After invading your personal life, Facebook is now ready to invade your professional life too.
Imagine a workplace where your boss tells you to don’t stop using Facebook in the office.
Facebook’s business platform will get an official pricing structure and a new name, Workplace by Facebook, on Monday. The service, a Facebook-hosted office communication tool, has been in the works for more than two years under the name Facebook at Work, but now the company says its enterprise product is ready for primetime.
This is the first time that Facebook is charging any money for subscriptions. The platform will be sold to businesses on a per-user basis, according to the company: after a three-month trial period, Facebook will charge $3 apiece per employee per month up to 1,000 employees, $2 for every employee beyond up to 10,000 users, and $1 for every employee over that.
On the company official website, Facebook said its real goal was to provide enough flexibility that Workplace would be an attractive option across a large variety of businesses, “from a shipping company that can now connect with their ship crews using Live video, to a bank that now uses Workplace instead of fax machines and newsletters to share updates with its distributed bank branches”.
Workplace is already a success for Facebook, Currently; businesses using Workplace include Starbucks and Booking.com as well as telecom giant Telenor, Car company Renault, Godrej and Yes Bank. Facebook has said it will eventually require for-profit businesses that helped to test the service to pay for it, but it has not picked a date when those businesses’ free service will end. The company even said they will offer this service for free to non-profit organisations.
Workplace links together personal profiles separate from users’ normal Facebook accounts and is invisible to anyone outside the office. For joint ventures, accounts can be linked to businesses so that groups of employees from both companies can collaborate.
Watch the video here:
Link: Workplace at Facebook.