Facebook rolled out Workplace as a standalone institutional software as a service in October 2016. I asked a colleague what he thought about our Formal Media™ Workplace and Office 365 integration and he replied that the solution was redundant. His reasoning was that Workplace was akin to Office 365 and therefore there was duplication.
I think comparing Workplace to Office 365 is apples and oranges. A more apt comparison would be comparing Workplace to Yammer or probably even Teams. Workplace is ideal for collaboration and enterprise social (or rather formal) networking. Office 365 includes SharePoint (eDiscovery, Document Management, Enterprise Search, Records Management etc.) as well as Skype 4 Business, Exchange and 1TB of data storage per user on One Drive Business.
I see Workplace as a viable and superior alternative to Yammer. To buttress my point, why would Facebook deploy Office 365 for its employees? See the article Why Facebook is betting on Office 365 and the Microsoft cloud.
"This is why we’ve implemented Office 365. Not only is it a mature and comprehensive platform, it meets our stringent security standards, it complements how we work with intelligence, flexibility, and it is continually evolving. It is globally deployed, accessible on every mobile platform we support, and it is secure. Most of all, it enables our productivity with powerful new capabilities for employees, such as the ability to share and edit traditional Excel documents at the same time, across devices."
Tim Campos CIO of Facebook
At virtualdeveloper.com, LLC we have built sophisticated integrations with Facebook Workplace e.g. our Formal Media ™ Feed. This is also available as a SharePoint APP being sold in the Microsoft SharePoint store. In addition we have Formal Media™ Enterprise which is a much deeper integration of Workplace with Office 365. Some of the features include:
Integrating Workplace with Office 365 empowers your users to have a seamless single sign on experience with social networking and enterprise Office 365 features for maximum productivity and collaboration.
