Features from both Facebook and Meta will be available to users without switching the apps. There’s no integration with Yammer

Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, on Wednesday announced a partnership with Microsoft that will allow customers to integrate Meta’s Workplace enterprise social network software with Microsoft Teams.

meta and Microsoft

Team launched in 2017 and has mature considerably during the covid pandemic. Facebook recently modified its name to Meta to specialize on Metaverse project.

Workplace, which is used by Meta as its internal messaging board, was launched for public 5 years past. The Microsoft Teams integration into Workplace will also allow employees using Teams or Workplace to view, comment, and react to meetings in real-time without having to switch between apps. This partnership bought two rivals along to vie compete in the communication software market.

Workplace and Teams, however, do not have complete overlap. Whereas Workplace is focused on broad, companywide connections, Teams is focused on instantaneous communication between workers and their direct colleagues.

Singh, head of workplace  also said that the integration was requested by customers including Vodafone and Accenture. According to report, the partnership is probably going to prove additional help to Meta since Workplace is far behind its competitors in terms of its users. 

For example: the report pointed out, Workplace hit 7 million paid subscribers in May, as announced by the company, while Microsoft announced in July that Teams now has 250 million monthly active users.

“The way our customers end up using it is customers use the complementary features, not the competing features,” Singh said. “There are customers that are just Workplace shops, and then there are customers that are just Teams shops. This is really for those customers that use both.”

In addition to Teams, Microsoft also offers Yammer, enterprise social network software. It competes more directly with Meta’s Workplace service. Singh made it clear that there’s no integration with Yammer. 

 Microsoft is going to bring its virtual platform Mesh into Microsoft groups next year.