Facebook's 13,000 Employees To Shift To Microsoft's Office 365
Facebook has sign up a deal to use Microsoft’s online email and other software, whereas developing its own workplace communication and collaboration service. Now Facebook employees will be able to use the Office 365 suite to work more efficiently. The deal marks as one of the most high-profile contracts the software behemoth has signed recently. Next week Facebook is likely to declare that its 13,000 employees will shift to Microsoft's Office 365.
According to WSJ reports Facebook's 13,000 employees will use some parts of Office 365 just like the calendar and email. However the report declares that Facebook will not use Microsoft's Yammer as it competes with the company's Facebook at Work service. Introduced last year, Facebook at Work is a new way for teams to collaborate efficiently at work. The report describes email as "inherently top-down" compared to the Facebook at Work service.
Tim Campos, Facebook’s CIO, appeared at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference in Toronto today to announce that his firm is an Office 365 customer. “Microsoft got cool again,” Campos said on-stage.
“We collaborate on everything online—no files, no fragmented information stores—and we provide our employees with the ability to work anywhere and in any way they want,” Campos wrote in a blog post. “Our IT has to be flexible and available over the web, on mobile, and across platforms — wherever our employees need it. This is why we’ve implemented Office 365.” The SaaS version of Office 365 works on multiple operating systems and devices, including smartphones.
Facebook Chief Information Officer Tim Campos wrote in a blog post to announce the development: “At Facebook, our mission is clear. Give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected. Over 13,000 Facebook employees wake up committed to making this mission a reality for the more than 1 billion people who use Facebook every day.”
Facebook at Work is like a version of the social network designed for its own workplace as well as for the enterprise sector. Announced last year, it permits employees to exchange content and data across the more-than-familiar web-based user interface. The platform houses special executive and security tools for technology managers to apply at various businesses.
Moving to Office 365 will support Facebook to also benefit from Microsoft’s Delve, a product that benefits workers to easily find internal data that is applicable to their employment without killing too much time on irrelevant findings. Such a tool would help Facebook employees to rapidly go through amounts of data to collect required information, somewhat the social network would highly benefit from, bearing in mind its user-base of over 1.6 billion.
Mr. Campos said: "As Microsoft continues to innovate with Office 365, we will continue adding and rolling out more services that have value for Facebook. In that way, we’re not just buying the capabilities that Office 365 offers today. We are also buying capabilities that Microsoft will offer over time, and expect even greater things to come."