Facebook Launches 'Workplace' So You Can Use Facebook At Work For Work (theguardian.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Facebook's business platform will get an official pricing structure and a new name, Workplace by Facebook, on Monday. The service, a Facebook-hosted office communication tool, has been in the works for more than two years under the name Facebook at Work, but now the company says its enterprise product is ready for primetime. The platform will be sold to businesses on a per-user basis, according to the company: after a three-month trial period, Facebook will charge $3 apiece per employee per month up to 1,000 employees, $2 for every employee beyond up to 10,000 users, and $1 for every employee over that. Workplace links together personal profiles separate from users' normal Facebook accounts and is invisible to anyone outside the office. For joint ventures, accounts can be linked across businesses so that groups of employees from both companies can collaborate. Currently, businesses using Workplace include Starbucks and Booking.com as well as Norwegian telecoms giant Telenor ASA and the Royal Bank of Scotland. Facebook has said it will eventually require for-profit businesses who helped to test the service to pay for it, but it has not picked a date when those businesses' free service will end. Nonprofits such as Oxfam and Save the Children, as well as educational institutions, will continue to use the service at no cost. "We've been amazed by the breadth of organizations who've embraced Workplace -- from a shipping company that can now connect with their ship crews using Live video, to a bank that now uses Workplace instead of fax machines and newsletters to share updates with its distributed bank branches," the company said in its blog post.

Comments

No

[Temkin]

Just no. Fuck no!

I swear that I can feel it laughing at me.

[Narcocide]

If this is heap of money-sucking, time-wasting garbage is what finally launches the telecommuting revolution and causes everyone to "understand" networked collaboration, there is a real non-zero chance I will go completely mad.

Which companies?

[darthsilun]

"We've been amazed by the breadth of organizations who've embraced Workplace -- from a shipping company that can now connect with their ship crews using Live video, to a bank that now uses Workplace instead of fax machines and newsletters to share updates with its distributed bank branches,"

Which shipping company? Which bank? I want to short their stock. Connect with live video? Srsly? How long have Skype, FaceTime, and Google Hangouts been around? Faxes and newsletters? What century are these companies living in?

I should probably short Facebook too while I'm at it.

Re:Which companies?

[ShanghaiBill]

Faxes and newsletters? What century are these companies living in?

Faxes are still in daily use by government bureaucracies, and businesses that interact with the government, including lawyers and doctors. If a bank it using faxes, it is only because they are required to use faxes by some compliance checklist. So there is no way that they could switch to "Workplace" simply because it was more convenient.

I should probably short Facebook too while I'm at it.

Keep in mind that the "Slashdot consensus" was that Facebook would be out of business by 2008, that the Google IPO would tank, and that the iPhone would be dead-on-arrival.

Re:Which companies?

[DerekLyons]

Keep in mind that the "Slashdot consensus" was that Facebook would be out of business by 2008, that the Google IPO would tank, and that the iPhone would be dead-on-arrival.

Yup. And when Facebook's stock cratered right after it's IPO (as did Google's), the was dancing in the virtual Slashdot streets. They were certain there were going to be lawsuits, that Facebook would evaporate, etc... Yet, today, it's trading at $130 a share. (And we're still waiting on the Year of Linux on The Desktop.)

Re:Which companies?

[apoc.famine]

Slashdot forgets that not all businesses are IT businesses. The beauty of a fax is that it's machine-to-machine. While you can intercept a fax, you need to be in the position of being able to tap a physical phone line. Unlike email, and unlike the dodgy windows computer used to send email, faxes are pretty secure. I've worked in multiple businesses where sensitive information gets faxed. Everything else can go over email, but personnel records, anything with a SSN or other bit of personal information such as medical or educational records, and any sort of invoicing/billing gets faxed.
 
Is this a perfect system? Nope. Is it the best system? Well, that depends. If you don't have the IT and professional development staff to set up, maintain, and teach administrative assistants how to use a proper encrypted file transfer protocol, and to ensure that they don't compromise their machines, and to monitor their use of it to ensure they're not taking shortcuts, then simply buying a printer that can handle faxes is not the worst idea.

Re:Why?

[rtb61]

Exactly! None of them can be trusted, basically you are handing them on silver platter, all the inside information of your company. They will know before the, normal insiders traders in the company know, the future financial conditions of the company. All sorts of information to be stolen from sucker companies and passed off to companies they have an investment in. Pretty much various securities agencies across the globe should ban that software as attempting to regulate it's abuse would be impossible and the temptation or let's accept reality, the intent to data mine insider information for financial gain should be considered criminal and be nipped in the bud.

Mostly sucks, like Facebook

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting AC duh.

My company has been using this for a while now. The upper management all claim to love it. The people who don't understand good web forums, good email usage, etc, love it too; the people with more procedural jobs and less tech knowledge. The people who know how to use email, search mailing lists, etc, think it's crap. Most of IT hate it. So let's compare FB@Work with FB@Home (the one you all know). Many people think it replaces email, which is deluded.

So the good:
Threaded comments
Easy image inlining
OK mobile app
Reasonable search facility (unlike FB@home where you can't find anything later unless you bookmarked it)
If you can get it working, Social Fixer does fix some things on it, it's the same style sheets and JS as FB@Home.
You're paying, so you're not the product being sold any more.
No advertisements (unless your company puts internal stuff, like safety reminder notices or whatever).

The bad:
You have to click many times to read a full set of comments to a post, just like FB@Home. Being treated like a source of click revenue is really annoying.
It's aimed at a single stream of posts. It's hard to filter, there are no user filters (only reading each group at once).
It's hard to save any categories of stuff you like.
People think it's Facebook so they lose all self control and post any random crap that crosses their mind. So your post feed is a mixture of drivel and important things and you can't sort/search/scan easily to find that. You'll miss the quarterly department work priorities announcement between people's cat pictures and selfies doing something cool with a client.
Now way to get data out.
No choice of client, of course - FB web or FB app, no RSS feed or anything like that. You can be emailed comments if you like, like FB@home, but that's it.
The feed goes back about 10 days. Take a fortnight off? You're hosed, you'll never see the things you missed.
There's no way to see "posts in order since I last looked", your last read is not saved. You just have to go back until you get deja vu and realise you read all this already.
Posters expect everyone relevant to it sees their posts. Like FB@Home that doesn't happen, so communication is fragmented. Don't send out major reorg announcements with this, 'cos some people will miss them.
The layout design is fixed, narrow, width. If you have a wide screen you still have to scroll as much as someone on a tiny laptop. It's idiotic.
All your company data now belongs to Facebook and gets sent to the USA.

It's way more effort to read than a decent email setup most of the time, though the comments-with-posting is useful. I frankly think an old- style USENET server would be better (with a web frontend for the under-30s of course). Because it's so much effort to read, and check you haven't missed anything, it's a complete time sink.

The sneaky:
The design is just like FB@Home. Unlikely anyone walking near your computer would spot you were on FB@home wasting time. Have the FB@Work tab by FB@Home and change fast.

Overall the interface is pretty sucky and Facebook haven't got their heads out of their backsides for this any more than FB@Home.

Re:Trade secrets

[Actually, I do RTFA]

The resulting.... outsider trading with insider knowledge will be astounding. Oh, that sounds awesome, no patent on it yet?

Actually, that's already been tried. Someone who ran the print and distribute service for companies started using that information. It was ruled to be insider trading.