Meta and Microsoft announce partnership to combine Office and Groups

Meta, the corporate previously generally known as Fb, on Wednesday introduced a partnership with Microsoft that may enable prospects to combine Meta’s Office enterprise social community software program with Microsoft Groups.

The combination offers prospects entry to Office content material contained in the Groups app. Likewise, customers can view Groups video conferences within the Office app.

The partnership between Meta and Microsoft brings collectively two rivals that compete within the enterprise communication software program market. Office and Groups, nonetheless, do not need full overlap. Whereas Office is concentrated on broad, companywide connections, Groups is concentrated on instantaneous communication between employees and their direct colleagues.

This integration had been requested by prospects together with Vodafone and Accenture, Meta’s head of Office, Ujjwal Singh, advised CNBC.

“The best way our prospects find yourself utilizing it’s prospects use the complementary options, not the competing options,” Singh mentioned. “There are prospects which can be simply Office retailers, after which there are prospects which can be simply Groups retailers. That is actually for these prospects that use each.”

The partnership might show most useful to Meta. Its Office service drastically lags behind its opponents when it comes to customers.

Office introduced in Might it hit 7 million paid subscribers. Microsoft in July introduced that its Groups product now has 250 million month-to-month energetic customers. Salesforce-owned Slack not breaks out consumer figures, however the firm mentioned it had 12 million day by day energetic customers in September 2019, the final time it reported that statistic. Slack’s variety of paying prospects elevated almost 39% 12 months over 12 months in June 2021 to 169,000.

Along with Groups, Microsoft additionally presents Yammer, enterprise social community software program that competes extra immediately with Meta’s Office service. In August, Microsoft mentioned that Yammer’s utilization had doubled 12 months over 12 months, with “tens of hundreds of thousands of month-to-month energetic customers.”

Though Office has integrations with Microsoft’s Workplace 365, SharePoint, Azure Lively Listing, OneDrive and now Groups, there isn’t a integration with Yammer, Singh mentioned.

“I might say we’re greatest at school round group, connection, folks first and serving all staff,” Singh mentioned. “Groups is arguably greatest at school round productiveness, so that is actually two best-in-class merchandise coming collectively to resolve an employee-experience drawback.”

 — CNBC’s Jordan Novet contributed to this report.