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What are Microsoft Doing with Kaizala? Part One

To set expectations straight away if you are expecting an answer please don’t be disappointed – I don’t know what Microsoft are or plan to do with Kaizala. This article will be entirely speculative and based on no sourced information.

If you are deploying Office 365 or planning to in 2019 I do think you need to find an answer to what Microsoft plan to do with Kaizala.

Kaizala is a mobile messaging app built for iOS and Android with many features similar to WhatsApp, initially released for countries where low bandwidth mobiles dominate. You can have one-to-one and group chats, voice, video and bot integration. Hold on a minute isn’t that what Microsoft Teams does I hear you say. And you would be correct there is a significant overlap between the Teams Chat function and Kaizala. Through to this November the discussion between Teams and Kaizala was academic – Kaizala not being available for Office 365, this changed in November Kaizala now being available for Office 365 commercial tenants.

So why did Microsoft choose to release Kaizala to Office 365? Redmond don’t simply release new services onto Office 365 in a random fashion. As I mentioned before I have no knowledge as to why but here are a few possible ideas:

  1. WhatsApp is huge in business and IT professionals are becoming more concerned about the use of a consumer app for business decisions. IT pros and management however just can’t say don’t use it – they need to provide an alternative. Kaizala being integrated with Office 365 gives the under siege IT pro/management a viable substitute.
  2. Teams Chat adoption may not be as high as OCS/Lync/Skype. I’ve written many times that Teams is fundamental to any Office 365 deployment but its strength lies more in Meetings and Collaboration rather than Chat. Using Teams for non IT people requires effort and thought which does not induce viral usage of chat. On the flip side there are also issues of over-usage of Teams with reports of Channel and Notification fatigue which chat exacerbates.
  3. Kaizala would be a viral hit. Office 365 is a rich platform but it can be complicated to deploy with services such as Zoom and Workplace able to challenge the dominant platform. Kaizala reminds me of OCS/Lync. OCS and Lync drew people in, they wanted and often demanded to be allowed access to the service. They’d become accustomed to using Yahoo and Messenger chat but wanted a corporate version which OCS/Lync provided. I’m willing to wager that with very little effort Kaizala would reach a significant percentage of people within weeks of its release. Especially if used in combination with a message on (non)acceptable usage of WhatsApp.

No doubt there are issues and questions before anyone deploys Kaizala and my speculation may be over blown – I’ll try and cover these in Part Two. Meanwhile if you think of any more reasons why Microsoft released Kaizala to Office 365 please feel free to comment.

What are Microsoft Doing with Kaizala? Part Two
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What are Microsoft Doing with Kaizala? Part Two

In Part One I provided some thoughts on why Microsoft released Kaizala to Office 365. In Part Two I’m going to provide my practical advice on finding out what Microsoft really think of Kaizala.

If you are deploying Office 365 in 2019 and you want to know more about Kaizala and how it could affect your deployment/roadmap – even if it’s just to confirm a ‘nothing to see here’ moment.

  • Find out who (if anyone) in Redmond owns Kaizala. Understanding the Microsoft Office product team and management often provides plenty of clues about the future/potential of the product. Those who witnessed the emergence of Teams and its shift away from Skype management in mid-late 2016 knew something was going to happen with Skype. Similarly when people speculate what will happen with Outlook vis-a-vis Teams I can almost guarantee that Outlook and Teams will share a similar but non competing roadmap given the team which created Outlook also created Teams. My understanding of Kaizala is that it originated from a team in India and continues to be developed in India. So where and how does/did Kaizala get into Rajesh Jha’s Office organisation? If they report into the Teams team that would tell you one thing, if they were entirely separate from the Office team that might tell you something else.
  • Ask when Microsoft intend to release where Kaizala data lies at rest. This is not only important for compliance but will provide information where they invest in servers. If they are co-located with Teams servers/services that would be of interest. At the moment Kaizala servers/services are not listed in the Microsoft Data Centre/Service list.
  • Ask your sales team if Kaizala is part of their deployment metric through to the end of June 2019. I strongly suspect not at this stage.
  • Ask the Marketing arm of Microsoft what and how they intend to market Kaizala. Even if they don’t provide an answer that will help you build a clue. For example would they intend on presenting Kaizala at Enterprise Connect? Are they updating their inner/outer loop slides to reflect Kaizala.

At the moment I’d imagine it would be difficult to ascertain answers to the above. This would provide a steer on the maturity of thought on Kaizala within Microsoft. Having said all that it is still intriguing on the release of Kaizala to Office 365 tenants.

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A Story of the Fax Machine and Digital Workplace

The NHS is one of the greatest ideas and institutions in Britain. I’m deeply committed to the idea of healthcare free at the point of use and how the NHS puts that in action every day of the year. I’m fortunate enough to rarely use the NHS but this summer I witnessed for myself the dedication of the NHS staff and their work. It made me humble to witness the NHS in action.

Yesterday the BBC and others reported the NHS in England will prohibit the purchase of Fax Machines. This seems to be part of a wider effort by the new Health Secretary to modernise the service. See the Health Advisory Board here.

This issue highlights the difficulty for IT professionals. We know there are many ways to improve productivity in the NHS but how do we convince non IT professionals to change?

I’m convinced we have to improve telling the stories of how technology can improve how we work. Today as an industry we typically lead on numbers. Deploying technology x will save y pounds and z in man hours. These remain necessary (many projects still require CFO/Finance approval) but we lack an emotive side. We need to tell how technology will actually impact people, these are almost certainly intangible but we should stand by these stories. Let me provide one small real life example in a video conferencing project I deployed a couple of years ago.

The company spent circa $5million on video conferencing globally and within a year saved much more than that in travel savings directly attributed to video conferencing. Everyone from CEO down was happy how the project went.

If the above was left to itself it seems to make sense but let me add this real story I received during the implementation. It was from a manager in the business.


I really appreciate you providing me the ability to have video chat. I’m based in the UK and have one direct report in Sweden. I constantly feel guilty that I can not have the same interaction with my direct report in Sweden that I have with my team in the UK. If I were to visit Sweden every week it would mean I’d have to be away from home consistently and I have a young family. Before video chat I was faced with the choice of feeling guilty about not providing enough quality time for my work colleague or my family. Now I can accomplish both and you’ve reduced my stress levels considerably. Thank you so much.

So coming back to the Fax Machine in the NHS – what stress and guilt can we help reduce by replacing the Analog Workplace with Digital Workplace? Let’s find those stories and share them widely. Let’s also be cognisant that forcibly replacing the Fax Machine may in fact generate more stress for people who have worked in a specific way for many years so when we make changes let’s make sure we do that with those people in mind too.

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5 Key Questions for the Digital Workplace Team

Five key areas for Collaboration/Digital Workplace teams to be aware of in 2018.

Editing note: Collaboration or Digital Workplace?  Whilst most organisations have settled on Collaboration which I always preferred to Unified Communications we are starting to see a move to Digital Workplace. End User Services/Desktop and Collaboration should be a single service and once you add in property services Digital Workplace seems to make sense as its own discreet tower/service. In addition the move to cloud/hosted/subscription services supports the collapsing of the IT service towers.

Having said that what would be my top 5 priorities for the Digital Workplace team in 2018. In no particular order…

Homogeneity or Heterogeneity in communication tools. I think we’ve all been in the Highlander discussion…there can be only one or not.

There is no clear answer or preference as to whether an organisation should focus on a single platform and trade off possibly not receiving the best in class across the Digital Workplace technologies or whether it chooses to allow multiple platforms and lives with the management and end user challenges.  It very much depends on factors unique to each organisation on which will be the best approach. What is clear is that we need to push organisations to make a conscious choice and pick a path otherwise it’s very easy to find a Digital Workplace which is complicated to manage, costly and provides a poor end user experience.

Mobiles

Mobiles are considered a secondary device in the enterprise yet they dominate in the consumer world. All enterprise services will eventually be mobile first and the Digital Workplace team not only need to factor this into their key services but also be seen as an enabler and advocate for the move.

Working Environment

There is a ‘just right’ formula to create the most productive physical working environment. Just enough floor space and meeting rooms for collaboration and team work but also enough private space for serious thought and one to one communication. It takes a high degree of effort to find that formula and it is complicated that IT do not often own the workplace environment working in partnership with the facilities team and the business unit which owns the floor space. Remote working should also not be forgotten with key services accessible securely and effectively away from the office.

External…External…External

So much of the collaboration services today focuses on internal communication and yet an organisation’s success depends on external collaboration and communicating with customers.

Email

For its faults Email remains the bed rock of enterprise Collaboration but change is coming. Email has begun a death spiral in the consumer world and while it certainly will not disappear in either world it will lose its prime importance over the coming years and will eventually reshape the core communication habits within an organisation.

There are rarely definitive answers in our industry but if the Digital Workplace team are aware and have a position to all the above they will be in good shape to answer the more detailed questions which surround each of these areas.

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Microsoft Teams Resource Page

There is a great deal of great content being added to the #microsoftteams community, this blog post is dedicated to capturing as many of those links as possible.  Please note these are not Alloquy posts and full attribution will be made.

Meetings

Chat

Calling

Learn About the New Calling Features in Microsoft Teams – Microsoft Teams On Air with Mark Pottier

Development

Office 365

Connect/Integrate Yammer to Microsoft Teams (How To Configure) – Matt Soseman’s “The Productive Cloud” Blog

Accessing Microsoft Teams Usage Data in code with Microsoft Graph – Tom Morgan “Thoughtstuff” Blog