Facebook redesigns Workplace for improved team collaboration
Featured
Facebook's Slack competitor Workplace is getting a new look and performance improvements. The social networking giant on Tuesday announced that it's revamping the Workplace user interface and updating key features to make the platform faster and more collaboration friendly.
According to Facebook, the UI updates are focused on giving users quicker access to information via a new notifications view, making groups more prominent and easier to find, and streamlining the "Posts" and "Chat" tabs so users don't have to click back and forth as much.
In addition to a new UI, Workplace also introduced new ways of interacting with teams via Unified Group Experience and QuickChat to reinforce the "work" aspect of the platform.
"The new web experience is faster and includes a host of new features to help you get work done. It makes it easier for people to connect and collaborate," Facebook said in a Workplace blog post. "It also ensures that the core experience of using Workplace remains familiar and intuitive. And we've leveraged the significant innovation and performance improvements from the Facebook infrastructure, as the Facebook experience itself evolves, to make Workplace better and faster."
Workplace started out in 2011 as an internal project for Facebook, and was launched publicly in October 2016. Facebook monetized the platform a year later with paid subscription tiers and has added a bevy of very large enterprises to its customer list. Nonetheless, it's still unclear how the total Workplace user base compares to Slack, which now has 10 million daily active users, 85,000 paying customers and is prepping for an IPO.
The two services compete for similar slices of the enterprise collaboration market, although Facebook has positioned Workplace more toward the larger enterprise set. But in a move from the Slack playbook, Facebook over the last year has rolled out a series of integrations with third party enterprise apps, which lets customers take tools like Microsoft Sharepoint and Atlassian's Jira and use them on top of the Workplace platform.