Technology

Facebook has unveiled updates to its Workplace social collaboration app, including the ability to communicate with external organizations using its chat client.

Workplace launched in 2016 following a lengthy beta trial during which it was called Facebook at Work. Its customer base has since grown to more than 30,000 businesses.

At Facebookfirst user conference for Workplace & Flow & the company announced that Workplace Chat, the enterprise equivalent of its consumer-focused Messenger tool, now supports communication between multi-company groups.

New phone launches these days are pretty darn consistent. By and large, they're all about the hardware and why this latest model is light years better than the one you saw last year: the snazzier design, the smaller bezels, the sharper display, and so on.

At this week's Pixel 3 launchapalooza, Google took a decidedly different approach. Sure, its presenters glossed over some of those standard hardware high points — physical niceties that set the phone apart from its predecessor and give this latest model a reason to exist — but the real focus, and the sell for most people, was something far less tangible. Cementing a strategy the company started with its first Pixel two years ago and then refined with last year's second-gen model, Google basically told us: Hey, hardware is fine and all, but everyone's got the same stuff — and none of it is especially exciting anymore. Where we're gonna shine is in an area where no one else can compete: software.

Therea well-known bug in the Win7 update installer that can throw error 0x8000FFF unless you pre-install an upgrade to the installer. I wrote about this Servicing Stack Update (SSU) requirement about a month ago.

Three weeks ago, Microsoft promised to fix the problem. Superficially, the problem shouldn&t exist anymore. But because of sloppy implementation, the bugstill there, and people are still hitting error 0x8000FFF when they try to install Win7 Monthly Rollups. Fellow columnist Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols hit the same problem yesterday.