One of the biggest technology takeaways of the last couple of months has been that organizations need confident, wide-ranging digital strategies to stay afloat, and Facebook — in its wider bid to build products to serve businesses — is taking note. In the same week that the social network doubled down on business tools for small and medium enterprises with
Shops, it is also sharpening its focus on larger enterprises and how they might use its platform.
Today, Facebook announced a number of new products coming to Workplace, its enterprise-focused chat and video platform, including Workplace versions of Rooms (its
Houseparty video drop-in clone), Work Groups (a feature it launched on Facebook itself
last October to create informal Groups for co-workers), more tools to make video conversations more interactive, and enhanced tools for its Portal video hardware.
Alongside all that, Facebook also announced the general availability of Oculus for Business, an enterprise-focused version of its virtual-reality headset and platform that plays on how spatial computing is starting to get adopted in a business setting, particularly in training and collaboration projects. It said that there are now more than 400 independent software vendors contributing products to the effort.