Meta and Microsoft integrate Workplace and Teams to provide new features

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Microsoft Teams users can now access an updated news feed within Meta’s Workplace enterprise social network without having to switch programs, thanks to an integration Meta and Microsoft announced today. Plans are also underway to enable Teams video call streams directly from Workplace.

This is the first integration between Teams, Microsoft’s workflow collaboration tool, and Workplace, which has more than 7 million paying subscribers and now integrates with Office 365 applications, including Microsoft SharePoint and OneDrive, and will support Teams on Meta (formerly Facebook) Portal video devices next month.

The new integration provides two features: First, the Workplace app for Teams can be pinned to the Teams side navigation bar or added as a tab to provide access to the Workplace news feed within the app. Teams administrators can mark workplace content as "important" to draw users' attention to certain information. Individual users can also pull content from Workplace groups into Teams channels, highlight it to colleagues, and react to Workplace posts directly from Teams.

The video integration, coming in early 2022, will allow users to watch Teams video calls from Workplace and comment in real time. Presenters in Teams will be able to monitor view engagement and reactions in both apps simultaneously.

While the two companies compete in many ways (Microsoft's Viva Connections also offers social networking features, for example, and both companies recently unveiled competing visions for immersive collaboration software), the recent moves show that many customers now rely on a range of tools to enable employee collaboration.

Ujjwal Singh, head of product at Workplace, said the integration with Teams will make it easier for employees who use both tools to stay up to date and create more opportunities for enterprise-wide engagement.

The Meta's Workplace app for Teams can be pinned to the Teams side navigation bar or added as a tab for quick access to the Workplace news feed.

Singh said earlier this year that Teams integration was in the works, noting that joint customers already trialing integrations include Vodafone and Flight Centre.

In a statement, Jeff Teper, CVP product and engineering for Microsoft Teams, said: “We will work together to help our joint customers adopt collaboration software and break down silos within organizations.”

The integration is particularly beneficial for Workplace customers who view the app as their core employee communications solution but use Teams to power day-to-day productivity, said Angela Ashenden, principal analyst at CCS Insight. She said this is common in large organizations where communications and HR teams rely on Workplace, while IT teams are responsible for Teams as a collaboration and productivity platform.

With that in mind, these integrations make sense for Meta because they help push information from Workplace to the users where they tend to spend the most time. “By surfacing the news feed within Teams, Workplace can continue to reach these employees while allowing communications and HR leaders to retain control over communications and employee engagement platform strategy,” Ashenden said.

However, Ashenden noted that while the integration helps connect the two platforms, there are still challenges for users of Teams and Workplace — especially since there is overlap in functionality between the respective chat features, Teams Chat and Workplace Chat, which can be confusing for users.