Facebook is already a ubiquitous tool actively used by more than 1.7 billion people monthly to socialize online with friends, and now the social networking company wants to become a common tool for businesses, too.

A new office version of the social network, called Workplace, became widely available Monday as an online collaboration tool for employees from different companies as well as from within a single organization.

It’s meant to help employees collaborate with one another on products, listen to their bosses speak on Facebook Live and post updates on their work in the News Feed. Facebook also announced as part Workplace a service called Multi-Company Groups, which it describes as “shared spaces that allow employees from different organizations to work together, to extend collaboration in a safe and secure way.” It said it will be rolling out Multi-Company Groups within the next several weeks.

“At Facebook, we’ve had an internal version of our app to help run our company for many years,” Facebook said in a blog posted yesterday. “We’ve seen that just as Facebook keeps you connected to friends and family, it can do the same with coworkers.” The company says it started testing a version of Workplace with a few other organizations over a year ago.

To help more companies get started with Workplace, Facebook also announced yesterday the Workplace Partner Program, a group of technology and professional service organizations such as global management consulting firm Deloitte that will help companies set up and use Workplace.

“We’ve also built unique, Workplace-only features that companies can benefit from such as a dashboard with analytics and integrations with single sign-on, in addition to identity providers that allow companies to more easily integrate Workplace with their existing I.T. systems,” Facebook said in the blog post. The dashboard, for example, lets companies view information on the number of messages their employees send.

Employers will be charged a monthly fee of $3 per employee for the first 1,000 monthly active users, $2 a head from 1,001 to 10,000 users and $1 per worker beyond that, Facebook said in a statement.

The product will give Facebook a new stream of revenue, to supplement advertising on its free social network. Workplace is designed to compete with services from Microsoft Corp., Salesforce.com Inc., Jive Software and Slack Technologies Inc. to provide a controlled setting online for collaborative conversations on the job. Microsoft is in the process of acquiring LinkedIn Corp. to add social elements to its business tools, for example. In April, Microsoft introduced a version of its Yammer communication tool for people across multiple organizations.

“The new global and mobile workplace isn’t about closed-door meetings or keeping people separated by title, department or geography,” Facebook said in a blog post. “Organizations are stronger and more productive when everyone comes together.”

Facebook already has 1,000 organizations using Workplace, including Starbucks, Oxfam and Booking.com, it said in the blog post. “People have created nearly 100,000 groups and the top five countries using Workplace are India, the U.S., Norway, U.K. and France,” it said.

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