Why Facebook is betting on Office 365 and the Microsoft Cloud

[Lana O'Brien]

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 employees wake up committed to making this mission a reality for the more than 1 billion people who use Facebook every day.

Our mission is enabled by our company culture and together, they shape how we work together. The IT organization at Facebook is focused on having the most productive workforce possible and the foundation for Facebook’s continual innovation is our ethic of collaboration that empowers everyone to bring their best ideas to the table. To enable our productivity, IT at Facebook provides our people with the best tools available. Tools that can mean the difference between just having an idea and bringing that idea to life. Read more on Office Blogs. 

[#2]

Seeing that Facebook has used on-premises Exchange for their email service up to now, it's not at all surprising that they should embrace Office 365. What is interesting is the potential impact on their Facebook @Work service. My view on the keynote is at https://www.itunity.com/article/facebook-loves-office-365-news-wpc-keynote-3466

[#3]

A very nice read, thank you, Tony.

[#4]

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.

[#5]

@Morten, you make some interesting points. I think we are still at a somewhat immature stage yet before we could contemplate the free exchange of services between different cloud providers in such a way that a company could mix and match to create their own version of what something like Office 365 should be. Figuring out how people are charged for such services and how the different providers receive payment is one obvious issue. Authentication is probably another, as are permissions and sharing. All problems that can be solved, but only if all of the providers buy into a common vision.