Tencent's WeChat messaging app began to take China by storm five years ago, but now the company is planning to go beyond that success with a professional version. Currently in testing, Tencent says WeChat's enterprise edition will be formally released in one or two months. But how will it differ from the one we know?
The enterprise edition of Wechat will include new services such as automatic acknowledgement of messages, and provision for you to make phone calls on your company's account. It will also have a rest function which allows workers to block messages while taking a break. It will not include Wechat's popular Moments function, which lets users share their photos with friends. It turns out that will be a relief to some.
"I usually block some people from looking at my moments. If we're only talking about work, we don't need to post any messages on moments."
The service will be free to companies, for now at least. The first release will be open to invited companies, but not to all companies. This is not the first time Tencent has tried to get into the office communications business. Not many know that the company made a similar attempt on 2003 with a product called RTX, an online chat service.
Tencent is not the only company targeting business talk. Alibaba's Dingtalk.com went live in 2014, starting up with several big companies such as Fosun to make a major entry into the market. Company adminstrators say this kind of service does improve working efficiency, just so long as the fun bits are not included.
"A lot of employees play with their phones and look at the moments. If the enterprise edition has some simlarities with Wechat, for example informing staffers that bosses are looking for them, it will definitely help at work, it will be convenient. But I wouldn't want to see the moments as part of it, because it's for work. If it included moments it would just distract people," said Liu Xianyin, vice president of Keahoral.com.
Tencent says the number of Wechat users hit 650 million by the end of September last year, an increase of some 40 percent over the same time the previous year.