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Workplace Desktop by Facebook
p/workplace-desktop-by-facebook
Facebook's Slack competitor with chat, screen share & more
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Emily Hodgins
Workplace Desktop by Facebook — Facebook's Slack competitor with chat, screen share & more
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One year ago, Facebook launched Workplace to help make companies more connected and productive. So today, we’re launching the Workplace Chat desktop app. Now, anyone can download the app for Workplace Chat on PC, Mac, Android or iOS.

Replies
Ryan Hoover
So many startups and big companies are fighting to become the gateway to team communication. Workplace has been in beta for a while. I'm curious to hear from people that have used it. How does it compare to Slack and others?
Brandon Reid
@rrhoover I use it at a company I'm doing consulting work with. It gets the job done and is catching up, but definitely not on par with slack yet imo. Chat wise, syntax highlighting isn't formatted nice like slack, you can't post an image link and have the image show up, can't edit your posted messages, etc. I think their main differentiator is a "News Feed" view that's basically like a facebook for your company, if you're into that kind of thing.
Tangerine
So @rrhoover, there are different tools for different use cases. The (news) feed based way of communicating (FB) can work well for slow moving tasks or project overviews. I feel like a company with more than 50ppl could start to make real use of this kind of work. The FB messenger really isn't on par with any of the major business chat's out their. So don't switch to FB if you really just wanna chat with your guys. You could, however, use it to supplement your Slack usage with some company feeds. But then you should save the money and use G+ which comes free with your G Suite subscription. Was my ramble clear, Ryan? 🙈
Arun
@rrhoover @rrhoover We use Workplace here at Freshworks Inc. and it has changed how we communicate, Ryan. This Medium blog post - https://hackernoon.com/dear-slac... by my friend @nivasravi should be a great read. I was a huge fan of Slack back then - https://twitter.com/arunsathiya/..., but Workplace seems easiest to get started with because of the learning curve.
Arun
@rrhoover @dominik_kugelmann This is likely to change in the coming days. Workplace is aggressively betting on new integrations availability. Workplace is fairly new, if that's to be remembered.
Tony Lucas
@rrhoover I actually think it's hard to compare to Slack as in a lot of ways it's being used to maybe solve a similar problem (communication and collaboration) but from very different approaches. Slack tends to be bottom up (Start with a Dev team, grow from there) where Workplace is top down, typically with HR/Internal Comms driving the adoption, and typical customers tend to be larger. e.g. a startup of 10 people isn't really going to get the full benefit from it. The biggest differentiator I hear is 'I don't need to train people on how to use this, they already know' (from being Facebook users) Disclaimer: $company is a very happy Workplace integrations partner
Vadi
Anyone has thoughts on the rationale behind FB trying to become team communication? Does the world is “socializing as teams”?
Tangerine
@vadivelk They have a widely used and successful product which many teams already use to collaborate their work on. Many of them are using the regular FB Groups to coordinate the organisation of events or other projects but the functionality is limited. So I think FB want's to fill in this gap with their expertise and help teams that are already using FB Groups to collaborate a whole lot easier..
Arun
This title is very misleading. I was in the hopes that Facebook finally launched a full-fledged Facebook app for work (Workplace app), and all it enables is "Workplace Chat" Also, it looks like the Mac download link is not listed here. Can someone confirm where the Mac download link is? @codorniou
Tangerine

If you are working for a company that has multiple topics at the same time running in the one department/team thinking about a feed based collaboration could be a good option.

With Workplace you can organise your team in groups and discuss projects/topics via the comments on a post. This could help your team stay on topic and don't get distracted by another random comment in your chat history.

The (news) feed based way of communicating (FB) can work well for slow moving tasks or project overviews. I feel like a company with more than 50ppl could start to make real use of this kind of work.

The FB messenger really isn't on par with any of the major business chat's out their. So don't switch to FB if you really just wanna chat with your guys. You could, however, use it to supplement your Slack usage with some company feeds. But then you should save the money and use G+ which comes free with your G Suite subscription.

The pricing however is attractive. Starting at a about a dollar a month and employee it's way below industry average.

Pros:

Great, familiar design and use for your team. If you into feed based collaboration you should check it out

Cons:

The chat feature needs to ramp up it's features quickly to get on par with industry standards.

Sebastian Orozco
Used Slack before switching to Workplace and I'm glad I did. Workplace > Slack 💯
tj vdp

great and easy to use, dont have any employee training really needed.

Pros:

All round great asset

Cons:

Not to be used for project management