Facebook has announced that it’s moving all their 13,000 employees to Microsoft Office, specifically Office 365 with Exchange Server hosting for mail, calendar and contacts. Facebook will continue with it’s own collaboration systems.
Every week there’s another announcement of an organization switching to Office 365. Office Watch sees them all the time and sometimes more than once for the same organization. We don’t bother our readers with them but the Facebook announcement is a big deal.
Facebook has run Microsoft Office with Exchange Server in-house up to now. Certainly they have the staff and resources to do that. Instead they’ve decided to let Microsoft run the whole show for them from Microsoft’s own servers.
Presumably Facebook was able to get a better deal than the advertised Office 365 Enterprise rates.
While Facebook and Microsoft are talking to each other maybe they’d like to think about their customers and restore the social network connection between Facebook and Outlook. Don’t hold your breath – the executives of both companies are too busy with mutual backslapping to worry about paying customers.
