It’s Like Facebook At Work

For the last few years many software vendors in the enterprise social market have explained what their product does by using the analogy "It's like Facebook at work".  Well, now it appears Facebook themselves will be getting into the game by actually offering, Facebook At Work. At the moment there are few official details from Facebook about the product such as when will it be available, what will it cost, what will it do, etc.

Below are a few of my thoughts about the potential Facebook At Work:

1) You can't just move a consumer tool into the enterprise, the requirements are very different. For example, directory support, security, application integration, compliance, auditing, and industry regulations. Many consumer tools are unable to make the transition to enterprise in areas like scalability, language support and accessibility... but given Facebook supports a billion people all across the world, I think they have these aspects covered.

2) Facebook At Work needs to be much more than just a "private Facebook for your company".  To be a successful platform for work, Facebook's business offering will need to integrate with the business tools people use to do their jobs. This includes things like CRM, Customer Service, Marketing and HR. Obviously Facebook can partner with almost every enterprise software vendor, but they may want to acquire one or two to develop robust native offerings. Since Facebook is all about people, CRM vendors like SugarCRM, Nimble or Contatta could be a natural fits.

3) Facebook has massive consumer mind share, but do they know how to sell to CxOs? Do they understand how companies buy software, support it and integrate it into their infrastructure?

4) Security. Security. Security. It's one thing to mistakenly share your cat photos with people you had not intended, it's another to accidentally leak a company secret. Facebook does not have a stellar reputation when it comes to security and privacy so they will have to ease the minds of corporate software purchase decision makers.

5) Enterprise social networking is not a "one-size fits all" business. The successful enterprise collaboration vendors understand the needs of specific vertical industries such as Healthcare, Finance, Manufacturing, Legal, Education, Entertainment and Government.

6) The consumer version of Facebook is missing several standard features of enterprise collaboration platforms, including: document editors, file sync and share, project management and web-conferencing. If Facebook is serious about being a tool people can use to do work, they may want to purchase companies like Slack, Glip, Box, Egnyte, Fuze, BlueJeans, Quip, Evernote... the list goes on and on.


There is nothing wrong with using tools at work that are similar to those you use at home.  People do it every day with Google and Microsoft products, so perhaps Facebook will be next. Would you want to collaborate with your colleagues and customers using a private version of Facebook?