Dive Brief:
- Facebook at Work, the enterprise version of the world's most used social media platform, is behind schedule and remains in closed beta.
- Though the product was on hand at last week's Facebook developer conference, F8, it never took the main stage and was instead overshadowed by talk of Messenger bots and solar-powered airplanes.
- There is no set deadline for when the corporate platform will become available. A spokeswoman said Facebook at Work will be "launching more widely later this year," according to CIO.com.
Dive Insight:
Though its been a long wait, Facebook at Work will likely prove a competitive tool simply because of its familiarity. Rather than learning how to operate and integrate to a new platform, enterprises could simply look toward Facebook as their product of choice.
The platform could rival Slack in popularity and already has 60,000 companies on its waitlist to join the pilot. Facebook at Work looks and operates just like the traditional social media platform, but instead of friends from across the globe, connections are limited to coworkers. Companies are in charge of the deployment and how employees can use the platform.
In September, Facebook announced its enterprise social platform would be ready by the end of 2015. As of now, there are 450 companies of different sizes participating in the pilot, including Telenor, a Norway-based telecommunications company, which turned on the service for its more than 35,000 employees around the world, according to TechCrunch. The Royal Bank of Scotland is also part of the pilot, and plans to have 100,000 employees on the platform by the end of the year.
The platform will be free at launch, but Facebook plans on a paid version with integration to tools like Office 365, Google Apps, Dropbox, Microsoft Azure and Box, according to CIO.com.
