Microsoft and Meta have announced a partnership to integrate Workplace and Teams.
- Customers will be able to integrate Workplace with Microsoft Teams thanks to a partnership announced by Meta, formerly known as Facebook.
- Meta and Microsoft have partnered to bring together two competitors in the enterprise communication software market.
- The agreement could be especially useful to Meta, whose Workplace service has a far lower user base than its competitors.
Meta, previously Facebook, established a partnership with Microsoft on Wednesday, allowing clients to integrate Meta's Workplace workplace social network software with Microsoft Teams.
Customers can now access Workplace content from within the Teams app. Users can also watch video meetings from Teams on the Workplace app.
Meta and Microsoft have partnered to bring together two competitors in the enterprise communication software market. Workplace and Teams, on the other hand, do not completely overlap.
Teams is focused on rapid communication between workers and their direct coworkers, whereas Workplace is focused on large, company-wide interactions.
Customers such as Vodafone and Accenture had requested this connectivity, according to Meta's head of Workplace, Ujjwal Singh.
"Our consumers end up using the complementing features rather than the competitive capabilities," Singh explained. "There are clients that are only Teams stores, and there are customers who are only Workplace shops." This is mostly for users that use both products."
The collaboration might be extremely advantageous to Meta. In terms of users, its Workplace offering trails far behind its competitors.
Workplace stated in May that it had reached a milestone of 7 million paid subscribers. Microsoft revealed in July that its Teams platform has 250 million active monthly users. Slack, which is owned by Salesforce, no longer publishes user numbers, but the firm announced in September 2019 that it has 12 million daily active users. In June 2021, Slack's number of paying customers climbed by over 39% year over year to 169,000.
Microsoft also offers Yammer, an enterprise social network software that competes more directly with Meta's Workplace service than Teams. Yammer's usage had increased year over year in August, with "tens of millions of monthly active users," according to Microsoft.
Despite the fact that Workplace has integrations with Microsoft's Office 365, SharePoint, Azure Active Directory, OneDrive, and now Teams, there is no Yammer integration, Singh remarked.
"In terms of community, connection, people first, and serving all employees, I would say we're best in class," Singh added. "Teams is perhaps best in class in terms of productivity, so this is truly two best-in-class technologies combining to solve a problem with employee experience."