On November 10, 2021, Microsoft Teams and Meta Workplace officially announced their collaboration, where all Microsoft Teams users can now access Meta’s Workplace social network without switching screens anymore.

The new integrations enabled 

Workplace apps for Teams can be pinned to the Teams side navigation bar or added as a tab to provide access to the Workplace newsfeed within the app. Workplace content can be marked as “important” by Team admins to draw users’ attention to certain information.
In addition to, Individual users will also be able to pull content from a Workplace group into a Teams channel to highlight to colleagues, as well as react to Workplace posts directly from Teams.

The integration can let the user view a Team’s video call from Workplace and comment in real-time. It will be able to monitor engagement and reactions in both Workplace and Teams simultaneously.

Though Meta and Microsoft compete in many ways, the move to integrate is an acknowledgement that many users can now rely on a range of tools to support employee collaboration.

The integrations should be of particular benefit to Workplace customers who see the app as their central employee communications solution but use Teams for day-to-day productivity. This is common in large organizations where communications and HR teams rely on Workplace, while IT is responsible for Teams as a collaboration and productivity platform, Angela Ashenden, principal analyst a CCS Insight said. Further Ashenden added, Meta helps push information from Workplace to users where they tend to spend most of their time. On the other hand, Workplace can still reach its employees, allowing HR retain control over communications and employee engagements platform strategy.

Ashenden noted, however, that while the integrations help connect the two platforms, users of both Teams and Workplace still face challenges-particularly due to the overlap between their respective chat functions, Teams Chat and Workplace Chat, which can create confusion for employees.