A New Workplace: Welcoming Facebook to the Enterprise 

Today, Facebook officially launched its first ever enterprise product, Workplace. At Box, we’re incredibly excited because Box and Workplace have been collaborating for a while now. In the coming months, we'll be working to build several integrations that will enable seamless productivity and communication - all of which will help power the future of work.

The way that people get their jobs done today is being fundamentally reimagined. People need to be able to work seamlessly both internally with colleagues, and with external partners, clients and agencies. Teams require access to critical information on the go and from anywhere in the world. Organizations operate in flatter ways so that they can move quickly and make fast decisions. And finally, people need to be able to access and leverage data to help do their jobs better and better. 

And as our work continues to change, so should the tools that help us get our work done. While enterprise software has often been an impediment to helping people do their best work in the past, cloud and mobile have reversed this trend. The cloud and mobile era – driven by Apple and Android devices, computing from Amazon Web Services, and modern enterprise software like Box, Quip, Asana, and others – has ushered in a modern IT stack where enterprise technology is as simple, delightful, and powerful as our consumer technology.  

But there's still so much more left to do, which is why we’re thrilled that Facebook has decided to enter the enterprise with Workplace.

Workplace by Facebook presents an exciting opportunity for organizations and enterprise developers alike to leverage the same capabilities that we’ve come to rely on for communicating and connecting in our personal lives at work. The ability to instantly see all your colleagues’ profiles and chat with them or find out about important updates in the business is incredibly powerful when it's all coming from an interface that the world is already familiar with. For a decade, various companies have tried to deliver Facebook-like enterprise tools without much success, but now that longstanding dream can finally be realized.

At Box, we’ve been working with Facebook to ensure our joint customers will get an amazing and seamless experience by connecting Box to Workplace. Box delivers secure, modern content management and collaboration to 60% of the Fortune 500 and 66,000 businesses across the globe, and we're excited to see how many of these organizations that are leading the way with a modern enterprise technology stack will use Workplace and Box together to transform the way people work. 

Imagine being able to share or discover the latest project files from Box with your colleagues in a Workplace Group, being able to add content into the Newsfeed that gets automatically added to Box, or passing Box files around securely and on-the-go through the Work Chat mobile app. You’ll get the best of Box's security, governance, collaboration, and viewing capabilities -- and all your content that's already in Box -- integrated natively into Workplace, just as we've done with Office 365, Salesforce, and soon, G Suite, and other platforms. Stay tuned for more details on when this will all be rolling out.

The future of work is going to look very different than it has in the past. Our slow, repeatable, and routine work will become more automated. We'll be able to securely share and communicate in real-time, no matter who we're working with. And intelligent software will materially change work in a range of industries by leveraging pools of data and creating new insights. There's never been a more amazing time in enterprise software or IT. 

Welcome to the enterprise, Facebook!