Today at its F8 developer conference, Facebook introduced a slew of tools that promise to enhance the capabilities of its Workplace platform. Along with new integrations with some prominent service providers, Facebook has also announced the ability to build custom workflows with bots and some important security integrations.
Workplace in case you are unaware of it, is Facebook’s take on providing institutions, offices and other corporate entities with a walled version of Facebook. Actually, a Walled Facebook wouldn’t be the most apt description — particularly after today’s announcement that promises to amp up Workplace’s capabilities and make it that much ore suitable for an office setting.
First off, the company has collaborated with some of the world’s leading cloud service providers in a bid to allow for easier sharing and collaborations within enterprises. The list of enterprise cloud services integrating with Workplace is quite long and includes some of the most prominent names n the industry.
Announcing the integrations, the company said:
Our new integrations with some of the world’s leading enterprise cloud services to make it easier to share, preview and organize files, documents, and work with customer records. With these integrations, we’re making it simpler for teams to share ideas and collaborate inside Workplace.
Next up is the ability to build bots. AI powered bots are quickly becoming an important part of business. Even apart from the sheer novelty of getting work done through conversations, bots have become a favorite way for people to interact with services they use everyday.
Starting today, Workplace customers can build bots that allow people to interact with other tools and services from within Workplace.
You can interact with these bots either in groups or individually. For instance, you can @mention a bot while to initiate a task or workflow. These bots can do all sorts of stuff like generating information, sending notifications and so on.
Facebook has already built over 100 bots and has integrated them within Workplace. For instance:
- A Work Chat bot that sends interviewers a notification 30 minutes before a scheduled interview with all the information they need to provide a great candidate experience.
- Teams are quickly able to create tasks in Facebook’s internal tool by mentioning a bot in group posts or comments.
- When guests sign in at reception, a bot notifies the host so they can go and meet their guest.
The company has also partnered up with a slew of third party providers in order to ease the process of making bots.
Finally, the company has announced support for streaming Live into Workplace over RTMP.
All of these features will together serve to make Workplace that much more useful. Facebook is already competing against the likes of Slack where workplace communication is concerned. With all these integrations, it will be better prepared to take upon Slack, which has the benefit of an early start.
