Meta Announces Partnership With Microsoft, Will Integrate Workplace With Teams

The partnership will allow customers access to Meta’s Workplace content inside the Microsoft Teams app

Representative Photo

New Delhi: Mark Zuckerberg-owned Meta, formerly Facebook, announced a partnership with Microsoft Wednesday and said its Workplace enterprise social network software will integrate with Microsoft Teams.

The partnership will allow customers access to Workplace content inside the Microsoft Teams app. Users can also view Teams video meetings in the Workplace app and share content from Workplace's newsfeed and from its groups into Microsoft's Teams platform. 

They will also be able to livestream video from Teams into Workplace groups, the company said.

Quoting Ujjwal Singh, Meta's head of Workplace, a CNBC report said this integration had been requested by customers including Vodafone and Accenture.

While Meta and Microsoft are two rivals, Workplace and Teams do not have complete overlap.

“There are customers that are just Workplace shops, and then there are customers that are just Teams shops. This is really for those customers that use both,” Singh told CNBC.

According to the report, the partnership is likely to prove more beneficial to Meta since Workplace is far behind its competitors in terms of users.

For example, the report pointed out, Workplace hit 7 million paid subscribers in May, as announced by the company, while Microsoft announced in July that Teams now has 250 million monthly active users.

Workplace, which is used by Meta as its internal messaging board, was launched for public five years ago.

Companies including Walmart also use the software, according to reports.

With Remote-working tools gaining significance during the COVID-19 pandemic, both Microsoft and Facebook are reported to be building virtual reality solutions for remote working.
Facebook recently changed its name to Meta to focus on its metaverse project.

Last week, Microsoft announced that it would bring its virtual platform Mesh into Microsoft Teams in 2022.