Facebook has signed a deal with the software giant, Microsoft, to use the latter"s online Office suite while it works on its own its own workplace communication and collaboration service. The deal will see all 13,000 Facebook employees switch to the cloud suite.
In the official blog post about the switch to Office 365, Tim Campos, CIO of Facebook said:
“Productivity is our most important charter, but security and efficiency are also paramount. We need the right technology to empower employees, while also ensuring our business is safe at all times.”
He continues on to say:
“Not only is it [Office 365] a mature and comprehensive platform, it meets our stringent security standards, it complements how we work with intelligence, flexibility, and it is continually evolving. It is globally deployed, accessible on every mobile platform we support and it is secure. Most of all, it enables our productivity with powerful new capabilities for employees, such as the ability to share and edit traditional Excel documents at the same time, across devices."
Aside from Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, which usually spring to mind when we think of Office, Facebook will also be using Delve, which offers insights into how employees work with each other, it gives employees a breakdown of who they"re collaborating with the most, and how much time they spent where. These analytics coupled with features such as Focused Inbox will heighten effectiveness at Facebook.
Although Facebook will use portions of Office 365 including email and calendar, there will still be some features it won"t use. Employees won"t have access to Yammer, Microsoft"s workplace social network, or Skype for Business as Facebook already caters for these services.