Our monthly product blog is landing a little later than usual this month, but to make up for it we're kicking off with an exciting announcement. Workplace now has a status page!

Introducing the Workplace Status page

Here at Workplace, we aim to provide a powerful and reliable platform to connect with your colleagues and get work done faster.

Though we strive to ensure Workplace is always available when you need it, sometimes things break and we want to make it as easy as possible for you to stay up to date as we work to resolve them.

The new Workplace Status page will do just that. Our public status page will provide frequent updates on any widespread issues affecting Workplace

How does it work?

If there is an issue with Workplace, our Enterprise Operations team will create an entry on the status page and provide regular updates until we've resolved it. The Status page will tell you which part of Workplace is affected, details on what isn't working as expected, and when the issue began. You can check it out right now at www.workplace.com/workplace/status.

A new look for Workplace

This year at F8, Facebook's annual developer conference, we announced a new web design for Workplace to make it easier for people to connect, collaborate and get work done. The new Workplace design retains its familiar user experience and makes it easier for people to connect and collaborate. Here are some of the benefits of the new Workplace experience.

Reliably get the information you need

The new navigation makes it easy to switch between Workplace Groups, Notifications and Workplace Chat. The new notifications view helps you stay on top of your notifications by displaying them as an inbox and enables you to filter them based on your preferences. You also have more granular controls over your notifications. Ultimately, it's now much faster to check and act on your notifications.

Get work done with fewer distractions

Groups are where people get work done. So now they're much more prominent and it's easy to keep track of the groups you've joined, to re-order your shortcuts, and to navigate to the groups that are most important to you. You can also collapse both the navigation and the right-hand column to focus on the content you care about. And because it's faster, you'll spend less time waiting for a page to load.

Easily find and connect with people

The home page uses the machine learning elements of the work graph to focus on the people and groups closest to you. You can find what you need in the Home tab and if you're working on a Teams & Project group, you can switch between the “Posts” and the “Chat” tabs easily to make sure everyone's on the same page.

You can also use the redesigned files tab to organize your work on Workplace. This means fewer clicks to find someone, to start a chat, or to connect your groups and chats.

All system admins of premium communities now have access to our new design with everyone getting access by the end of August. Learn more about all the detail here.

Add descriptions to your group chats

You can now add descriptions to your Workplace group chat threads making it easy for group chat members to understand the purpose of your chat and get up to speed quickly.

Use chat descriptions to help make your chat threads more purposeful and useful. Share key links, answers to common questions or just a brief overview of what the thread is for. Chat descriptions can be added to any chat with 3 or more people on the web, desktop app, iOS, and Android apps.

The ability to add chat descriptions is rolling out to everyone over the next few days. Check out the Help Center to learn more.