A year later

Fast forward to today and more than 30,000 organizations are using Workplace worldwide — more than double from just six months ago. They’ve used Workplace to create over 1,000,000 groups to help teams work better together. Innovative companies continue to join Workplace, including Walmart, Heineken, Spotify, Lyft, and Reliance Group.

Introducing Workplace Chat

This past year, we shipped new features to help companies better work together: multi-company groups, live video chat, group analytics and more. Increasingly, we’ve found that many customers rely on messaging for real-time, reliable communication.

Messaging has always been a key component of the Workplace experience. But we wanted to make it even easier for people to work together in real-time, both on the go and at their desks.

We envision Workplace as an employee’s command center for everything that’s happening with their team, their company, and their industry. To accomplish this, companies use a combination of Workplace features to best fit how they work – groups for teamwork, video for storytelling, and integrations like Box and Office365 for everyday work. Now, we’re offering a messaging-focused experience through Workplace Chat, both on desktop and mobile.

Workplace Chat has always had mobile and browser components, and now we’re adding a desktop app. With the desktop app, people can access the same great features of the mobile app directly from their desktop. Workplace Chat includes video chat with a co-worker or group, screen sharing, and file sharing. It also includes features like message reactions, @mentions, and gifs that keep the conversation fun but focused.

Find out more about Workplace Chat and download it for free right here.

New look and feel

Building on the launch of the Workplace name and logo last year, we’re giving all our apps across all platforms a new, fresh, consistent look and feel. These design updates are based on feedback from customers and make it easier to connect and navigate on Workplace.

A look back

Over the past year, our customers have shown us that Workplace is changing the way work gets done:

• Disaster response: When unprecedented hurricanes struck the U.S., Delta used Workplace to coordinate their disaster response and real-time communications. Delta also used Safety Officer, a bot by ServiceRocket, to account for Tampa Customer Engagement Center employees.
• Idea sharing: At Oxfam International, a staff worker shared a video on Workplace about his work helping bring clean water to a village in Yemen. The video became a key fundraising asset that Oxfam shared with major donors.
• Collaboration to automation: Companies like Deliveroo are using a chatbot by Envoy that alerts people when a visitor arrives at the office. And the Royal Bank of Scotland built a bot on Workplace to handle technology and office questions — freeing up help desk time for more complicated tasks.

More than 50 service partners, including Slalom, Golin, and Revevol, now help customers launch and use Workplace to connect their people. Workplace is also integrated with a growing list of tools and services, and people can build custom integrations with our APIs.

It’s been an incredible year, and we can’t wait for what’s to come.