Founded in 2004, Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook was a late entrant to the social networking game defying the catchphrase, ‘first-mover advantage’. As we all know, the social media platform gained tremendous momentum in the past decade moving itself to the top of the heap running past Twitter, LinkedIn and others.
Secret to success?
Facebook managed to claim the throne with two simple components – innovation and redesign at the ‘right time as per the trend’. Well aware of this fact, Facebook, at F8 conference 2019 held at San Jose, California this week, announced an array of design-related changes to its family of apps including Whatsapp, Instagram, Messenger and to its enterprise edition, Workplace.
Facebook’s Slack rival ‘Workplace’ is used by many tech startups for internal communication and now it has got an overhaul and performance improvements. The company revamped the Workplace’s UI and updated important feature in an attempt to make it more faster, smoother and collab friendly.
What’s changing in Facebook Workplace?
Facebook launched the Workplace to provide the world with a place to work together. According to the company, “The new web experience is faster and includes a host of new features to assist you to get work done. It makes it easier for people to connect and collaborate. It also ensures that the core experience of using Workplace remains familiar and intuitive.”
- The new navigation enables users to quickly and easily switch between groups, notifications and chat.
- The Notifications are displayed in the inbox and enable users to filter that inbox based on their platforms, as well as take advantage of more granular controls.
- Furthermore, the Workplace also introduced new ways of interacting with teams via Unified Group Experience and QuickChat to reinforce the “work” aspect of the platform.
- Users can now see which groups they have joined, customize their shortcuts and navigate to the groups that are most important to them.
- The navigation menu and the right-hand column can also be collapsed, enabling people to zero in on the content they care about.
Slack – Where work happens!
On the other hand, Slack an enterprise software platform based out of San-Francisco is continuing to grow at a heady pace. Despite its success, a few tools are breathing down its neck, and Workplace is one among them.
Slack equally boasts a range of features like larger integrations, which means that all your notifications will be in the same place. Another significant capability is file sharing and storage. The platform is so successful right now and has confidentially filed to go public with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Notably, this is one of the anticipated IPO’s of 2019 as well.
Microsoft’s bet – Yammer
Yammer is the social network except it connect just single companies instead of the whole world. Microsoft came up with Yammer as a solution to Slack and Workplace. The tool from Microsoft has a greater range of open APIs for integration, more capabilities for importing and exporting data, and more plugins as well. Having said that, Yammer is different in a few ways when compared to Slack and Workplace, which has its benefits.
Nonetheless, there are other apps in the European market as well, and who knows, it might fit your workflow even better. Also, there can be many reasons why you may be looking for other alternatives.
Flex-Appeal: Based out of Rotterdam, Flex-Appeal is specifically made for retail, restaurant and hotel chains to reach, train and engage all of their employees through one single app.
Speakap: Speakap is a secure and private platform that enables organisations of all sizes to reach their frontline employees to deliver greater customer experience and business value.
Loop Email: Loop is a secure email app that upgrades your Gmail or Outlook inbox. It organizes your mail around the people and teams that matter to you.
Other alternatives include Azendoo, Fleep and Hibox.
Choosing one for you!
When it comes to workplaces with multiple locations collaborations is important. And without the right tool, it can prove to be difficult to ensure that everyone is on the same page. To help keep your team in check, there are various tools mentioned above.
Choosing one for you and your company depends more on what you’re considering for in a collaboration tool. Which one do you prefer?
Stay tuned to Silicon Canals for more updates in the tech startup world.
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