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Facebook Rolls Out Its Workplace Social Network To Compete With Slack

It’s meant to help employees collaborate with one another on products, listen to their bosses speak on Facebook Live and post updates on their work in the News Feed.
Fabrizio Bensch / Reuters

Facebook Inc. wants you to use Facebook at work -- and make your company pay for access.

A new office version of the social network, called Workplace, becomes widely available Monday. It's meant to help employees collaborate with one another on products, listen to their bosses speak on Facebook Live and post updates on their work in the News Feed. Employers will be charged a monthly fee of $3 per employee for the first 1,000 monthly active users, $2 a head from 1,001 to 10,000 users and $1 per worker beyond that, Facebook said in a statement.

The product will give Facebook a new stream of revenue, to supplement advertising on its free social network. Workplace is designed to compete with services from Microsoft Corp., Salesforce.com Inc. and Slack Technologies Inc. to provide a controlled setting online for collaborative conversations on the job. Microsoft is in the process of acquiring LinkedIn Corp. to add social elements to its business tools, for example.

"The new global and mobile workplace isn't about closed-door meetings or keeping people separated by title, department or geography," Facebook said in a blog post. "Organizations are stronger and more productive when everyone comes together."

Facebook already has 1,000 organizations using Workplace, including Starbucks, Oxfam and Booking.com, it said in the blog post.

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This article exists as part of the online archive for HuffPost India, which closed in 2020. Some features are no longer enabled. If you have questions or concerns about this article, please contact indiasupport@huffpost.com.