On Monday, Facebook announced the official launch of Workplace, its enterprise software product that any businesses can now purchase.

The initiative has been a long time coming for the tech giant. Back in November 2014, a small group at Facebook was in the early days of building the first product, Financial Timesrevealed. In January 2015, Facebook released the first beta version.

SEE ALSO:Facebook wants your boss to let you use Facebook

Over the next 18 months, it signed corporate clients from all over the world, including Royal Bank of Scotland, real estate company Coldwell Banker and tech company Hootsuite. By March 2015, it had 450 clients and was signing on one to two more per day, reaching 1,000 at launch.

Mashable spoke with Julien Codorniou, the director of the project (who previously led Facebook's platform partnership team), last month about how the project started, why companies have joined and where he sees the initiative headed. The interview below is lightly edited.

What was the initial purpose of Facebook at Work, or now Workplace?

It’s important to remember that the mission of Workplace is very much aligned with the mission of Facebook. It’s all about connecting people. Either way we spent the first few years of the company connecting people in their personal life. Now we’re coming after a different audience which is the workplace where people spend a lot of time communicating, collaborating and connecting with their colleagues with kind of a different product but still looks familiar to anyone that has used Facebook.

Credit: facebook

We started using it internally a few years ago. You can connect with people that you don’t see everyday but you should be working with. When we started testing Facebook at Work outside of Facebook, some partners wanted to see if it could work in their organizations. It validated that there was a market.

What’s unique is that it’s for everyone in the company.

This is when we decided to package the product to be a team of developers, designers and a growth team to be like a real startup inside Facebook. Since then, we’ve been able to launch one or two companies pretty much everywhere in the world every day. Every time we do that we validate the assumption that the product really works.

Is there an industry or sized business that you are going for?

Surprisingly banking, which is a very conservative and complicated industry, has been one of our main sweet spots. I'm sure you've heard about Royal Bank of Scotland, Norway, India have been using Workplace for months now with a pretty high satisfaction.

What’s unique is that it’s for everyone in the company. We care about people that have never had email before. We care about people who just had a mobile device. Everyone in the company; every employee; every industry; that's what is unique about it.

When we think about KPIs [key performance indicators], we don’t think about number of companies using it. We think about it as the percentage of the country’s working population that is using it.

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What's the benefit of using the service?

If you're one of the guys at Eimskip (the shipping logistics company), if you're one of the guys on the ship all day with just a mobile device, suddenly you seem connected to the company. You know the values of the company, the culture. You can see posts from the CEO. You can actually post photos of what you’re doing.

It can be for people that have not been connected before. When you give everyone a voice, we've noticed that it creates a more connected workplace and a more productive workplace, at every level.

From the services you have, what are companies using?

Live video has been one of the top requests from our companies. It’s important to understand that 95 percent of what we build for Facebook somehow gets integrated. We keep the best. We keep it enterprise friendly. As you know, there’s no ads, there’s no targeting, you cannot play Candy Crush. But things like Facebook Live is key for enterprise. You can stream live to everyone in the company from your mobile phone.

Credit: facebook

And think of everything we're doing in accessibility. We launched a company in the UK called Royal National Institute of the Blind. All the work we’re doing with accessibility and AI is integrated.

It’s important to understand that 95 percent of what we build for Facebook somehow gets integrated.

Translation is also very popular on Facebook. We cover more than 100 languages. If you post something in English, I will see it in French automatically. Talk about connecting people who don’t know each other, who don’t work in the same office, who don’t know the same language. That’s something that makes a lot of sense.

What about security? What did you have to build to make sure it's secure?

We didn’t really have to build anything new, but we had to go through the typical industry evaluations. We had to open our books and show how we operate security.

As every chief information officer knows, Facebook Inc. is invested in security. We're more than happy to work with our client to show how we build data centers, how we sell data.

How much time does it take to onboard a client?

When you have 80 percent of the company that is in a field with a mobile device because it’s not just another piece of productivity software, it's really changing the culture of the company. That’s what takes training and preparation. That’s why we have a global team in Singapore, India and Menlo Park.

With the product itself, if you know how to use Facebook, you know how to use Workplace.

What are you focused on right now, for the rest of the year, and in the coming years?

We want to build a SaaS business inside Facebook. We want to do with the humility of a company that just started in SaaS but also with the confidence of knowing we have engineers that now how to build software that people use and people love to use. This is why people come back to Facebook every day.

We are focusing right now on adoption, engagement, retention, and satisfaction. This is why we've been in beta since we started. We keep testing the product in different scenarios, especially in countries where you have different bandwidth connections, where most of the employees use mobile phones.

If I use the service, will I still have to keep my email address?

A lot of companies in that space want to kill email. That’s the main tagline. That’s not what we want to do. We want to change the way companies are run and how people work with each other.

TopicsFacebook