Facebook wants to handle your workplace chats

Facebook wants to handle your workplace chats

Your office may try to keep you off Facebook right now, but you may have a genuinely work-related reason to hop on that social network in the near future. Sources for the Financial Times understand that the internet giant is developing "Facebook at Work," a professional take on its familiar formula. It'll reportedly look like the regular page, but will focus on chatting with coworkers, connecting with business partners and collaborating on documents. On the surface, it sounds like a cross between Facebook, LinkedIn and Google Drive.

The company isn't commenting on the apparent leak, but you might not have to wait long to try it out. Facebook employees have reportedly been using the work-focused site for a while, and a handful of outside companies are now giving it a try. There's no telling whether or not the service will displace the likes of LinkedIn, assuming the leak is accurate to begin with. Nonetheless, it's easy to see the appeal of a work-safe Facebook that omits all the iffy photos and status updates that you'd rather not share with your colleagues.

Original Article at www.engadget.com

Introducing Skype for Business

Introducing Skype for Business

Yesterday we kicked off a global conversation about how Microsoft is reinventing productivity—across the board—to create a world where people can truly make the most of their time and lead more fulfilling lives. Connecting people across all of life’s moments – to talk, to share, to collaborate – is at the heart of helping people make the most of every moment. To that end, and for our business customers, we are bringing together the familiar experience and user love of Skype with the enterprise security, compliance, and control from Lync to create the most loved and trusted communications platform for doing things together.

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Original Article at www.skype.com

Facebook's anonymous Rooms is a chat app that feels like the old days

Facebook's anonymous Rooms is a chat app that feels like the old days

Facebook's new Rooms app is weird, and it isn't long after installation that you figure out why. You don't log in with your Facebook credentials. Your profile picture appears nowhere. It doesn't tap into your contacts. If Rooms' iOS-only App Store listing didn't proudly proclaim it was a Facebook product, you'd almost certainly never know it was brewed within the social giant's cavernous confines. Seems a little off-kilter for a chat app, especially one with this pedigree. Instead, it just lets you create those eponymous Rooms -- they're like those AOL chatrooms of yore, dedicated to any topic (or no topic at all) and augmented with the the ability to moderate posts like a power-tripping VIP on a forum. When it's spelled out like that, doesn't it all sound just delightfully anachronistic?

Facebook's Josh Miller (who previously work on Branch before FB bought it) cops to a certain level of historical inspiration -- he says the company's Creative Labs team wanted to meld the "ethos of these early web communities and the capabilities of modern smartphones". Naturally though, those Rooms don't look like the places we hung out online in 1998 -- they're bright, colorful, near-endlessly customizable. Users can pin especially good content for all to see, or tweak member permissions to control who gets access to what. And, most importantly of all, your real name doesn't come anywhere near Rooms... unless you want it to, anyway. Every time you enter or create a room, you're prompted to come up with a nom de plume -- when your Rooms are small and insular enough, chances are most people will be able to suss out who the others are. But when a Room gets big (by way of a neat image-based invite system)? Like, say, Noms From Above, which sports 479 people sharing pictures of food? You just might be glad for that anonymity. After years of insisting that people should stick to using their real names, Facebook has finally conceded that yes, there's value in getting to choose who you want to be in a given situation.

Original Article at www.engadget.com