A Goliath Collaboration

Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, and tech Goliath Microsoft are integrating their collaboration tools. Enterprise customers from each organization will now be able to access content from both Meta Workplace and MS Teams.

This venture has long been in the works but is not a huge surprise given there are already integrations with Workplace and O365 apps like OneDrive and Sharepoint.

The real winner of this partnership is Meta. Workplace has only 7 million paid subscribers, and the Teams product has 250 million active users that will now potentially be using elements of Meta’s platform as well.

What makes this partnership unique is that it is a direct warning shot to other heavy hitters like Google, Slack, and Zoom that Meta and MS have every intention of competing in the business collaboration space. Meta and Microsoft have been fighting diligently for years in the virtual technology market, which has skyrocketed in popularity over the last 18 months due to COVID-19-related remote work. According to Meta’s head of Workplace, Ujjwal Singh, this collaboration has been requested by many Enterprise customers including Vodaphone and Accenture.

“The way our customers end up using it is customers use the complementary features, not the competing features,” Singh said. “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.”

According to a Meta blog post, customers will be able to stream between Teams Meetings into Workplace groups. This allows employees to watch meetings and events on whichever app they are using without worrying about the inconvenience of switching back and forth.

In the Meta blog post, Jeff Teper, CVP Product & Engineering at Teams said, “We have a shared vision of offering our customers choice and flexibility, so it made sense for us to come together to help our mutual customers unlock collaboration and break down silos within their organizations.”

There is still a long way to go to see who eventually ends up on top of the business communication collaboration heap, but this strong powerhouse partnership seeds Meta and Microsoft pretty high. And their work together is far from over, as they are anticipating full video integration in 2022.