Facebook has agreed a deal with Microsoft that will see its 13,000 employees migrate some of their day-to-day activities to Office 365, with the goal of increasing productivity and flexibility across the organisation.
The announcement was made at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference, which took place in Toronto last month. At the event, Facebook CIO Tim Campos said Satya Nadella’s firm had “got cool again,” before explaining why he thinks the cloud-based productivity suite is a good fit for his company.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Facebook’s team will be using the email and calendar features in Office 365, but won’t have access to Yammer or Skype for Business – both of which compete with its own core services.
Office 365 provides flexibility across multiple devices
In a blog post published after the event, Campos discussed the reasoning in more detail, saying: “Our IT has to be flexible and available over the web, on mobile and across platforms – wherever our employees need it. Enabling this mobility requires a secure environment that defends against cyber-attacks and protects mobile devices.
Campos stated: “[Office 365] 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.”
Facebook is in no way the first big organisation to harness the power of Office 365. Companies across the world are making use of its features and capabilities, which include support for a range of devices, automatic security updates and data backup. The software is also known for allowing users to collaborate, with the ability to share data and documents across computers and locations easily.
A recent study by login management software-maker Okta found Office 365 to be the most popular web-based business app on the market, ahead of Salesforce, Amazon Web Services and Google Apps. Microsoft also claimed in 2014 that the platform was the “fastest growing business in [its] history.”
