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New Integrations for Workplace Announced at F8

May 1, 2018ByJoel Krebs

Today, we're announcing a number of new integrations for Workplace - including many of the world's leading enterprise cloud services - that are designed to make common workflows dramatically easier and simpler.

The integrations launching today have access to a powerful new set of functionality that helps people easily share content from other apps, stay current with what's happening, and simplify common processes.

Share Extensions

Share Extensions let people easily share content from other tools and services with their team on Workplace. Integrations that support Share Extensions appear in the Workplace composer on web and mobile. People can also search across multiple services to quickly and easily find the information they want to share.

Authenticated Previews

Much of the content people share at work may be hosted on other apps or services, with various security settings. Previously, when you shared links to private content on Workplace, we would render a “Content Unavailable” attachment.

Now, when people share links to services that support Authenticated Previews, Workplace will make an API call to the third-party service and only render a rich preview if the user has access to view the content. These new previews are much more engaging, particularly for certain types of content like tasks.

Feeds & Notifications

Workplace quickly becomes the place where people have critical discussions about work. Today's announcements also help people get more work done on Workplace by helping people stay up to date.

New integrations from SurveyMonkey and Marketo publish updates about your team's surveys or campaigns into a group on Workplace. These integrations act as the seed for a conversation between you and your team by providing timely and relevant updates about your campaigns.

We've also heard people use Workplace to share news about what's happening in their company, or across their industry. Starting today, group admins can subscribe to feeds from a range of business publications such as Bloomberg, Reuters, Business Insider, and Harvard Business Review . You can also setup a custom feed from any service that supports RSS or Atom. When new items appear in these feeds, they'll automatically be posted to your group on Workplace, so you quickly get the information you need.

Bots in Workplace Chat

Workplace Chat bots have always been able to have 1:1 conversations with people, but from today, bots can create groups chats, or be added to existing group chats.

This enables several powerful new use cases. For example, a bot can automatically create a group chat thread for an operational issue, and add the relevant people to help manage it. Or you can add a bot to an existing group chat thread so it can post updates to you and your team, for example: every time you make a sale, close a task or ship a diff.

We're also bringing Messenger's Chat Extensions to Workplace Chat. Now Workplace Chat bots that support Chat Extensions will appear in the composer drawer in Workplace Chat. When a user taps the bot's icon, it opens a webview in which you can render an interactive experience that lets people, for example, create tasks, schedule meetings, or fill out forms. People can share a message from your bot back to the chat thread with a single click.

Integrations Directory

To help Workplace customers find and enable these awesome new integrations, we're also announcing the Workplace Integrations Directory. The directory includes integrations from many of the world's leading enterprise cloud services: ServiceNow, ADP, Jira by Atlassian, Box, Dropbox, Microsoft SharePoint, Smartsheet, HubSpot and many more.

All the integrations that are available to enable from the Integrations Directory have been functionally reviewed by the Workplace team, and have passed a rigorous, independent security audit.

Tools for Users and Admins

We believe it's important that people have an understanding about how their information is being shared. As part of today's announcements we're adding two new surfaces that help users and admins do just that.

From today, Workplace Premium admins can go to a new tab in the Admin Panel that shows all the integrations they've enabled in their community, see the permissions each integration has been granted, and download details of the API calls those integrations are making.

Users in Workplace Premium will be able to go to a new section within their account settings which lists all the 3rd party and Custom Integrations that their community admins have enabled within their organization.

Apply Today

If you're a developer who's keen to help people at more than 30,000 organizations simplify their workflows, we'd like to invite you to apply for building integrations for Workplace.

Get started by reading our developer documentation, or to learn more about Workplace, visit our website.

We're looking forward to seeing what happens when more of the tools people use at work, work seamlessly together.