HardOCP News
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Facebook at Work Launches So You Can Never Not Be on Facebook
- Thread starter HardOCP News
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This guy needs to kill himself.
I can see what they're trying to do with the service, but your company would have to have the most ancient, disorganized Intranet ever for it to be worthwhile.
jtm55
Gawd
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Hi All
As I don't have a Facebook account I don't understand the draw it has on a lot of folk.
As I don't have a Facebook account I don't understand the draw it has on a lot of folk.
do you enjoy pictures of food that your friends have recently posted? maybe pictures of all their kids you don't care about? would you like to read the latest racist and politically misinformed post from your distant relative?
then sign up for facebook today!
Gigus Fire
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I dunno about this app, but at least where i work they've had the "bright" idea of using facebook as a marketing tool and posting videos to it. Sometimes to see what new crazy ideas marketing came up with, we're directed to facebook. That's practically the only reason why it's not blocked at work. If it was blocked, nothing of value would be lost.
kbrickley
Supreme [H]ardness
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Facebook, like any aspect of the internet, is what you make of it ... if you have a circle of remote friends or acquaintances then Facebook can be a convenient way to stay in limited touch with those circles without using much more intrusive methods of maintaining contact (email, phone, etc) ... it all comes down to preferences and how you utilize the internet
Besides, all those cat videos aren't going to watch themselves so Facebook helps you maximize your cat video content
rudy
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Facebook can easily be a work tool a lot of people will often use an odd tool for a job simply because they are familiar with it. Much like how some people will use powerpoint to make posters, or even MS word to do drawings.
Facebook does all of the basic functions a work need, you can schedule events, chat with people make groups and post information etc... All facebook really is, is a forum. Granted its a very poorly designed one but it is one.
If nothing else facebook wants to make sure they have enough of a product that another competitor does not spring up and make its way into the social media scene through enterprise. You could easily imagine something like lync or google plus using enterprise to gain huge inroads against facebook.
Facebook does all of the basic functions a work need, you can schedule events, chat with people make groups and post information etc... All facebook really is, is a forum. Granted its a very poorly designed one but it is one.
If nothing else facebook wants to make sure they have enough of a product that another competitor does not spring up and make its way into the social media scene through enterprise. You could easily imagine something like lync or google plus using enterprise to gain huge inroads against facebook.
StoleMyOwnCar
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I don't think I even have a Facebook. Am I the only one? Screw social networking sites. I have a linked in but since I got a job at my college's career fair the profile has just been sitting stale. Don't even have a picture up.
Does Facebook help me remove virus's from the computers of people who click on stupid attachments?
Does Facebook help me diagnose a flakey exchange server problem?
Does Facebook help me setup a new user in Active directory or reimage a laptop?
Does Facebook help me punch down a new phone extension?
Does Facebook help me figure out why the SQL server is running slow?
As for chatting with people, I waste enough time at work doing that already. As for posting information, if it's that important I'll send out an email.
Looks like there is NOTHING I would ever need Facebook for in my work.
Red Falcon
[H]ard DCOTM December 2023
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QFT
dandragonrage
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No, he doesn't. Anyone willing to invest time and/or money into stupid ideas like this deserve to lose that money.
But yeah, the idea is ridiculously bad.
I wanted to come here to point that line out also. I can't think of a single thing that facebook is going to help with that nothing else can. Video editing, nope. Audio editing, nope, Office documents collaboration, nope. image editing, nope. Web site design, nope. IM yes but no different than any other IM. actually more limited as I don't think you can go group im in faceback. emailing people, nope (you can message them but that isn't as useful as email). if you can get by with only using facebook all day and not touching another program or site, sounds like you are wasting too much time and should just be fired.
aShrubbery!
[H]ard|Gawd
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I heard on the radio quite a while back, that even e-mail can be disruptive in productivity, because of the urge/need to check business e-mail that are work related.
Now, with Facebook at work what do you think will happen? Already, there is plenty of this crap at work anyway with people checking their smartphones constantly.
And to add an OT rant. There is one type of legislation that would welcome with open arms; stiff fines for people driving and checking - NOT talking - their smartphones. I myself spend a time online, but really? Do people have to do this kind of crap while driving???
Now, with Facebook at work what do you think will happen? Already, there is plenty of this crap at work anyway with people checking their smartphones constantly.
And to add an OT rant. There is one type of legislation that would welcome with open arms; stiff fines for people driving and checking - NOT talking - their smartphones. I myself spend a time online, but really? Do people have to do this kind of crap while driving???
Sometime I'm shocked at how un-tech savvy some people in a tech forum are Then again, I may simply be mistaking sarcasm
So, as much as I hate Facebook and really thing this new application stinks - there is actually a niche for it. There are in fact several players in this space, I think someone mentioned Jive, there is also Yammer, and some smaller players or wanna be players like Slack.
The idea is that you have a platform with a closed membership that is used for group communications, storage and easy access to resources (such as documents or presentations), and things like announcements or events by your company. This isn't meant to replace Email or things like Sharepoint, but to augment them - give people easy access to common things (almost like a wiki, in a way). Whether this concept works in practice is hard to say - I suspect for some companies there is value, but for others its a 'ghost-town' as they would describe.
'Facebook at Work' is not Facebook, at work. At least in what the application's goal is. Their platform may be so tuned to the internet social, that it is purely useless in a professional setting to do all of those other -- you know, productive things.
That being said - I'm thinking that Facebook's main disadvantage here is going to be that it is a hosted application - and not in the same way as a compartmentalized cloud service (e.g. Amazon or MS Azure). Does your company want to share ALL of this data with Facebook? sure go ahead and see how that works out. The only way any of these 'social' platforms can possibly work for company privacy and data security is if they are deployed onsite, or secured in a reputable compartmentalized cloud service.
Then again, I may simply be mistaking sarcasm So, as much as I hate Facebook and really thing this new application stinks - there is actually a niche for it. There are in fact several players in this space, I think someone mentioned Jive, there is also Yammer, and some smaller players or wanna be players like Slack.
The idea is that you have a platform with a closed membership that is used for group communications, storage and easy access to resources (such as documents or presentations), and things like announcements or events by your company. This isn't meant to replace Email or things like Sharepoint, but to augment them - give people easy access to common things (almost like a wiki, in a way). Whether this concept works in practice is hard to say - I suspect for some companies there is value, but for others its a 'ghost-town' as they would describe.
'Facebook at Work' is not Facebook, at work. At least in what the application's goal is. Their platform may be so tuned to the internet social, that it is purely useless in a professional setting to do all of those other -- you know, productive things.
That being said - I'm thinking that Facebook's main disadvantage here is going to be that it is a hosted application - and not in the same way as a compartmentalized cloud service (e.g. Amazon or MS Azure). Does your company want to share ALL of this data with Facebook? sure go ahead and see how that works out. The only way any of these 'social' platforms can possibly work for company privacy and data security is if they are deployed onsite, or secured in a reputable compartmentalized cloud service.
rudy
[H]F Junkie
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I am not sure I understand, you think that facebook is an IT suite? Never did I say that. your IT problems are not problems or functions most of the work force needs to address. That is as senseless as claiming facebook is useless because you cannot edit PDFs, make spreadsheets, or do photo editing for advertising or even flipping the argument around and saying adobe photoshop is worthless because it doesn't do instant messaging. Facebook is most likely trying to carve out a space in communication and organization. Not become your antivirus.
If you consider how dumb most employees are on a computer the way it can help you out is to make a part of your business organizations something you have to train far less people on. If 80% of your workforce already knows how to use facebook and does it daily then you don't have to train them as much on lync, outlook, etc..... I am not saying it will work this way in practice for a large enterprise but I won't be one bit surprised at all if a lot of small to medium sized businesses start to adopt this infrastructure. This comes from a person who really doesn't use facebook for anything except getting a coupon once every 6 months. But I know lots of people try to force me to use it to organize events, setup meetings, form groups etc..... And I see enough people trying to force facebook to function as something it is clearly not that I see huge potential in this taking off due to familiarity.
Sometime I'm shocked at how un-tech savvy some people in a tech forum are
So, as much as I hate Facebook and really thing this new application stinks - there is actually a niche for it. There are in fact several players in this space, I think someone mentioned Jive, there is also Yammer, and some smaller players or wanna be players like Slack.
The idea is that you have a platform with a closed membership that is used for group communications, storage and easy access to resources (such as documents or presentations), and things like announcements or events by your company. This isn't meant to replace Email or things like Sharepoint, but to augment them - give people easy access to common things (almost like a wiki, in a way). Whether this concept works in practice is hard to say - I suspect for some companies there is value, but for others its a 'ghost-town' as they would describe.
'Facebook at Work' is not Facebook, at work. At least in what the application's goal is. Their platform may be so tuned to the internet social, that it is purely useless in a professional setting to do all of those other -- you know, productive things.
That being said - I'm thinking that Facebook's main disadvantage here is going to be that it is a hosted application - and not in the same way as a compartmentalized cloud service (e.g. Amazon or MS Azure). Does your company want to share ALL of this data with Facebook? sure go ahead and see how that works out. The only way any of these 'social' platforms can possibly work for company privacy and data security is if they are deployed onsite, or secured in a reputable compartmentalized cloud service.
There is a niche for Facebook in certain types of business trees. However the enterprise environment or rather the company portal they are going at here isn't it. Those things are always worthless in practice. Sooner rather than later employees always find the direct links to the resources they need and abandon the usually terribly laid out portal. The only ones who I ever see using those things are HR and marketing in their continual effort to convince everyone else how amazing it is. Meanwhile the rest of us have actual jobs to do.
I don't disagree that in practice a deployment of these portals is generally useless - but I think that the portal's main enemy is entrenchment of business process and workers' reluctance to use something different than they are used to.
Just follow this thought for a moment - let's say you setup a portal to help orient your company workforce with the organizational structure of the company with the goal of providing common content, such as handbooks, procedure manuals, training schedules, upcoming events, announcements related to management or leadership, or even just simple things like holiday schedules. This actually sounds pretty great in theory because as a new employee (or an existing one) you can go to one place to search for this content and not have to maybe call the HR department to find out where they store forms, or find out what share those forms are on, or call IT Support to give you access to said shares. You maybe not spent less than 5 minutes tracking something down rather than potentially hours, or waiting even days for tickets or other departments to get back to you. Its a degree of self-service.
The challenge is getting the content up on this portal. This is typically where these deployments fail because they start out very narrow and until all of the organization's various departments actually publish their content there - yeah... you still have to go about getting those resources the old tried and true way. So its also a massive shift in adoption of a new business process for content publishing and storage. Its something that I think at best can become useful over time - and that goal should be realistically measured. Don't look at changes 6 months or 1 year after implementing these platforms, that data is skewed. Try 2-3 years and you may have something to show.