Tests underway for how employees can use news feed, groups and messaging for their work, but will be kept separate from personal profiles

Many companies still ban staff from accessing Facebook during office hours, but the social network is hoping to win over the corporate critics with Facebook at Work, a version of its service designed for use within companies.

The new service launched on Wednesday as a test for “pilot partners”, whose employees will be able to download the Facebook at Work mobile application for iOS or Android devices, as well as using its website.

It is Facebook’s move to compete with existing workplace communication and collaboration tools from big technology companies like Google and Microsoft, as well as from emerging startups like Slack.

Facebook at Work will use familiar Facebook features like the news feed, groups, messages and events, but has been designed purely for use within individual companies.

Employees’ information will not be accessible to the outside world, including keeping it separate from their personal Facebook profiles.

Facebook at Work’s launch is not a complete surprise, with the Financial Times reporting in November 2014 on the social network’s plans for a corporate version, claiming that the project had been “discussed internally for some time”.

An earlier report by TechCrunch in June 2014 suggested that “FB@Work” was being developed within Facebook’s London office, inspired by the way Facebook’s own staff used features like groups and messaging for their work.

The executive in charge of Facebook at Work is the company’s director of engineering Lars Rasmussen, who joined Facebook in 2010 from Google, where he played a key role in the launch of its Google Maps service.



Facebook at Work looks like a clear successor to Rasmussen’s last project within Google though: Google Wave. Also an online collaboration tool, it launched in preview form in 2009, but was dropped a year later with Google claiming it had “not seen the user adoption we would have liked”.

A few years on, the idea’s time may finally have come. Microsoft paid $1.2bn for Yammer, another private social networking service for companies, in 2012, while in November 2014 it launched a dedicated Skype for Business communications tool based on its popular voice, video calls and messaging service.

Meanwhile Slack, which was launched in 2013 by Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield, has signed up tens of thousands of “teams” – companies and teams within larger companies – for its messaging and file-sharing service. In November 2014, a $120m funding round valued Slack at $1.12bn.

Facebook at Work could provide a valuable new revenue stream for Facebook, although the company has not revealed how it plans to charge for its new service – or even whether it plans to charge for it at all.

Research firm Gartner has predicted that globally, businesses will spend $344bn on “enterprise software” in 2015. If Facebook can take even a small slice of that, it would make a significant impact on the company’s business, which currently is dominated by advertising sales.

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