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Facebook Businesses

Meta Will Shut Down Workplace, Its Business Chat Tool (axios.com) 21

Meta is shutting down Workplace, the tool it sold to businesses that combined social and productivity features, according to messages to customers obtained by Axios and confirmed by Meta. From the report:Meta has been cutting jobs and winnowing its product line for the last few years while investing billions first in the metaverse and now in AI. Micah Collins, Meta's senior director of product management, sent a message to customers alerting them of the shutdown.

Collins said customers can use Workplace through September 2025, when it will become available only to download or read existing data. The service will shut down completely in 2026. Workplace was formerly Facebook at Work, and launched in its current form in 2016. In 2021 the company reported it had 7 million paid subscribers.

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Meta Will Shut Down Workplace, Its Business Chat Tool

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  • by Anonymous Coward

    Workplace was formerly Facebook at Work, and launched in its current form in 2016. In 2021 the company reported it had 7 million paid subscribers

    So those subscribers will now have to migrate to TikTok at Work or OnlyFans at Work?

    • OnlyFans at work doesn't sound safe for work.

      • OnlyFans at work doesn't sound safe for work.

        LOL, do you really need to pledge to Thi Slappa U to confirm what kind of work is going on at the old OF campus? Pretty sure they define “safe for work” as having a clean STD screening.

      • > OnlyFans at work doesn't sound safe for work.

        It will: you don't know what people would do for a career advancement...

  • by iAmWaySmarterThanYou ( 10095012 ) on Tuesday May 14, 2024 @11:16AM (#64471359)

    Ymmv, but to me they're all the same. The only difference is the UI, which all suck in different ways, and some have better backend administration tools for those working in restricted companies or governments with data storage requirements.

    On pretty much all of them you can send text, links, pics, emojis, etc to individuals, groups, internal, external, have a video chat with 1 or more, have a conference where everyone is muted but the speaker, and so on. Like most of you, I have used most of them at least once and I can't recall any of them being "better" than any others. The differences are nit picky personal preference and change with each new release anyway.

    Absolutely no one will notice FB's tool going away or if 90% of the others do as well, as long as something with the core features and some data preservation features exists for banks and government.

    • You're not wrong but so far I still have found Slack to be the most, well maybe "good" is too strong a term, but the least offensive. It seems fairly lightweight, has enough features, stable, etc. It just works for the most part, the worst aspects are the auto functions the companies themselves put in.

      However since Slack is still something of an island despite it's many, many integrations I have heard the dreaded rumblings internally of "maybe we should transition to Teams"

      • Looking forward to when work productivity tools are just utilities with bare-bones features: text chat, post image in chat, audio call, call with shared screen, meeting call,channels for each team, document directory and folders for each team and maybe a look at your calendar.

        Not going to miss all of the marginally 'useful' features...emotes, meme generators, plug-ins to get emails in a teams chat, integration with workflow tools, school attendance tools, a way to build your own apps and host them in the to

    • > Absolutely no one will notice

      Other than the people who invested man-years into integrations with inhouse and have to scramble now?

      Think they'll move to Matrix or make the same mistake with another centralized platform?

      • Years to hack up some API crap?

        They have 2 years to switch to something else and change to a different api that does the same things with different key words.

        No one is in a panic.

    • Ymmv, but to me they're all the same.

      Clearly you've not used MS Teams before.

    • by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      Workplace is nice in that it's locally hosted - you're not paying Slack to host your chats for you. So if you're a place that wants a chat tool that doesn't need the cloud, Workplace is an option.

      I know when I was a contractor to Facebook (just before they became Meta), their internal Workplace was well integrated - if you were chatting with someone, and you discovered a bug, you could easily file a new ticket by just typing "/ticket". You could do things like get notifications in the chat if the build brok

  • Meta is shutting down Workplace

    You mean "Meta[stasize]" - the cancer of the internet.

    • I read the first four words of the title and was filled with an overwhelming sense of joy.

      Everything after that completely killed the erection.
  • by sigemund ( 122744 ) on Tuesday May 14, 2024 @11:23AM (#64471393)

    I implemented this back in 2017 with about 2000 users and we made a lot of it. For us, it was a perfect fit - easy to use, offered a lot of developer options, and it was very convenient and easy to use. I'm very sad to see it go - it was a FAR better product than most would realize. It wasn't perfect, but they did a lot to improve it over the years, and especially in the early days, they really worked a lot with the community to improve it. I was on several panels and focus groups and eventually they implemented everything we asked for. I don't think it pivoted well to a more video-focused world - it was never a good alternative to Zoom for video conferencing outside an organization for instance.

    For many, the more tightly-integrated options from Microsoft or others are much more conducive to work, but for us it was a spectacular fit and I loved it. Not sure what we'll do now, but switching will be a challenge.

    • by trawg ( 308495 )

      I have heard this from several people, to my surprise. It would have been interesting if they'd used this as a launchpad to get into more business products, like email and calendaring.

      I think they'd have had a bit of a hard slog because of the privacy stigma attached to them. It would be nice to have another competitor in the market that's not Google or Microsoft, and sure, I'd rather it wasn't Facebook, but at this point I'd take anyone.

  • by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Tuesday May 14, 2024 @11:31AM (#64471437)

    Today I learned that Facebook had a workplace chat tool. Of course, had I known this existed I still would have never considered using it - and would have argued loudly with anyone else at my workplace who suggested we do so.

  • by awwshit ( 6214476 ) on Tuesday May 14, 2024 @11:36AM (#64471455)

    > Meta Will Shut Down

    Stop teasing.

  • At work (me in IT) we've invested lots of time and money in teams/sharepoint. Then Marketing sidelined us, having the CEOs ear and "implementing" workplace. Which ended up just being internal marketing pat-on-the-back posts.

  • Nothing of value will be lost. It's been an absolute disaster and I am glad that all the useless shills will go back to their cave and leave people that move things forward do the actual work.

The "cutting edge" is getting rather dull. -- Andy Purshottam

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