an in-built messaging service and trending posts will be available.
It will also feature exclusive functions such as a dashboard with analytics and integrations and identity providers that will allow companies to integrate with their existing IT services.
Facebook also announced a new feature called ‘Multi-Company Groups’, a shared space that will allow employees from different organisations to work together.
For those of you out there that might not want to cross-contaminate their personal and professional lives, any content shared on Workplace is invisible to anyone outside the office. Work profiles will be populated by pulling across information stored on social Facebook accounts.
In the next few months we could be entering an upside down world where your employer could be complaining that you aren’t using Facebook enough in the office.
The blog post concluded: “The new global and mobile workplace isn’t about closed-door meetings or keeping people separated by title, department or geography. Organisations are stronger and more productive when everyone comes together.”