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.