While organisations grapple with what their new ways of working will look like, one thing is for certain, flexibility will be key and video will continue to play a huge role in how people connect. That’s why we’re so incredibly excited by Workplace’s newest features, that have been designed to make video collaboration better than ever.
Announced today, the features will be available in May and June. Check out the full announcement from Facebook here. And, a more detailed run through of each of the features, here.
Enablo’s CEO Daragh McGrath gives us his perspective on why these features are so significant.
Get a room
I’m beyond excited about today’s announcement from Facebook around major enhancements to their Workplace Video offerings.
When I met with Mark Zuckerberg two years ago – I asked him where does he see Facebook going on their journey into providing solutions for enterprise collaboration. He told me that in his view, the most broken enterprise collaboration platform was video conferencing.
In Mark’s words:
“When you look at how video calling works in work for most organizations, it is not a frictionless experience. Most meetings start several minutes late because of technical difficulties, video quality is not awesome and the whole experience is underwhelming, yet many of us spend several hours per day on video conferences.
“However, in our personal lives, we make infrequent video calls to friends and family, but regardless of whether you use Messenger or WhatsApp or FaceTime, the experience is frictionless and beautiful.
“It is beholden on Facebook to solve this problem for work.”
This conversation, and in particular the last sentence, has never left me.
Good things come to those who wait
Given the work that we do here at – empowering people to do their best work, together – I have stopped on several occasions to consider partnering with one of the many video conferencing platforms out there to have in our toolkit alongside Workplace. However, I knew that Facebook was solving this problem and I knew that, when they solved it, the experience would be seamless, easy to use, intuitive and engaging.
Today’s release of a suite of video solutions and enhancements for Workplace vindicates my decision to wait for Facebook to enter this space.
- Workplace Rooms is a virtual meeting space based on the recently released Messenger Rooms (for consumers), allowing up to 50 people to connect in a spontaneous or persistent room.
- Live Producer allows you to stream reliable, high-quality live video and include features such as Q&A’s, polls and real-time health metrics.
- Live Q&A allows leaders to engage with their audience by crowdsourcing questions during live events such as town halls and Ask Me Anything sessions
- Live captions, translations & caption editing provides multiple language translation for live broadcasts as well as the ability for those with hearing disabilities to follow along.
- And finally, being able to use all of these on Portal is one of the most exciting elements of this – the quality of Portal’s camera and audio, at the price point that Portal is available at, is a game changer. Add to this, Mark mentioned today that there’s work happening with other video conferencing providers to provide interoperability of their solutions on Portal, which means that for most of us, the video conferencing experience at home is going to be even better than anything that we have experienced in the office.
Read Daragh’s article on LinkedIn and be part of the conversation by posting a comment or question!
If you’ve been considering Workplace, there’s never been a better time to jump on board. We’d love to help you make this a reality! Please get in touch.
