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Get Social with RoboMQ and Facebook at Work

Posted on October 12, 2016

When you need to send a message to a colleague, what’s your preferred mode of communication? Do you send an email, pick up the phone, or type an instant message? Do you wish you could quickly and effectively communicate the thoughts and ideas without the formality of the email and the intrusive nature of making a phone call and interrupting your colleague’s busy day?

Studies say that age diversity results in discrepancies with the various facets through which employees connect and correspond with one another. These differences present a challenge for businesses seeking to implement advances in communication methods while still extracting value from the knowledge-sharing activities of employees from all age groups and with varying levels of technical proficiency. Now, major companies are searching for common alternatives for their employees to communicate faster and more productively with one another.

The best solution for this communication issue may be enterprise social networking. Even though it has been around for several years, many organizations are still facing issues with its adoption. Workers are more productive and adaptive when they use tools that allow them to apply the same skills and literacies across digital work and social life.

The question is why an application like Facebook can’t be used in the enterprise setting to create a work social network. Facebook is a well known social media networking site that is widely used by many generations to connect and communicate with friends, family, and interest groups as well as share photos and videos. Facebook has several applications outside of its most popular news feed, such as Messenger (for chat/VOIP/video calls), Instagram (photos and videos), Paper (displaying news/content) and Events (calendar), all of which could provide the foundation for a useful business platform. Since people are already familiar with these services, employers can save both time and money by not requiring the training necessary for a new tool.

The good news is that Facebook launched the business version of its social networking service, Facebook at Work, as of January, 2016. With a Facebook at Work account, you can use the familiar Facebook tools to interact with your coworkers. You can join different groups and be connected with the activities at your workplace as well as make groups to discuss business proposals, participate in videoconferences, share documents and pictures, make valuable connections and build your professional network .

Facebook at Work had been in beta since the beginning of the year and on October 10th, 2016, just recently, has been launched as a generally available product with the new name “Workplace by Facebook”. Check out their announcement here.

Companies can now use “Workplace by Facebook” in many ways, including the following:

Employee onboarding communication
Alumni and retiree networks
Wellness programs
Corporate communications (such as town halls, polls, surveys, etc.)
Community outreach (voluntary employee groups that do social good locally)
Employee engagement
Communities specific to roles and work practices
External activities with business partners and contractors – potentially customers down the road
Motivational and team building activities

However, to make Workplace by Facebook work, it needs to be integrated with your company’s existing systems for granting access, managing roles and making sure the right folks have access to such a powerful tool. This is where RoboMQ can help.

RoboMQ is a leading SaaS, Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), and IoT integration platform that provides protocol-agnostic integration capabilities that are built for the world of Cloud and SaaS. It offers Hybrid Messaging Cloud and Microservices-based integration, and it certainly provides the integration solution for Workplace by Facebook .

Why RoboMQ?

RoboMQ has a suite of adapters and connectors, such as “ThingsConnect”, which provides protocol-agnostic integration. Using RoboMQ, developers can use their choice of protocol or programming language. This eliminates any learning curve there may be.
Microservices based architecture allows you to build integration with Workplace by Facebook or any other application in a modular, expandable and highly scalable fashion.
RoboMQ is built on a leading industry standard integration protocol (AMQP) providing the benefits of Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) like guaranteed delivery and complex routing for your business workflows.
You can integrate Workplace by Facebook with a simple drag and drop of the Microservice nodes in RoboMQ’s Integration Flow Designer.

Let’s look at a common example of an employee experience with Workplace by Facebook:

When a new employee joins a company, their identity and account should be created in Workplace by Facebook along with other enterprise applications such as Active Directory, WorkDay, etc.
Once their account is created, the employee will receive an email from Workplace by Facebook telling them to activate and start using the account.
Now, whenever this employee experiences life events such as promotions, transfers, or long leaves and terminations, Workplace by Facebook will reflect the updates. In the case of a termination, the employee’s account must be deactivated and/or removed from Workplace by Facebook.

The processes outlined above could be easily automated with RoboMQ’s Integration Solution for Workplace by Facebook. With RoboMQ, employee data could be received in any form, format or structure. RoboMQ’s army of Microservices, adapters, and connectors take care of data transformation and validations while also communicating with Workplace by Facebook APIs to create and/or update the account for the employee.

Without RoboMQ’s workflow automation, these actions would otherwise be time consuming resulting in costly manual chores that are prone to error.

The integration solution for Workplace by Facebook would also provide automation for regular Facebook activities such as publishing posts or images, searching for items of interest, updating and/or deleting posts, and acquiring analytics about how many likes or comments there are on a particular post and/or image. RoboMQ can collect this information and insert it into any database or analytics engine. From this information, the company can analyze this data to improve its marketing and employee engagement strategy.

Now you know how RoboMQ could provide flexible and scalable integration solutions to automate the user account management and analytics integration for Workplace by Facebook. This will allow employees to better communicate and collaborate with his or her entire organization through a familiar and popular tool. It can also automate organizational communications and analytics for the management, HR and marketing departments.

So what are you waiting for? Check out more information about RoboMQ’s Workplace by Facebook Integration and other RoboMQ products and use cases at https://www.robomq.io or email us with any questions at sales@www.robomq.io.

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