Alibaba-owned enterprise collaboration app DingTalk comes to India

In a bid to tap into the growing enterprise chat and collaboration app market in India, Alibaba-owned platform DingTalk has unveiled an English version of the app that caters to the small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

The English version of the app, also available in Malaysia, is the first concerted push outside of China since launching three years ago. Currently available on iOS, Android, Mac and Windows operating systems, DingTalk offers organizational-centric functions and features aimed at improving business-to-business communication and collaboration. The main features of the app are:

• Unified Communications – supports audio, video and/or conference calls for up to 3,000 parties in a single call; integrated emails, chats and message reminder features;voice and video services are currently only available via VoIP for users outside of China
• Office Automation – allows businesses to manage attendance, make approvals, maintain business reports, send files of up to 700MB in size;
• Internal and External Collaboration – businesses can book and host meetings, manage CRM information, create tasks and service tickets, set up private chat and more;
• Open Platform – allows third party SaaS applications and services to be integrated with DingTalk and provide an enterprise service ecosystem for SMEs.
• ISO security certification – Dingtalk is one of the first Chinese apps to have obtained the ISO/IEC 27001:2013 standard, a globally recognized data security benchmark. That means data is encrypted at SSL/TLS security standards to provide high-level communications protection.

"With DingTalk, we will enable organizations to seamlessly communicate and collaborate across locations, thereby increasing productivity. We believe that this is the future of the workplace, and we see immense potential in helping businesses redefine their organizational connectivity," said Chris Wang, Head of Global Business Development for DingTalk.

Over five million enterprises and organisations in China are already using the Chinese version. DingTalk aims to ramp up its user count in India and Malaysia by the end of the fiscal year ending in March. The company is also considering to launch the app in other South-East Asian countries and a Japanese-language version is currently under development.