‘Facebook At Work’ To Enter The Office Space2 min read

On Jan 14th, Facebook officially announced their much rumored Facebook at Work offering. This private version of the popular social network is designed to provide employees a place to collaborate securely with their colleagues. ‘Facebook At Work’ will operate differently than the social media site in that it won’t retain any user data and will not sell advertising space. Activities on the work site will be kept private and will not affect a user’s social profile.

Below are a few of the pros and cons of Facebook at Work.

Opportunities

• Name Recognition: Facebook is “the standard” when it comes to social networking. Like it or not, it’s a household name.
• Familiar User Experience: Since people are already familiar with it, employers can save time and money by avoiding education and training on a new tool.
• Large Partner Ecosystem: Perhaps the biggest plus Facebook has going is the massive ecosystem of developers than know their API and can build add-on tools..
• Massive Mobile Usage: Facebook’s experience on mobile devices could be a strong selling point to organizations who’s employees require anytime/anywhere access.

Challenges

• Different from Consumer Software: Often when consumer companies try and break into the business world they fail to understand that companies have different requirements than individuals. Organizations have to deal with things like auditing and compliance, accessibility, multiple language support, etc. Facebook will need to show that they can meet these business requirements before business will use them for work.
• Competition: Perhaps the biggest hurdle is that there are already so many collaboration solutions available. Many of these vendors have a decade or more experience providing collaboration solutions, so Facebook may have a considerable challenge on their hands winning deals against these vendors.
• Lack of Vertical Expertise: It’s not enough to just provide a single collaboration platform and try and have it fit all use-cases. Winning collaboration vendors understand the specific needs of industries such as Healthcare, Finance Services, Legal, Manufacturing, Entertainment, Government, etc. Facebook will need to build teams in each of these areas if they hope to sell into specific industries.
• Privacy Concerns: Warranted or not, most people have concerns about what Facebook does with their information.
• Customer Support: Today Facebook support is primarily an online help knowledge base. They will need a much more robust support organization in order for organizations to feel comfortable using them for critical business communications.
• Pricing: Currently no pricing has been set, but if organizations are already paying for something like Microsoft Office 365 or Google Apps (both of which include social networking) then they will be weary of spending additional funds.

Article from www.firstpost.com

Author: Kelly Desormes