Microsoft to Expand Kaizala to Office 365 Plans Worldwide
Dec. 13, 2018At an event in New Delhi today, Microsoft celebrated the first anniversary of its fast-growing chat-based enterpriseproductivity app Kaizala, and announced that it’s now looking to expand the platform toOffice 365subscribers worldwide.
Maheshwari further shed light on how the platform is coming in handy tobridge the gap between white collar and first-line workers, simply via a smartphone app. The platform lets businesses turn unstructured real-time data, to structured data and to be used with a variety of Office 365 tools.
Microsoft India VP Rajiv Kumar then took the stage to talk aboutnew features that have recently been added to Kaizala, including persistent chat, Me Chat, and Kaizala Web. The persistent chat feature allows new users in a group chat to view the complete message history, staying up to date with everything in their department, even if they have joined after the conversation began.
Post the event, I got a chance to test out all these new features and chat with one of the product developers of Microsoft Kaizala, who spoke to me in brief about theapp’s future roadmapinstead of revealing all the upcoming new features, which he did say are all prioritized based on user feedback.
Kaizala is being optimized to only further reduce friction and quickly touch base with the on-ground workforce. The team is currently exploring more avenues for expansion, experimenting with the different types of users they can onboard. I particularly like Microsoft’spilot test in residential complexes in Hyderabad, which allows all stakeholders to easily manage tasks such as security, meetings and maintenance.
Kaizala has a ton of potential use-cases, which Microsoft is trying to explore one step at a time. The company may currently be targetting SMEs or huge organizations, but the chat platform will eventually hold value for most use-cases, thanks to the integration of Actions in the app, which take the effort out of compiling data and allocating tasks.
