Facebook has inked a deal with Microsoft to roll out Office 365 web-based email and calendar services to its 13,000 employees. Internally, employees rely on the social network's Facebook at Work service to collaborate, but it does not have an email (or calendar) component. Facebook will also leverage Office's Delve feature to easily find relevant information within documents.
From The Wall Street Journal:
On Tuesday, Facebook will announce plans to use Microsoft's Office 365, the web-based version of the software giant's suite of workplace productivity programs. Facebook previously used the on-premises versions.The social network's 13,000 employees will tap some portions of Office 365, including its email and calendar. But they won't have access to Yammer, Microsoft's workplace social network, or Skype for Business, for messaging and videoconferencing, which directly compete with Facebook's own services.
In explaining why Facebook made this move, Chief Information Office Tim Campos cited security and platform flexibility in a guest post on Microsoft's Office 365 blog:
This is why we've implemented Office 365. Not only is it a mature and comprehensive platform, it meets our stringent security standards, it complements how we work with intelligence, flexibility, and it is continually evolving. It is globally deployed, accessible on every mobile platform we support, and it is secure. Most of all, it enables our productivity with powerful new capabilities for employees, such as the ability to share and edit traditional Excel documents at the same time, across devices.
Interested in Office 365? You can get started with for as low as $6.99 a month (or $69.99 yearly), which gives you access to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Publisher, Access, and 1TB of OneDrive cloud storage.
