What's new in Workplace?
June 2020

New video features

As companies around the world move to working remotely to reduce the threat of COVID-19, the need for enhanced tools to keep employees connected even when they are apart has become more pronounced than ever. Building on our strength of helping companies build culture and get work done, we're doubling down on our commitment to video presence with new features that accelerate our vision for the future of work. Improvements to video will be launching throughout the month of June and include:

• Workplace Rooms: Workplace Rooms is a virtual meeting space with unlimited meeting time that makes it easier than ever to connect and share your work with up to 50 people – even if they're not in your company or don't have a Workplace account.
• New live features:
  • Live Producer: Stream reliable, high-quality live video straight from your computer, and access new features such as screen-sharing, Q&As, polls and real-time health metrics.
  • Live Q&As: 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 and caption editing: auto-generated translations help you make your live broadcasts more accessible, while in-line editing ensures that captions are not only correct but aligned with the video timing.
• New Workplace on Portal features:
  • Workplace live on Portal: Gives Workplace users a professional broadcast experience by using Portal's Smart Camera and Smart Sound to engage with their colleagues.
  • Workplace Rooms on Portal: Invite up to 50 people on a group call with the ability to add custom backgrounds during video calls, soon.

Go to our blog to read more about upcoming video improvements, and visit the Customer Resource Centre to learn more about using Workplace Rooms and improvements to live video.

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Show your care with a new reaction

The new Facebook care reaction – an emoji hugging a heart – is now available on Workplace to help colleagues show care and support when responding to a post, message, photo or video.

Personalise your profile with frames

Showcase your support by adding an "Apart together" frame to your existing profile picture, or signal the balance you need to strike with a "Work from home parent" frame. Each has been created to help colleagues better understand each other during this difficult time. Profile frames are available in 13 languages. If you're an admin and would prefer not to launch the profile frames to your Workplace, you can disable them by contacting Workplace support. Take a look at the Help Centre article about profile frames for more details.

Move faster with predictive text suggestions

To give you an extra edge of productivity, we added predictive text suggestions on posts and comments so you can respond more quickly and save time. Predictive text suggestions generate recommendations as you type, allowing you to write posts and respond faster on Workplace. Everyone can turn this feature on and off in their language settings.

Highlight important chat messages

Pinned messages let you keep important chat messages top of mind while the conversation continues. You can now select a message to pin to the top of a chat just like you can pin a post to the top of a group. And as a bonus improvement, larger files up to 75 MB can now be sent via chat as well.

Sync chat with multi-company groups

Work often involves connecting with partners, vendors, suppliers or agencies outside of your organisation. We've made this simpler to do with synced chats on multi-company groups. Now when you create a multi-company group, you will have the option to enable a chat too. The chat and group will be synced so you can move between posts and chat with ease.

Stay informed about issues affecting Workplace

You can now stay informed about issues affecting Workplace without visiting the Workplace Status page. Just open the Contact support tab in the Admin Panel to see the current status. Or, to receive automatic updates, subscribe to the Workplace Status RSS feed or set up live status updates in any chosen group by adding the "Workplace Status" integration. When an issue appears or gets resolved on the Workplace Status page, it will appear in the group and members will get push and email notifications. Follow these steps to set up the integration on your group.

Hide reported posts during review

We've improved our reported content tools, allowing admins to temporarily hide reported posts and comments while they go through review. We are introducing this new enforcement option for admins and content moderators in the reported content review panel. When you hide a post or comment, it will not be visible to anyone except the author and the admin while the post is being reviewed.

Expand the reach of your surveys

Surveys help you track the pulse of your organisation. We've added new ways to share your survey so you can ask questions and collect feedback faster and more easily. You can now send surveys through a link, email notification or Workplace Chat.

Extending the power of video rights management

Video right management (VRM) provides additional control and protection on videos that are uploaded onto your Workplace, so only people on supported browsers can watch them. In January, we made this useful tool available on Firefox, Chrome, Edge Chromium and mobile apps. And now VRM is available on Safari.

Export members of a group

To help you manage your groups and organise events, Workplace admins with group management permission can now export group members. This has been a longstanding ask from our customers and we are delighted to make this available to you. From the Workplace Admin Panel, select "Export members" from a group. You will receive an email with a CSV containing the group membership details.