Organisations might be drawn to cloud by the lure of gaining new information and insights from the data they hold. Perhaps they will learn how to retain customers more successfully, or get a better understanding of profit centres – or cost centres. The twin powers of artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI and ML), deployed in the cloud can work wonders. But they need their ‘food’, the raw data they work with, to be in tip top condition, and for many organisations preparing that food requires time, effort, and attention to detail. 

Data strategies and clear priorities 

There is no doubt that AI and ML can provide information that organisations can’t come by in any other way. Data-crunching can, if done well, help organisations boost productivity and profits. But optimal success doesn’t come overnight. As Yann Lepant, MD for Accenture Technology in the UK tells Cloud Pro: “It’s easy to get tempted by the extensive set of cloud based new data and AI technologies as it’s an exciting new playground to venture on. However, it’s also a place where it’s easy to consume wastefully and get lost in delivery.”

A key factor in avoiding the pitfalls is to have clear priorities and a solid data strategy. Lepant tells Cloud Pro that having these will mean “each initiative is done with purpose and outcome, contributing to a journey of maturation through the cloud”.

Ingrid Verschuren, head of data strategy at Dow Jones, whose global news database Factiva grows by a million articles every day, from approximately 33,000 sources, tells Cloud Pro: “It doesn’t matter how good the technology is if the data feeding it is poor quality. The first and most important step to get the most out of your data is to ensure you are using the right data – and that it is structured in a way that will answer the questions you want to ask.”  

So what do clear priorities look like? Paul Clough, professor of search and analytics at the University of Sheffield tells Cloud Pro: “Identifying the use cases is critical and needs to be based on issues and problems identified in the business by business stakeholders, rather than by data scientists or the IT department.” This approach keeps the priorities very practically focused, he says. 

Cleaning and refining

Another pair of related tasks that may need to be undertaken before AI and ML can work their magic are cleaning up old data and refining what new data is collected.

Part of the cleaning task will involve bringing data out of silos. This can be tricky, but worth the effort and organisations undertaking the task can take some comfort from the fact that they’re not alone. Often, data silos are a result of historical practice and how things have grown organically over time, and it takes a concerted effort to undo in a relatively short time what’s built up over a much longer period. But as Lepant points out, there are really no short-cuts. “From getting a 360 degree view of the customer to end-to-end supply chain management, via fraud prevention and intelligent forecasting, the list of business outcomes enabled by the removal of data silos is endless,” he says.

Cleaning data is another task that can take time, but the effort is definitely worth it in the longer term. Verschuren provides some useful advice to help keep the cleaning task focussed, telling Cloud Pro: “Before you start cleaning your data, you need to determine how that data will be used and what insights you need to generate. Ask yourself, what does perfect look like? From there, you need to define the data fields that will be part of your data set, and the input for each of those fields.” Effectively, work backwards from the outcomes you want to get, and determine what data you need to get them. 

And finally, along come analytics and insights

With clean data, a clear data strategy in place, and perhaps some new data collection streams in place too, an organisation is finally in a position to start using AI and ML to gain those valuable insights it craves.

But that’s not quite the end of the story. To continue to gain insights over time, data should take its place, unsiloed, front and centre. Or, as Lepant tells Cloud Pro when sharing key advice, organisations should “implement a programme to update the ways of working, culture and data literacy to help the business become more data driven and self-served”.

Health secretary Matt Hancock has outlined his vision for the digital future of the NHS that operates across a “consistent data platform”.

Speaking at the Digital Health Rewired virtual festival, Hancock announced he wants to explore whether a data platform can be created that separates the data layer from the application layer.

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This would mean “providers can offer the application software, but the data will be stored separately and securely in the cloud and then we have a consistent data platform across the NHS”.

He said it should be made easier to write applications or create services that interact with data from different NHS organisations.

Hancock also said that Shared Care Records will be put in place by September this year, where every local system will have at least a basic version implemented.

“This will mean patients only need to give their details once, and they’ll be captured in a local record that can be safely seen by those who are caring for them,” he said.

There was also an emphasis on the need to “connect the system so data flows appropriately and freely, and we get the intrinsic benefits that high quality data and interoperability can provide.”

He admitted that bringing together the data that usually would have only existed in silos was fundamental to the NHS’s COVID response. He also recognised the need to fill gaps in interoperability where they exist, “ especially the link to social care and responsibilities of the NHS.”

He said that in many ways every day of the last year has “been a session of digital transformation because of this shared experience of fighting the virus, and the vital role technology has played in response.”

The secretary did admit that half of the clinicians questioned in a BMA survey said they had been hampered by issues like internet speed and infrastructure when trying to access online services, and he underlined the need to “get the infrastructure in place.”

It was also revealed that thirty more NHS trusts will be joining the Digital Aspirant programme, which will help boost their digital infrastructure through funding.

“Seven trusts will get up to £6 million over the next 3 years, and the rest will get seed funding to start creating their plans,” he outlined.

Earlier this week it emerged that the digital transformation of the NHS needed “further work” and that the technological innovations implemented during the pandemic need to be improved before being “locked-in.” 

In November last year, the health department was blasted for its track record of failed NHS digital projects, with a parliamentary committee warning that there was a need for it to “move on” from its decades-long legacy of “failed attempts” at digital transformation.

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Health secretary Matt Hancock has outlined his vision for the digital future of the NHS that operates across a “consistent data platform”.

Speaking at the Digital Health Rewired virtual festival, Hancock announced he wants to explore whether a data platform can be created that separates the data layer from the application layer.

​

This would mean “providers can offer the application software, but the data will be stored separately and securely in the cloud and then we have a consistent data platform across the NHS”.

He said it should be made easier to write applications or create services that interact with data from different NHS organisations.

Hancock also said that Shared Care Records will be put in place by September this year, where every local system will have at least a basic version implemented.

“This will mean patients only need to give their details once, and they’ll be captured in a local record that can be safely seen by those who are caring for them,” he said.

There was also an emphasis on the need to “connect the system so data flows appropriately and freely, and we get the intrinsic benefits that high quality data and interoperability can provide.”

He admitted that bringing together the data that usually would have only existed in silos was fundamental to the NHS’s COVID response. He also recognised the need to fill gaps in interoperability where they exist, “ especially the link to social care and responsibilities of the NHS.”

He said that in many ways every day of the last year has “been a session of digital transformation because of this shared experience of fighting the virus, and the vital role technology has played in response.”

The secretary did admit that half of the clinicians questioned in a BMA survey said they had been hampered by issues like internet speed and infrastructure when trying to access online services, and he underlined the need to “get the infrastructure in place.”

It was also revealed that thirty more NHS trusts will be joining the Digital Aspirant programme, which will help boost their digital infrastructure through funding.

“Seven trusts will get up to £6 million over the next 3 years, and the rest will get seed funding to start creating their plans,” he outlined.

Earlier this week it emerged that the digital transformation of the NHS needed “further work” and that the technological innovations implemented during the pandemic need to be improved before being “locked-in.” 

In November last year, the health department was blasted for its track record of failed NHS digital projects, with a parliamentary committee warning that there was a need for it to “move on” from its decades-long legacy of “failed attempts” at digital transformation.

​

Ofcom has unveiled new regulations for wholesale telecoms markets used to deliver broadband, mobile, and business connections in the UK, which aim to promote competition and investment in gigabit-capable networks.

This includes regulating the impact of Openreach, which holds the biggest share of the UK’s broadband market, by examining the level of current or prospective competition in a given area. The BT subsidiary will be prevented from offering geographic discounts on its full-fibre wholesale services.

However, Ofcom will also freeze the wholesale fees Openreach charges for providing data speeds of up to 40Mbps using technologies such as FTTC (copper links via fibre to the cabinet) or ADSL, which uses copper links only. The regulator has also decided not to place a pricing cap on Openreach’s fastest fibre services, allowing the company to better fund a faster rollout.

Ofcom chief executive Dame Melanie Dawes said that, despite the huge demand for network connectivity due to continuing lockdown restrictions, “millions of homes are still using the copper lines that were first laid over 100 years ago”.

Ofcom is “setting the right conditions for companies to step up and invest in the country’s full-fibre future,” said Dawes, adding that “now it’s time to ramp up the rollout of better broadband across the UK”.

The new regulations will go into effect starting next month and remain in effect until at least March 2026.

Openreach CEO Clive Selley said that Ofcom’s new regulations will allow the provider “to ramp up to 3 million premises per year providing vital next-generation connectivity for homes and business right across the UK”.

The company has by now managed to extend the FTTP rollout to “almost 4.5 million premises”.

Virgin Media CEO Lutz Schüler welcomed Ofcom’s announcement, describing it as a “resounding sign of support and longer-term clarity from Ofcom for those rolling up their sleeves to build the nation’s next-generation digital infrastructure”.

Last month, Virgin Media announced plans to create more than 400 new graduate, intern, and apprenticeship roles over the course of 2021 to assist the company in building and maintaining its gigabit infrastructure, as well as continuing to expand its network to connect new homes and businesses as part of its ‘Project Lightning’ programme.

“Ofcom’s focus is in the right place, and we urge the regulator to maintain this trajectory so that more of the country can benefit from competing gigabit networks that deliver long-lasting economic, societal and environmental benefits,” he added.

CCS Insight’s consumer and connectivity director Kester Mann described the ruling as “a huge boost for the deployment of full-fibre broadband that will benefit millions of UK homes and businesses for years to come”.

“It comes at a time when the value of connectivity has never been more appreciated as the pandemic triggers major change in how people live and work. The UK’s over-reliance on using dated copper lines for 21st-century connectivity has held back its aspirations to become a world-leading digital economy. Today’s news sets fresh conditions to help accelerate full-fibre broadband deployment to help it move out of the slow lane.”

Mann added that “the news caps a great week for BT following a successful outcome in the 5G spectrum auction”.

“Rolling out fibre infrastructure is a costly and time-consuming venture with a pay-back measured in decades. CEO Phillip Jansen recently declared that BT is “ready to build like fury” and while it would have preferred a longer period free from regulated pricing, the announcement still brings much-needed certainty to make a return on investment. The news may not be so appreciated among service providers that rely on Openreach and other infrastructure. But this was always a delicate decision for the regulator which had to tread a fine line between encouraging long-term investment and maintaining fair competition. It may have got it about right.”

DCMS secretary Oliver Dowden said that he welcomes Ofcom’s new regulations, adding that they “strike the right balance between encouraging commercial investment and protecting consumers”.

He also announced that the government will tomorrow publish its “plan to drive the rapid rollout of gigabit broadband across the whole of the UK, including the first places to benefit from our £5bn investment in hard to reach areas”.

Ofcom has unveiled new regulations for wholesale telecoms markets used to deliver broadband, mobile, and business connections in the UK, which aim to promote competition and investment in gigabit-capable networks.

This includes regulating the impact of Openreach, which holds the biggest share of the UK’s broadband market, by examining the level of current or prospective competition in a given area. The BT subsidiary will be prevented from offering geographic discounts on its full-fibre wholesale services.

However, Ofcom will also freeze the wholesale fees Openreach charges for providing data speeds of up to 40Mbps using technologies such as FTTC (copper links via fibre to the cabinet) or ADSL, which uses copper links only. The regulator has also decided not to place a pricing cap on Openreach’s fastest fibre services, allowing the company to better fund a faster rollout.

Ofcom chief executive Dame Melanie Dawes said that, despite the huge demand for network connectivity due to continuing lockdown restrictions, “millions of homes are still using the copper lines that were first laid over 100 years ago”.

Ofcom is “setting the right conditions for companies to step up and invest in the country’s full-fibre future,” said Dawes, adding that “now it’s time to ramp up the rollout of better broadband across the UK”.

The new regulations will go into effect starting next month and remain in effect until at least March 2026.

Openreach CEO Clive Selley said that Ofcom’s new regulations will allow the provider “to ramp up to 3 million premises per year providing vital next-generation connectivity for homes and business right across the UK”.

The company has by now managed to extend the FTTP rollout to “almost 4.5 million premises”.

Virgin Media CEO Lutz Schüler welcomed Ofcom’s announcement, describing it as a “resounding sign of support and longer-term clarity from Ofcom for those rolling up their sleeves to build the nation’s next-generation digital infrastructure”.

Last month, Virgin Media announced plans to create more than 400 new graduate, intern, and apprenticeship roles over the course of 2021 to assist the company in building and maintaining its gigabit infrastructure, as well as continuing to expand its network to connect new homes and businesses as part of its ‘Project Lightning’ programme.

“Ofcom’s focus is in the right place, and we urge the regulator to maintain this trajectory so that more of the country can benefit from competing gigabit networks that deliver long-lasting economic, societal and environmental benefits,” he added.

CCS Insight’s consumer and connectivity director Kester Mann described the ruling as “a huge boost for the deployment of full-fibre broadband that will benefit millions of UK homes and businesses for years to come”.

“It comes at a time when the value of connectivity has never been more appreciated as the pandemic triggers major change in how people live and work. The UK’s over-reliance on using dated copper lines for 21st-century connectivity has held back its aspirations to become a world-leading digital economy. Today’s news sets fresh conditions to help accelerate full-fibre broadband deployment to help it move out of the slow lane.”

Mann added that “the news caps a great week for BT following a successful outcome in the 5G spectrum auction”.

“Rolling out fibre infrastructure is a costly and time-consuming venture with a pay-back measured in decades. CEO Phillip Jansen recently declared that BT is “ready to build like fury” and while it would have preferred a longer period free from regulated pricing, the announcement still brings much-needed certainty to make a return on investment. The news may not be so appreciated among service providers that rely on Openreach and other infrastructure. But this was always a delicate decision for the regulator which had to tread a fine line between encouraging long-term investment and maintaining fair competition. It may have got it about right.”

DCMS secretary Oliver Dowden said that he welcomes Ofcom’s new regulations, adding that they “strike the right balance between encouraging commercial investment and protecting consumers”.

He also announced that the government will tomorrow publish its “plan to drive the rapid rollout of gigabit broadband across the whole of the UK, including the first places to benefit from our £5bn investment in hard to reach areas”.

The founder of OVH, which owns the French data centre that perished in a fire last week, has said the incident highlights a need for the data centre industry to offer backups as a standard for all customers.

Octave Klaba said his company will start providing secure backups for its data centre customers by default rather than as an additional paid service.

Klaba said that the fire at OVH’s data centre site in Strasbourg earlier this month, that destroyed one building and partially damaged another, should serve as an industry-wide wakeup call.

“This incident will change our way of delivering these services, but, also, I believe it will change the industry, which will increase the securities of backups by default, without any payment,” Kalaba said in a video. “This will be our strategy, our answer to this incident.”

Several OVH customers affected by the fire were unable to bring their applications back online due to a lack of backups. Klaba suggested there was some confusion over service terms and that some of its customers hadn’t fully understood what they had brought from OVH. The French cloud firm did offer 500GB of free backup storage with every dedicated server and customers could pay to ramp that up to 10TB.

“It seems that globally, the customers… understand what we are delivering, but some customers, they don’t understand what exactly they bought,” Klaba said in the video.

The CEO added that he would post another video on Friday 19 March with an update on the ongoing investigation into the cause of the fire. Thermal images used by firefighters suggested the building’s uninterruptible power supply (UPS) system was a possible cause. Klaba said that investigators had taken the UPS units and all its batteries and fuses – along with video footage – for analysis.

The founder of OVH, which owns the French data centre that perished in a fire last week, has said the incident highlights a need for the data centre industry to offer backups as a standard for all customers.

Octave Klaba said his company will start providing secure backups for its data centre customers by default rather than as an additional paid service.

Klaba said that the fire at OVH’s data centre site in Strasbourg earlier this month, that destroyed one building and partially damaged another, should serve as an industry-wide wakeup call.

“This incident will change our way of delivering these services, but, also, I believe it will change the industry, which will increase the securities of backups by default, without any payment,” Kalaba said in a video. “This will be our strategy, our answer to this incident.”

Several OVH customers affected by the fire were unable to bring their applications back online due to a lack of backups. Klaba suggested there was some confusion over service terms and that some of its customers hadn’t fully understood what they had brought from OVH. The French cloud firm did offer 500GB of free backup storage with every dedicated server and customers could pay to ramp that up to 10TB.

“It seems that globally, the customers… understand what we are delivering, but some customers, they don’t understand what exactly they bought,” Klaba said in the video.

The CEO added that he would post another video on Friday 19 March with an update on the ongoing investigation into the cause of the fire. Thermal images used by firefighters suggested the building’s uninterruptible power supply (UPS) system was a possible cause. Klaba said that investigators had taken the UPS units and all its batteries and fuses – along with video footage – for analysis.

Since its launch in 2016, Workplace has aimed to bring the powerful tools and addictive user experience of Facebook to corporate environments, with the intention of improving staff engagement and communication.

Remote working was already on the rise when COVID struck, but the ongoing health crisis has made it a priority for every job that can be done remotely to be made as accessible as possible for people working from home.

To this end, Slack – now owned by Salesforce – and Microsoft’s rival Teams have been providing vital communication between now-remote colleagues, alongside video conferencing tools such as Zoom and Google Meet.

Workplace includes unified communications, with voice, video and text chat. However, it adds a lot more: personal blogs, events, and both formal and informal groups for staff. Its knowledge management features make a compelling alternative to an office intranet, and there’s polling and checklists for rudimentary project tracking in there, too. 

It really is a corporate version of Facebook – for better and for worse.

Facebook Workplace review: User experience

Workplace looks and feels a lot like Facebook. Whether that’s a user experience advantage or not may depend on whether your company’s staff actually use or care for Facebook, but either way, the user interface is undeniably clear and easy to navigate. 

Its desktop browser interface tiles neatly on higher resolution monitors, but is most comfortable occupying the entire screen on resolutions of 1920×1080 or less. You can enable dark mode via a menu accessible from your profile icon at bottom left, which is very easy on the eyes if you’ve been staring at a screen all day.

The interface is split into a large content pane on the right, a narrower tabbed index to its left and, at the far left, a narrow icon pane that allows you to switch between your home view, notifications, chat and, if you have access, the Workplace admin panel.

The Home screen opens on your News Feed, which behaves much as it does in the traditional version of Facebook: you can share posts, videos or images to your timeline, and see posts from the colleagues and groups you follow. 

When you create a post, Workplace prompts you, uninspiringly, with a line asking “What are you working on?”. You can @mention others, use emoji, start live video streams, and share location check-ins, images, animated gifs and pre-recorded H.264/AAC videos up to to 720p.

There are plenty of formatting options available for posts, including markdown support, lists and code blocks. Posts can also be scheduled in advance, so you don’t have to let the entire company know that you’re still working at 2AM.

Live video streaming – not to be confused with video chat – supports your average smartphone or USB camera, external hardware encoders, and software such as Xsplit, Wirecast and OBS. An excellent addition is support for Real-Time Messaging Protocol over SSL (RTMPS) to help secure your content, although you’ll have to ensure that any external encoder you use supports this if you want to stream from it.

Facebook Workplace review: Knowledge management

So far, so Facebook. Next down on the Home navigation column is the Knowledge Library. This is a genuinely useful addition, allowing you to create neatly formatted documents in a tree structure, with a powerful search feature that brings to mind Atalassian’s Confluence.

Workplace suggests using this for corporate handbooks and policy documents. It’s also useful for sharing style guides, documentation and even code and scripting examples, although the otherwise generous formatting options unfortunately lack code blocks or markdown support. 

You can attach files of up to 50MB to your Knowledge documents, but file type support is somewhat limited, so we couldn’t attach a DLL that went with a chunk of our documentation until we compressed it. Once shared, users can discuss the documents via comments, and edit them if they have appropriate privileges.

It could be a little easier to publish Knowledge Library files – inviting people to view a parent file in a tree doesn’t automatically share its children with them, for example – but the system is nonetheless outstandingly useful and feels more elegant and streamlined than similar features other hybrid project/comms solutions such as Basecamp.

Facebook Workplace review: Keeping in contact

Groups work much as their Facebook counterparts. They’re ideal for individual project teams and workgroups, but also for company-wide pet photo sharing and sign-ups for the next virtual pub quiz. You get a few extra posting features in these, including the ability to create events, video chatrooms, shared documents, polls, checklists of actionable items, and Q&A sessions.

The final entry on the Home navigation pane is People, which is populated with links to the colleagues you interact with most often – this opens on a chat window, but you can also get to their profiles, ‘about’ pages and various other content they’ve created or interacted with via a shortcut bar. An Add People button allows you to invite others from either inside or outside your company’s verified domain.

A directory allows you to browse everyone in the company Workplace, while an Events tab lets you schedule private or company-wide events as you please, with associated discussion pages. Oddly, this doesn’t include the ability to schedule a video conference in advance.

You can save a range of posts and other content via the three-dot menu you’ll find at the top right of most content, and these can all be found in your Saved tab, although you can’t save content from the Knowledge Library to these bookmarks.

Facebook Workplace review: Notes, Notifications, and Navigation

Notes, like the corresponding section of the core Facebook product, houses your own private drafts and public notes; these are for individual staff members’ personal use, while the Knowledge Library is designed to be a more general reference for all employees or team members. 

The Follow Coworkers tab, meanwhile, allows you to see all your colleagues and quickly subscribe to their feeds – they aren’t notified when you follow or unfollow them, which is a nice touch. Finally an org chart can be used to illustrate the company’s departmental and managerial relationships.

Below that, you’ll find sections listing the groups and people you interact with most frequently.

A cluster of extra icons at the top of the furthest-left navigation pane provide quick access to a few more helpful features. Notifications are pretty self-explanatory, covering both updates from your colleagues and changes to Workplace itself. As a product under active development, you’ll see the latter with some regularity.

In one such recent change, Group notifications default to selected highlights, and you have to manually opt in if you wish to be notified about all posts from a group. That’s fine for your company pet appreciation group, but less than ideal for key main project groups, so keep an eye on those notification settings.

The Chat tab lists every group and private chat you’re in and is Workplace’s Messenger-inspired communication solution to compete with Slack or Microsoft Teams.

Administrators get an extra settings icon below this, and at the very bottom, everyone gets a trio of icons. These let you provide feedback to Workplace itself, get help and – via your own user icon at bottom left – set your status, enable Do Not Disturb mode, check your activity, and access your account settings.

Facebook Workplace review: Unified communications

While it’s widely regarded as an alternative to Slack or Teams, Workplace’s core communications features aren’t exactly peerless. Video chats are limited to 50 people – fewer even than the free tier of Google Meet. Video quality of the calling system (which is forked from WebRTC with a few enhancements) isn’t bad, though, so you’re well sorted for sensibly-sized meetings.

Group calls are supported under Firefox, Chrome and other Chromium-based browsers, notably Edge and Opera. However, Linux users may experience issues when using Firefox, and should use Chromium instead.

There’s also a desktop video chat app for Windows and MacOS. You can create new video chatrooms from either the news feed or the chat pane, but not from events. Events also don’t get associated chatrooms. However, the Workplace team is currently working on ways to integrate live video streams into events more fully.

Each group can have its own chatroom too, and you can see an overview of them all via your Chat tab, but we missed the compact layout we’ve become accustomed to in rivals such as Slack. Your entire chat history and individuals’ profiles are both searchable, and #topics are supported to help keep things on track. However, although you can directly reply to chat messages, there’s no reply threading, which, as with Discord, can make busy rooms feel cluttered.

You can’t adjust how much space your central chat window takes up relative to the channel list and right-hand About sidebar, either. The general layout feels a great deal like Facebook Messenger, and that doesn’t translate entirely well to a business tool, although the mobile app is rather more streamlined.

Facebook Workplace review: Quality of life

Workplace’s default notification settings mean that you’ll get a lot of email: every time someone adds you to a group, every time you’re mentioned or interacted with, and to keep you up to date with a significant chunk of the activity in your groups. This is one of those rare cases where most people will be best off disabling emails and enabling in-browser or on-device push notifications via their Workplace account settings.

You can’t block messages from anyone inside your organisation, but you can block people from outside it who’ve been invited to participate in a shared multi-company chat. You can, however, block specific co-workers from inviting you to events via the settings pages.

You can also limit who can see your posts, hide comments containing certain words and review both posts that tag you and tags added to your posts before they appear on your profile. There’s a highly customisable Do Not Disturb mode, too, supporting both one-off and scheduled settings.

If you’re a member of multiple Workplaces, you can switch between them via the bottom-left personal menu options; this is less convenient than Slack’s implementation, but works well enough given that Workplace has a larger and more feature-packed interface.

Workplace supports ‘he’, ‘she’, and ‘they’ pronouns, configurable alongside your name in general settings. It also has none of Facebook’s weird name restrictions, and use of Workplace is entirely unrelated to the possession or status of a standard Facebook account. Two-factor authentication is supported via the security settings.

Facebook Workplace review: Administration

The Administration panel is hugely comprehensive and not actually as overwhelming as it might appear at first glance. You get a lot of data about what your company’s staff are up to, with features such as a security panel tracking password use, malware and poorly secured accounts. If you’ve got an ultra widescreen monitor, enabling full width mode makes this a lot easier to parse at a glance.

You get very granular control over rights and access privileges, as well as over company roles and the content in your Workplace. Administrators can highlight posts as important, group them together in campaigns and send out surveys.

A couple of more unusual features are worthy of note: you can add staff members to a frontline workers group. This is intended for deskless workings, including non-office and even casual staff, such as cashiers, field engineers, warehouse workers and delivery personnel. 

These accounts can be claimed by the worker using a code, rather than via email, and are mobile-first, rather than hinging on the desktop interface. The mobile app provides quick access to the same content as the desktop version, and enables front-line staff to quickly communicate with each other and with their managers, regardless of where they are, as well as providing easy access to knowledge documents. Extra restrictions can be applied to staff in the frontline set, such as barring them from creating Workplace groups.

There’s also less practical stuff, like badges – while it’s useful to know who the fire wardens are and who’s new to the business, awards for effort, helpfulness and participation feel like shiny, patronising trinkets of no real value, and might not be as popular with workers as Workplace seems to expect.

As you’d hope, you can connect Workplace to other cloud services, including Sharepoint, Google Drive and OneDrive, but not the broader features of Office 365 or Google Workspace. Its reasonably comprehensive library of integrations also includes Zoom, BlueJeans and WebEx video conferencing, Jira and Salesforce, but there’s no support for anything that competes with Workplace’s core communication features, such as Slack or Teams.

Facebook Workplace review: Pricing

Workplace has two subscription tiers: Advanced, priced at an extremely competitive $4 per user, per month, and Enterprise, which costs $8 per user, per month. Charities, educational establishments, and some other non-profit organisations may be eligible for a free tier via the Workplace for Good scheme.

Enterprise gives you unlimited storage, compared to 1GB per user for the Advanced subscription, as well as faster and more comprehensive support, with a dedicated team and 4-hour initial response time, compared to Advanced users’ 24-hour potential delay. Enterprise subscribers also get early access to new features and an enhanced peer-to-peer version of the Enterprise Live video streaming system.

Advanced is marketed at small businesses or teams within larger companies, while Enterprise (unsurprisingly) targets large enterprises, but there’s not a great deal to choose between them.

Facebook Workplace review: Verdict

On paper, Workplace is a slightly perplexing attempt to bring social media style interaction to a business environment. In practice, though, you get a competitively-priced hybrid solution with elements of chat and video communication, blogging and vlogging, knowledge management and even lightweight project management capabilities. That’s a lot of functionality – even if some of it is questionably useful.

The Knowledge Library, support for extended posts, and community tools are things we’d like to see more of in business communications platforms, particularly as many of us are settling in for the long haul when it comes to remote working.

However, Workplace isn’t as on point when it comes to its core unified communications, with chat that feels slightly clunky, lack of automatic video and chatrooms for events, and video conferencing tools hampered by some irritating limitations. That’s something we hope to see improve, because Workplace’s focus on building a sense of community among colleagues is a useful take on internal business communications.

Since its launch in 2016, Workplace has aimed to bring the powerful tools and addictive user experience of Facebook to corporate environments, with the intention of improving staff engagement and communication.

Remote working was already on the rise when COVID struck, but the ongoing health crisis has made it a priority for every job that can be done remotely to be made as accessible as possible for people working from home.

To this end, Slack – now owned by Salesforce – and Microsoft’s rival Teams have been providing vital communication between now-remote colleagues, alongside video conferencing tools such as Zoom and Google Meet.

Workplace includes unified communications, with voice, video and text chat. However, it adds a lot more: personal blogs, events, and both formal and informal groups for staff. Its knowledge management features make a compelling alternative to an office intranet, and there’s polling and checklists for rudimentary project tracking in there, too. 

It really is a corporate version of Facebook – for better and for worse.

Facebook Workplace review: User experience

Workplace looks and feels a lot like Facebook. Whether that’s a user experience advantage or not may depend on whether your company’s staff actually use or care for Facebook, but either way, the user interface is undeniably clear and easy to navigate. 

Its desktop browser interface tiles neatly on higher resolution monitors, but is most comfortable occupying the entire screen on resolutions of 1920×1080 or less. You can enable dark mode via a menu accessible from your profile icon at bottom left, which is very easy on the eyes if you’ve been staring at a screen all day.

The interface is split into a large content pane on the right, a narrower tabbed index to its left and, at the far left, a narrow icon pane that allows you to switch between your home view, notifications, chat and, if you have access, the Workplace admin panel.

The Home screen opens on your News Feed, which behaves much as it does in the traditional version of Facebook: you can share posts, videos or images to your timeline, and see posts from the colleagues and groups you follow. 

When you create a post, Workplace prompts you, uninspiringly, with a line asking “What are you working on?”. You can @mention others, use emoji, start live video streams, and share location check-ins, images, animated gifs and pre-recorded H.264/AAC videos up to to 720p.

There are plenty of formatting options available for posts, including markdown support, lists and code blocks. Posts can also be scheduled in advance, so you don’t have to let the entire company know that you’re still working at 2AM.

Live video streaming – not to be confused with video chat – supports your average smartphone or USB camera, external hardware encoders, and software such as Xsplit, Wirecast and OBS. An excellent addition is support for Real-Time Messaging Protocol over SSL (RTMPS) to help secure your content, although you’ll have to ensure that any external encoder you use supports this if you want to stream from it.

Facebook Workplace review: Knowledge management

So far, so Facebook. Next down on the Home navigation column is the Knowledge Library. This is a genuinely useful addition, allowing you to create neatly formatted documents in a tree structure, with a powerful search feature that brings to mind Atalassian’s Confluence.

Workplace suggests using this for corporate handbooks and policy documents. It’s also useful for sharing style guides, documentation and even code and scripting examples, although the otherwise generous formatting options unfortunately lack code blocks or markdown support. 

You can attach files of up to 50MB to your Knowledge documents, but file type support is somewhat limited, so we couldn’t attach a DLL that went with a chunk of our documentation until we compressed it. Once shared, users can discuss the documents via comments, and edit them if they have appropriate privileges.

It could be a little easier to publish Knowledge Library files – inviting people to view a parent file in a tree doesn’t automatically share its children with them, for example – but the system is nonetheless outstandingly useful and feels more elegant and streamlined than similar features other hybrid project/comms solutions such as Basecamp.

Facebook Workplace review: Keeping in contact

Groups work much as their Facebook counterparts. They’re ideal for individual project teams and workgroups, but also for company-wide pet photo sharing and sign-ups for the next virtual pub quiz. You get a few extra posting features in these, including the ability to create events, video chatrooms, shared documents, polls, checklists of actionable items, and Q&A sessions.

The final entry on the Home navigation pane is People, which is populated with links to the colleagues you interact with most often – this opens on a chat window, but you can also get to their profiles, ‘about’ pages and various other content they’ve created or interacted with via a shortcut bar. An Add People button allows you to invite others from either inside or outside your company’s verified domain.

A directory allows you to browse everyone in the company Workplace, while an Events tab lets you schedule private or company-wide events as you please, with associated discussion pages. Oddly, this doesn’t include the ability to schedule a video conference in advance.

You can save a range of posts and other content via the three-dot menu you’ll find at the top right of most content, and these can all be found in your Saved tab, although you can’t save content from the Knowledge Library to these bookmarks.

Facebook Workplace review: Notes, Notifications, and Navigation

Notes, like the corresponding section of the core Facebook product, houses your own private drafts and public notes; these are for individual staff members’ personal use, while the Knowledge Library is designed to be a more general reference for all employees or team members. 

The Follow Coworkers tab, meanwhile, allows you to see all your colleagues and quickly subscribe to their feeds – they aren’t notified when you follow or unfollow them, which is a nice touch. Finally an org chart can be used to illustrate the company’s departmental and managerial relationships.

Below that, you’ll find sections listing the groups and people you interact with most frequently.

A cluster of extra icons at the top of the furthest-left navigation pane provide quick access to a few more helpful features. Notifications are pretty self-explanatory, covering both updates from your colleagues and changes to Workplace itself. As a product under active development, you’ll see the latter with some regularity.

In one such recent change, Group notifications default to selected highlights, and you have to manually opt in if you wish to be notified about all posts from a group. That’s fine for your company pet appreciation group, but less than ideal for key main project groups, so keep an eye on those notification settings.

The Chat tab lists every group and private chat you’re in and is Workplace’s Messenger-inspired communication solution to compete with Slack or Microsoft Teams.

Administrators get an extra settings icon below this, and at the very bottom, everyone gets a trio of icons. These let you provide feedback to Workplace itself, get help and – via your own user icon at bottom left – set your status, enable Do Not Disturb mode, check your activity, and access your account settings.

Facebook Workplace review: Unified communications

While it’s widely regarded as an alternative to Slack or Teams, Workplace’s core communications features aren’t exactly peerless. Video chats are limited to 50 people – fewer even than the free tier of Google Meet. Video quality of the calling system (which is forked from WebRTC with a few enhancements) isn’t bad, though, so you’re well sorted for sensibly-sized meetings.

Group calls are supported under Firefox, Chrome and other Chromium-based browsers, notably Edge and Opera. However, Linux users may experience issues when using Firefox, and should use Chromium instead.

There’s also a desktop video chat app for Windows and MacOS. You can create new video chatrooms from either the news feed or the chat pane, but not from events. Events also don’t get associated chatrooms. However, the Workplace team is currently working on ways to integrate live video streams into events more fully.

Each group can have its own chatroom too, and you can see an overview of them all via your Chat tab, but we missed the compact layout we’ve become accustomed to in rivals such as Slack. Your entire chat history and individuals’ profiles are both searchable, and #topics are supported to help keep things on track. However, although you can directly reply to chat messages, there’s no reply threading, which, as with Discord, can make busy rooms feel cluttered.

You can’t adjust how much space your central chat window takes up relative to the channel list and right-hand About sidebar, either. The general layout feels a great deal like Facebook Messenger, and that doesn’t translate entirely well to a business tool, although the mobile app is rather more streamlined.

Facebook Workplace review: Quality of life

Workplace’s default notification settings mean that you’ll get a lot of email: every time someone adds you to a group, every time you’re mentioned or interacted with, and to keep you up to date with a significant chunk of the activity in your groups. This is one of those rare cases where most people will be best off disabling emails and enabling in-browser or on-device push notifications via their Workplace account settings.

You can’t block messages from anyone inside your organisation, but you can block people from outside it who’ve been invited to participate in a shared multi-company chat. You can, however, block specific co-workers from inviting you to events via the settings pages.

You can also limit who can see your posts, hide comments containing certain words and review both posts that tag you and tags added to your posts before they appear on your profile. There’s a highly customisable Do Not Disturb mode, too, supporting both one-off and scheduled settings.

If you’re a member of multiple Workplaces, you can switch between them via the bottom-left personal menu options; this is less convenient than Slack’s implementation, but works well enough given that Workplace has a larger and more feature-packed interface.

Workplace supports ‘he’, ‘she’, and ‘they’ pronouns, configurable alongside your name in general settings. It also has none of Facebook’s weird name restrictions, and use of Workplace is entirely unrelated to the possession or status of a standard Facebook account. Two-factor authentication is supported via the security settings.

Facebook Workplace review: Administration

The Administration panel is hugely comprehensive and not actually as overwhelming as it might appear at first glance. You get a lot of data about what your company’s staff are up to, with features such as a security panel tracking password use, malware and poorly secured accounts. If you’ve got an ultra widescreen monitor, enabling full width mode makes this a lot easier to parse at a glance.

You get very granular control over rights and access privileges, as well as over company roles and the content in your Workplace. Administrators can highlight posts as important, group them together in campaigns and send out surveys.

A couple of more unusual features are worthy of note: you can add staff members to a frontline workers group. This is intended for deskless workings, including non-office and even casual staff, such as cashiers, field engineers, warehouse workers and delivery personnel. 

These accounts can be claimed by the worker using a code, rather than via email, and are mobile-first, rather than hinging on the desktop interface. The mobile app provides quick access to the same content as the desktop version, and enables front-line staff to quickly communicate with each other and with their managers, regardless of where they are, as well as providing easy access to knowledge documents. Extra restrictions can be applied to staff in the frontline set, such as barring them from creating Workplace groups.

There’s also less practical stuff, like badges – while it’s useful to know who the fire wardens are and who’s new to the business, awards for effort, helpfulness and participation feel like shiny, patronising trinkets of no real value, and might not be as popular with workers as Workplace seems to expect.

As you’d hope, you can connect Workplace to other cloud services, including Sharepoint, Google Drive and OneDrive, but not the broader features of Office 365 or Google Workspace. Its reasonably comprehensive library of integrations also includes Zoom, BlueJeans and WebEx video conferencing, Jira and Salesforce, but there’s no support for anything that competes with Workplace’s core communication features, such as Slack or Teams.

Facebook Workplace review: Pricing

Workplace has two subscription tiers: Advanced, priced at an extremely competitive $4 per user, per month, and Enterprise, which costs $8 per user, per month. Charities, educational establishments, and some other non-profit organisations may be eligible for a free tier via the Workplace for Good scheme.

Enterprise gives you unlimited storage, compared to 1GB per user for the Advanced subscription, as well as faster and more comprehensive support, with a dedicated team and 4-hour initial response time, compared to Advanced users’ 24-hour potential delay. Enterprise subscribers also get early access to new features and an enhanced peer-to-peer version of the Enterprise Live video streaming system.

Advanced is marketed at small businesses or teams within larger companies, while Enterprise (unsurprisingly) targets large enterprises, but there’s not a great deal to choose between them.

Facebook Workplace review: Verdict

On paper, Workplace is a slightly perplexing attempt to bring social media style interaction to a business environment. In practice, though, you get a competitively-priced hybrid solution with elements of chat and video communication, blogging and vlogging, knowledge management and even lightweight project management capabilities. That’s a lot of functionality – even if some of it is questionably useful.

The Knowledge Library, support for extended posts, and community tools are things we’d like to see more of in business communications platforms, particularly as many of us are settling in for the long haul when it comes to remote working.

However, Workplace isn’t as on point when it comes to its core unified communications, with chat that feels slightly clunky, lack of automatic video and chatrooms for events, and video conferencing tools hampered by some irritating limitations. That’s something we hope to see improve, because Workplace’s focus on building a sense of community among colleagues is a useful take on internal business communications.

Dropbox will make its password manager, ‘Dropbox Passwords’, available for free from next month. 

The feature was launched last year for paying customers but will be made available to anyone that has a Dropbox account, the company announced.

Dropbox Passwords generates unique passwords for new sign-ups and autofills credentials on apps and websites. The service is based on zero-knowledge encryption, which means users don’t have to reveal the password for verification. What’s more, the company said it will soon release a feature that lets users securely share passwords with friends and family.

There are a few limitations, however. Dropbox Passwords users will only be able to store up to 50 passwords up to three devices to access those credential via the cloud.

“Last year, we launched Dropbox Passwords for all paid Dropbox plans to make signing into websites and storing your passwords seamless,” the firm said in a statement. “The Passwords app remembers your usernames and passwords on all your devices – so you don’t have to. And zero-knowledge encryption ensures only you know your passwords, not Dropbox.”

Using password managers have been touted as a best practice for businesses for years and they are now seen as a crucial part of remote working due to the increase in services needed.

The importance of these services was recently highlighted by the widespread backlash to LastPass‘ announcement that its free tier will no longer offer users unlimited access to stored passwords on both desktop and mobile devices.
 
“If you are not using a password manager then you are dangerously leaving yourself more open to cyberattacks,” said Jake Moore, ESET’s cyber security specialist. “It is vital to implement a password manager into your work and home life to remain protected from attacks, but many people mistakenly think of it as a more unsecure way of protecting accounts.
 
“Most people have dozens of accounts and this number is only going to get bigger, for example with one-time purchases, so it can be easy to reuse known passwords. But this is where threat actors often capitalise, seeking out those overused non-complex passwords and then compromising other accounts with the same credentials.”