Facebook at Work comes out of beta and launches as Workplace

Facebook has now launched its social application for use in a professional environment.

The service, previously dubbed Facebook at Work, is called Workplace and will allow employees in organisations to chat to each other and collaborate in the office or by mobile. Organisations can apply to be part of Workplace through the Facebook website.

The application has been launched worldwide following just over a year of beta, and is already used by more than 1,000 organisations globally.

In a statement about the release, Facebook said: “We’ve brought the best of Facebook to the workplace – whether it’s basic infrastructure, such as news feed, or the ability to create and share in groups or by chat, or useful features such as live, reactions, search and trending posts.”

The five top countries using the service are India, Norway, the US, the UK and France, and users have created more than 10,000 Facebook Workplace groups.

Danone, Starbucks, Oxfam and Booking.com are among the firms using the service.

Facebook’s social media platform, founded by Mark Zuckerberg, has accumulated more than 1.65 billion users since its launch in 2004.

Facebook had its own internal professional version of its social media service for years, and began to beta the concept of workplace Facebook with external organisations a year ago.

Facebook has added capabilities to Workplace over the past few months of beta, such as auto-translations, video and group calling, search filters and multi-company groups.

Users can create shared groups so employees in different organisations can collaborate, and Facebook has announced a Workplace Partner Programme to act as a global partner ecosystem to increase co-operative working and to scale the Workplace service.

The social media giant claimed its Workplace service is designed to make collaboration easier for remote workers, and Workplace can be easily adopted as users will intuitively adapt to using its familiar features – features they will be using every day when they use Facebook’s social media site.

The service will be offered one a competitive pricing plan based on the number of users in an organisation subscribed to the service, from $3 per month per user for the first 1,000 users to $1 per month per user for 10,000 or more users.

In a blog post, Aaron Levie, CEO of collaboration software provider Box, claimed Facebook’s Workplace service will help develop a better level of collaboration in the workplace to match the expectations of the next generation of workers.

“The way that people do their jobs is being fundamentally reimagined. As our work continues to change, so should the tools that help us do our work. While enterprise software has often been an impediment to helping people do their best work in the past, cloud and mobile have reversed this trend,” he said.