We’ve tried Facebook before. It was hard to keep coming up with new content to post, and it didn’t seem to benefit us much.

You’re echoing the experience of many organisations who have tried using Facebook as a marketing tool. The fact is, while Facebook’s potential for promotion and relationship-building can be formidable, it’s not right for everyone. “Workplace by Facebook” is something quite different: simply put, it’s a custom version of the Facebook environment for messaging between co-workers.

This sounds like a terrible idea – won’t people be distracted by chit-chat and memes when they’re supposed to be working?

It must be admitted, the Workplace vision of what people get up to at work isn’t universal. I certainly wouldn’t suggest that a company of forestry workers or a brass band try to use Facebook on the job.

Yet, the evangelical slogans about embracing social media aren’t entirely off base. If you trial Workplace and get nothing more from it than a chance to remind your staff to get on with their jobs, that’s still better than souring the working environment with glowering intrusions to check up on what they’re doing online.

It sounds like my employee communications will be running inside someone else’s cloud. What about security and privacy?

At the time of writing, Workplace offers a fairly simple framework providing virtual private meeting places for people who work in different businesses. The idea is to allow discussion of mutual projects without exposing other information and resources.

To be sure, it’s hard to overlook Facebook’s historic habit of eagerly rolling out new features and letting users do the field-testing. But there are good opportunities here. You can create and tear down a collaborative group more or less on a whim. It might exist for only an afternoon; it might also be that it has only one external member, advising a whole internal team (think legal matters, or health and safety). Adapting your mindset beyond the email model is a key part of getting the most from these consumer crossover platforms.

At the end of the day, isn’t this just another online chat system?

Facebook’s communications credentials certainly started with simple chat, but have blossomed to include both audio and video connections. This means you can substitute Workplace for services such as Skype, WhatsApp and dedicated VoIP systems. Yes, there are some notable gaps in the feature set, like the absence of a POTS (analogue phone service) gateway such as Skype Out, or true multi-feed video conferencing for virtual meeting room creation. Still, Facebook brings other advantages – for example, Facebook Live sessions, which are not only streamed but stored for future reference.

What’s more, like it or not, Facebook has tremendous member loyalty. For some people it’s the first place they go in the morning, and the last at night. Harnessing that feel-good factor to foster both collaborative and productive relationships isn’t a silly thing to be doing. If you can get employees to feel more positively about work, you’ve achieved something.

That sounds good, but I’m still concerned about oversight. We have to own our own business-critical systems.

That’s not an issue on Workplace. There are at least two defined classes of super-user, namely administrators, and “IT Teams”. Administrators can define the entire environment, in terms of how existing Facebook accounts are allowed into the Workplace separate playpen, and how the Workplace system handles things such as single sign-on with mature Windows networks. What’s more, Facebook provides one-on-one help for admins, so you can always get a guided support session and ask as many questions as you need. In short, whatever arrangement works for you ought to be attainable.

And how do we handle things such as oversight and legal compliance?

This is where that second group comes in. They’re referred to in terms of IT, but they really act as compliance officers: these are the guys who make sure you’re not breaking any laws or conditions of service, and keeping paper trails as required. Over the years, we’ve seen many collaboration platforms created by brilliant but inexperienced youths, which entirely lack the oversight features a business needs. Consequently, the fact that Workplace by Facebook doesn’t fall into that trap is itself a definite recommendation.

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Hybrid cloud company Colt Data Centres today announced a big push into renewable energy by opting to run its European data centres on power generated from renewable sources.

While the option isn’t available on all of its data centre sites, nine of the company’s 17 European facilities now run exclusively on renewable energy, and Colt plans to make the others renewable when possible – though this isn’t always the case.

In France, for example, the country’s reliance on nuclear power and an energy generation shortfall makes it impossible for any data centre provider to guarantee 100% renewable power, Colt claimed, althought it does hope that planned developments for renewable energy will make up the shortfall by 2023.

“The global technology industry needs to face up to its global responsibilities, not least in the area of energy usage,” said Colt CEO, Detlef Spang. “So far, most ‘green’ regulations are voluntary – such as the European Commission’s voluntary code of conduct for energy efficiency in data centres.”

He added that the firm believes that the cloud and data centre industry has “a moral and ethical duty” to go far beyond the minimum requirements for sustainability, and to deploy techniques and new infrastructure technology that “will have a major and measurable effect on the resources we use”.

This will require a lot of investment, Spang said, but by adopting the latest technologies and best practices, he believes it will be possible to deliver lower lifetime costs for its customers while ensuring “the smallest possible ecological footprint” in its territories where the company operates around the world.

“Colt’s internal design team have embarked on a project to look at all forms of green energy to see how they will best [fit] into data centre designs going forward to ensure we are minimise the impact of Colt data centres to the environment,” he added.

The announcement is part of a wider campaign by Colt to reduce the environmental impact of its worldwide network of data centres, which has also looked to kick off a strong drive internally to reduce CO2 emissions, optimising power usage effectiveness, and adopting new cooling technologies across its facilities to optimise the performance of their data centres.

Dropbox filed for an IPO last week, and while it’s the natural next step for a company dominating the cloud storage space, the filing also revealed a number of risks that could put a whole lot of pressure on the organisation if things go wrong.

By law, IPO filings must detail the risks to a company’s success so investors are able to make a considered investment, knowing all the facts. Dropbox’s filing is no different, and it has highlighted areas the company may struggle with when it goes public.

We’ve rounded up the main risks to Dropbox’s IPO filing and how it could affect the company’s potential to raise the investment it expects to achieve.

Number of Dropbox users and upgrading customers

At the moment, Dropbox has 500 million registered users around the world, but many of these are using the company’s free storage option rather than taking advantage of the extra storage offered in its premium options. In fact, only 11 million customers (2.2%) pay for a Dropbox subscription.

To ensure it can be profitable, Dropbox needs to convince as many of its free-tier customers – or those on a free trial of Dropbox for Business for example – to start paying for the use of its service.

The company must also focus on attracting new users. It explained in the filing that the number of unique users (those that have only registered one account) is a lot lower than its total active users and so its figures may be even more skewed than the initial numbers suggest. This also means there’s likely to be fewer customers it can convert to paying users, because each will only pay for one account.

Revenue vs profit

As a result of its failure to persuade customers on free trials and those making use of the free service to commit to a paid subscription, Dropbox’s revenue growth is slowing. The company explained in the filing that the major reasons its revenues aren’t growing as fast as previous periods include that there’s more competition now than there was previously, less demand for the platform, an overall decline in the content collaboration market and the company’s inability to maxmise growth opportunities. It also noted the business has matured and so saturation is higher than it previously was. 

Profits are also on course to decline as Dropbox invests more to scale its business, including supporting the infrastructure to support its customers and research and development. The company notes that these investments may not directly result in increased revenues or profit, making it likey both will slow, or start to fall.

No outbound salesforce

Dropbox also revealed that it doesn’t have a specific outbound salesforce on the ground hard-selling to businesses or other volume users. It has instead relied upon organic adoption and viral growth rather than actively selling its services to new prospects.

The company does believe it will be able to scale to reach new markets without a large outbound salesforce, but it also accepts that its current word-of-mouth and user referral marketing model may not continue to work as effectively as it has over the last few years.

However, there’s a significant cost and time investment attached to recruiting a specialised sales team, which could adversely affect the company’s profitability in the future.

“Further, adding more sales personnel would change our cost structure and results of operations, and we may have to reduce other expenses in order to accommodate a corresponding increase in sales and marketing expenses,” the company noted.

The filing can be read in full here.

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