Author: Sharon Gaudin / Source: CIO Credit: Facebook Just as the enterprise takes another swing at figuring out how to help employees wo
Just as the enterprise takes another swing at figuring out how to help employees work better together, Facebook continues its push to entice companies to adopt its collaboration service.
[ Related: Facebooks claims Workplace success ]
During the company’s annual F8 developer conference in San Jose, Calif. yesterday, Facebook rolled out updates to its Workplace collaboration tool.
“Here at Facebook, we’ve used Facebook to get work done for years,” wrote Simon Cross, the product manager for Facebook’s Workplace collaboration tool, in a blog post . “Soon, other companies were curious about how we used Facebook to work and scale, so we built a version of Facebook for work, to be used outside our company.”
Facebook released its collaboration tool in the fall of 2016 in an effort to tap into the lucrative enterprise market.
Today, there are 14,000 organizations using Workplace in 77 different languages, according to the company.
Collaboration tools — including Microsoft’s SharePoint and Cisco’s Quad — were big talking points about five years ago. There was a lot of talk about helping employees collaborate.
Then interest fell off.
Ezra Gottheil, an analyst with Technology Business Research, said business and IT managers simply didn’t know what they wanted and many pushed the entire issue to the back burner, letting workers focus on instant messaging tools, like Slack.
Now he sees companies coming back around to looking at adopting collaboration tools again.
“We’re seeing increasing interest in real-time collaboration and messaging,” said Gottheil. “I think lots of companies are just now beginning to evaluate products. Slack has generated a lot of interest, but it hasn’t locked up the market. Slack, and now Facebook and Google, are just building out from an instant messaging paradigm.”
The problem for many enterprises, according to Gottheil, is that companies have been cobbling together different tools — like using IM and some document sharing — and it’s just not an efficient or easy-to-manage system.
That might get some of the collaborative work done but it’s not cohesive, and different enterprise departments might use different systems, meaning they can’t all collaborate together.
“Well, enterprises…
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