Facebook claims 30,000 more customers for Workplace as it adds chat, and clients for Windows and Mac

Facebook adds features to Workplace in a bid to chisel off some users from Slack

Facebook is bringing its Chat feature out of beta and integrating it into Facebook Workplace, its supposed rival to the popular Slack collaboration platform.

Video calling capabilities are also expected to be added to increase its allure, as well as a stripped down free version of the chat for small businesses and other teams.

Facebook claims that 30,000 organisations now use the service - double the number of just six months ago - and is offering native clients for both Windows and Mac users to support more than one million groups those teams have collectively created.

However, it's unclear exactly how much revenue Workplace might be generating.

Facebook already offers Workplace free to not-for-profits, educational establishments and there's a stripped down version for anyone to use, which is attractive to hobbyists, community groups and other small non-profits. But it's not clear how many serious organisations are actually using it, let alone the revenues it might be generating.

It's also a piffling number compared to the four million users that Slack claims for its collaboration tools.

But this is about upping the game, so Facebook is adding GIF support (!), @replies and a fresher interface in a bid to bring some conformity across different platforms and clients, and to grab a share of the market not already clasped by Slack.

The Windows and Mac clients will have the same support already offered on the mobile versions - chats - both one-to-one and group are bolstered with file sharing and screen sharing.

Facebook is currently receiving heavy criticism from just about everyone after a change to its Facebook feed rolled out in test markets.

Separating personal posts from paid-for ones has been hailed as "undemocratic", and could, it is said, kill off small publishers who rely on the organic traffic from the news feed for content discovery.

Facebook has since said it has no plans to expand the experiment into further markets and is merely trying and experiment. It is expected that those with the new feed will see it roll back.