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Lana O'Brien's avatar
Lana O'Brien
Former Employee
Jul 12, 2016

Why Facebook is betting on Office 365 and the Microsoft Cloud

Today’s post was written by Tim Campos, CIO of Facebook. At Facebook, our mission is clear. Give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected. Over 13,000 Facebook employe...
office 365
Morten Myrstad's avatar
Morten Myrstad
Iron Contributor
Jul 17, 2016

The really interesting question here is: Will we going forward see more businesses “pick, choose and combine” their own version of a business cloud suite? Consisting of modules from different vendors like Microsoft, Facebook, Slack, Google, Salesforce, IBM, SAP, Box, Dropbox etc.?

 

Maybe Facebook shows the way for other businesses? At least it seems like Facebook is combining cloud tools for their own purposes.

 

The modules that Facebook will be using from Office 365 are Mail, Calendar and Delve (Office Graph).

 

On the other hand they have their own social network (Facebook at Work, which can be compared to Yammer) and their own video, audio and chat tools (Facebook Messenger, which can be compared to Skype).

 

Probably they will not use Office docs, but instead continue to use Quip, a Doc and Spreadsheet tool with integrated Chats, co-developed by a former Facebook CTO.

 

What about file storage and document libraries then? I don´t know about Facebook´s internal file storage solutions, but in their own business offerings I think they will have APIs that can connect "Facebook at Work" both with Box, Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive and other file storage solutions. Sort of a Slack strategy.

 

What does this kind of development mean for Microsoft then? In my book: An open mind and open solutions towards "frenemies", but in parallell working hard to make them redundant.

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