Microsoft’s ‘made for India’ product called Microsoft Kaizala is now rolling out to global commercial customers of Microsoft 365 and Office 365.
Launched in November 2017, Microsoft Kaizala is a phone-number enabled, simple and secure mobile chat application. It allows users to connect and coordinate work across the organization, vendors, partners, suppliers, and customers.
In December 2018, the company said that more than 1,000 organizations in India were already using Kaizala. These organizations include Philippines Airlines, Apollo Hospitals, M-Kopa Solar, McDonald’s Turkey, Narayana Health, UEM Edgenta, Government of Andhra Pradesh, to name a few.
Now Microsoft is stepping further by making it available to customers around the world. As per the latest announcement, Kaizala will be generally available in 40 languages across more than 180 markets. Plus, the solution will feature new capabilities and come to Microsoft Teams as well.
Developed by Microsoft Garage Team, the Kaizala allows people to connect in a group, create hierarchy-based access to a group, and create groups within groups. It comes backed by Microsoft Azure to ensure compliance with data policies of the organization.
New capabilities in Microsoft Kaizala will include @mentions which will allow users to tag individual members in a chat, ability to delete messages in a 1:1 or a group chat within an hour of sending it. Admins will be able to delete the messages any time.
There will be an image annotation feature to offer a rich inking experience, allowing users to markup images before sharing in chat. Video calling is also coming to Kaizala, along with the new Kaizala me feature. This feature is a private chat space which can be used to send messages to own, like meeting notes or reminders.
Microsoft is also launching the Kaizala web app which is currently in public preview. It is expected to be generally available later this quarter.
Lastly, the tech giant is adding the capabilities of Kaizala into Microsoft Teams as an integrated offering. The integration will take place in the next 12 to 18 months.
Also read: Celebrating second anniversary, Microsoft Teams gets 8 new capabilities
“The capabilities of Kaizala complement the robust communication and collaboration capabilities of Microsoft Teams, the hub for teamwork in Microsoft 365. Teams improves workplace collaboration by helping organizations move from an array of disparate apps to a single, secure hub that brings together what teams need, including chat, meetings, and calling, all with native integration to the Office 365 apps,” wrote Heather Gordon, Director of Marketing, Kaizala, in a blog post.
