• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, November 10, 2021

Microsoft Teams will integrate with Facebook parent company Meta’s Workplace platform, the companies announced Wednesday.

This "shared vision" between Meta and Microsoft could go a step further. The two companies also share the same vision of the metaverse. Both companies recently announced their version of the virtual world.

“We have a shared vision of offering our customers choice and flexibility, so it made sense for us to come together to help our mutual customers unlock collaboration and break down silos within their organizations,” Jeff Teper, CVP of product and engineering at Microsoft Teams, wrote in a post.

The integration will give those using the platform access to content from Workplace in Teams without having to switch back and forth between the two apps. The idea is to help people stay updated on important information, and open opportunities for company-wide feedback and engagement in real- time.

A feature will allow people to stream Teams Meetings into Workplace groups, letting employees watch live meetings and events on either app.

Teams and Workplace customers can use these integrations for free. Companies will have an option to stream meetings and broadcasts from Teams into Workplace beginning in 2022.

This Workplace by Meta and Microsoft Teams integration appears to be the latest in a broader partnership between the two companies. Workplace already integrates into SharePoint, OneDrive, and Microsoft’s Office 365 suite.

Meta has also integrated Workplace into Microsoft’s Azure Active Directory.

Microsoft Teams will also become available through Meta’s Portal video device in December.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella also share a similar vision of the metaverse.

It turns out that Microsoft and Meta will compete for market share of the metaverse. 

Speaking at the company’s Ignite 2021 conference, Nadella said he “can't overstate how much of a breakthrough” the metaverse and artificial intelligence (AI) has become. Microsoft Cloud will support this change.

“Large AI scale models are becoming platforms,” he said. “We are taking the AI breakthroughs and allowing you to build the platform.”

Microsoft also is creating a new platform layer called the metaverse.

“It’s no longer just looking at a camera view of a factory floor, you can be on the floor,” he said.

The company took what it learned through platforms like Dynamic 365 Connected Spaces to build the virtual world.

“When we talk about the metaverse, we’re describing a new platform and a new application type, similar to the way we talked about the web and websites in the early ‘90s,” he said. “The metaverse allows us to embed computing into the real world, and the real world into computing. … For years we talked about creating this digital representation in the real world, but now we actually have the opportunity to go into that world and participate.”