Microsoft Kaizala rolls out to Office 365 customers globally and will become part of Microsoft Teams

[Heather Gordon]

Today, we are pleased to announce that Microsoft Kaizala is rolling out to all eligible Microsoft 365 and Office 365 commercial customers worldwide, making it generally available in 40 languages across 180+ markets. We are also announcing plans to bring Kaizala capabilities into Microsoft Teams and several new capabilities in Kaizala.

Kaizala – a simple, secure work management and messaging app

Kaizala brings unique capabilities to Microsoft 365, with its ability to connect and engage people both inside and outside of an organization’s directory – including contract workers, vendors, partners, suppliers, customers, and citizens – using large and flexible group types. Kaizala enables phone number-based identity for easy onboarding, and a simple user experience for messaging and work management through the open directory. Kaizala Pro gives you the ability to create and manage organizational groups, gather rich analytics, build custom integrations and workflows, and offers enterprise-grade security and compliance.

Kaizala delivers on three key promises:

• Connect with anyone using the Kaizala open directory, enabling people to sign up with just a phone number, and is scalable to millions of users
• Secure work management integrated with messaging and video - Built-in action cards such as survey, poll, job, training, and location sharing enable you to coordinate work and securely collect information
• Digitize business processes – Kaizala’s extensible platform enables you to build custom line-of-business action cards and gather business insights using in-built reporting and analytics

Since its initial launch in India in November 2017, and subsequent roll out to select markets, thousands of organizations are using Kaizala, including Philippines Airlines, Apollo Hospitals, M-Kopa Solar, McDonald’s Turkey, Narayana Health, UEM Edgenta, Government of Andhra Pradesh, and many more across multiple industries. Based on these success stories and feedback from customers, we are making Kaizala Pro available to all Office 365 customers globally.

Bringing together Kaizala and Microsoft Teams

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. More than 500,000 organizations use Teams to collaborate across locations, time zones, and languages. Many of our customers, including M-Kopa Solar and UEM Edgenta, use both Teams and Kaizala to empower and engage their internal workforce and the extended network outside their directory.

Enabling every member of an organization’s network with digital communication and collaboration tools – whether they are inside or outside of the company directory – can transform the way work gets done. We also believe that every organization should have the ability to own and manage their company data. Based on this vision, and on feedback from customers, we will be bringing Kaizala capabilities into Microsoft Teams as an integrated offering. We expect the integration to happen in phases over the next 12-18 months, and we will provide more details about the Kaizala and Teams integration roadmap later this quarter.

Additional new Microsoft Kaizala capabilities

 Today, we are also announcing several new capabilities in Kaizala that have been top requests from current customers.

New features for Kaizala users:

•  @mentions enable you to tag individual members in a chat so you can call their attention to things that matter.
• Delete messages: You can now delete a message in a 1:1 or group chat within an hour of sending it. If you are a group admin, you can delete any message at any point in time.
• The Kaizala web app allows managers and admins to easily access and search chat conversations, send documents, action cards and more from a desktop (PC/laptop). It is now available in public preview and will be generally available to all Kaizala users later this quarter.

Kaizala web app is in public preview and lets you access chats, documents, action cards and more from the web

• Image annotation provides a rich inking experience, so you can markup images before sharing in chat
• Video calling enables you to connect face to face using rich 1:1 video calling.
• The new Kaizala me feature is a private chat space just for you, where you can send yourself chat messages such as meeting notes or reminders, or try new action cards

Chat with yourself to keep your notes organized, and connect face to face using video calls

New group and data management capabilities

• Updated Kaizala Management Portal: We have updated the Kaizala Management Portal so business users can manage their groups more effectively. The management portal now also supports a single sign-on experience for Office 365 users.
• In-region data residency: For new customers, Kaizala will store customer data at rest within the customer’s region (US, APAC, India and EU). Customers will also benefit from a robust failover and disaster recovery support.  Learn more.

What’s next?

We are excited about the Kaizala to Teams integration and the opportunity this provides our customers and partners, to securely connect users both inside and outside their organization. We are delighted about the momentum Kaizala is gaining, and are working on several additional capabilities that have been requested by customers to be released over the coming months, including:

• Support for right-to-left languages such as Hebrew and Arabic
• The ability to invite users using their email
• The ability to sync your organization’s Azure Active Directory (AAD) within Kaizala
• A new Kaizala admin role so you can assign dedicated admins to manage Kaizala policies

You can download Microsoft Kaizala today from the app stores and get started. Join the Kaizala Tech Community to give feedback, vote on feature requests, and engage with an awesome community.

Note: Microsoft Kaizala Pro is included in Office 365 F1, E1, E3, E5, Business Essentials and Business Premium, Office 365 Education A3 and A5 and Microsoft 365 F1, Business, E3, E5 and Microsoft 365 Education A3 and A5.

[Philip Worrell]

I predicted it would get integration with Teams. Makes perfect sense. 

Keep up the good work 

[Timothy Balk]

@Heather Gordon is AIP integration on the roadmap? Kaizala is a great tool, used it to socialize w/ Ignite 2018 attendees, but our security minded individuals are freaking out regarding the ability to sign into the web app with no connection to our O365/Azure instance. Very easy sign up using a mobile device and phone number, but its seems difficult to secure unless we have a very tight cap on things... looking like we need to have AIP/DLP sitting properly on documents. Still looking forward to the product's evolution (thumbs up emoji).

[Eric Davis]

Why do we need this in our tenant when we already have Teams?  How can we prevent this new feature from become activated in our tenant?  We want to drive Teams adoption, not Kaizala adoption.

[Praveen Maloo]

@Eric Davis - you can enable/disable the service for your tenant: http://aka.ms/managekaizala

[Praveen Maloo]

@Timothy Balk - you can enforce group policies such as requiring AAD sign-in, Intune managed devices etc. to control who is able to join the organizational groups. The key is to attach the groups to your tenant so they become managed group. We don't have AIP integration for documents yet.

[mehta deepak]

Negative, i am not going to have kaizala in my org with teams.

I have skype and we are trying to go to teams, where does Kaizala comes into this.

Making things more confusing, kaizala is a chat, calling meetings app and MS teams is offering same feature set.

[Mary Branscombe]

will Kaizala stay a separate client on the same back end or will the Kaizala features move into the Teams client?

[Stephane Petit]

we are really excited about this integration to Teams

[Marc Vanderstraeten]

This is the news we were waiting for! Thumbs up for the Kaizala Team!

Just tried to enable the "Data retention for all organization groups" and failed... because it still indicates: "Please make sure your organization has Kaizala Pro, Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SharePoint licenses." Guess I'll have to wait...

AIP/DLP is also upmost important to us.

[Marc Vanderstraeten]

@metha deepak I don't see the confusion with Teams & Kaizala. The purpose of using it is just different. If you only want to chat internally, then Teams is the way to go (but of course Teams does more than that!). If you do work a lot with external users and need a simple way to chat, then Kaizala is the way to go!

@Mary Branscombe Kaizala will surely remain a separate client, but I expect there will be integration with Kaizala similar as with Yammer, I guess

And upcoming integration with Teams? Super!

[Stephane Petit]

what I don't understand is, where is the connection between Kaizala and teams, which functions are integrated in the teams ? or do we have to use Kaizala as a separate app?

[Marc Vanderstraeten]

@Stephane Petit  Kaizala IS a separate app. What they will probably do is integrate it in Teams, so one can see what's going on in Kaizala, the same as they did with Yammer integration. Linking the Kaizala group to the Office 365 Group (or Teams' Team) could do the trick I guess.

[Gregory Gilbert]

Is it possible to only enable this for a subset of users while we evaluate it?  I expect a lot of large companies would rather run a POC of this prior to turning it on for everyone.

[Dana White]

Is this GCC compliant?  Will I see it in my GCC tenant?

[Heather Gordon]

@metha deepak  to answer your question on where Kaizala plays versus Microsoft Teams. Kaizala is ideally suited for users that do not have company email and sit outside of the organizations Azure Active directory that you would like to communicate with. These users could be both within or outside of your organization

[Heather Gordon]

@Mary Branscombe integration is expected to happen in phases over the 12 – 18 months and more information will be shared in the June timeframe on the integration roadmap.

[Heather Gordon]

@Marc Vanderstraeten really pleased you’re excited about Kaizala being made available into all eligible Office 365 and Microsoft 365 SKUs and wanting to get started! All Office 365 admins will receive a Message Centre post shortly providing more details with timing. 

[Heather Gordon]

@Gregory Gilbert  – To test with a subset of users, you will need to enable the entire org. To enable a POC with a subset of users you can use the Kaizala Management Portal  to create POC test groups.

[Heather Gordon]

@Dana White  – at this point Kaizala is not available in GCC tenants 

[Edward Whishaw]

Does this mean the end of Yammer?

[TonyWilson]

Fantastic! I have been using Kaizala as my personal chat because it is even better than other chat apps. The text box extender for more than 5 lines of text is brilliant. You just need short video messaging and you are done!

For those who don't understand the difference between Teams Conversations and Kaizala, I suggest you try to use Teams convo with external to your organisation people and you will see the difference right away. The approvals process from your end and the login process from the external user end is as complicated as it can get. You have to ask the global admins to open access in Azure, then the Teams admin to open access in Teams (oh maybe you need Sharepoint and onedrive too..), then invite the one person. Then that person might have to create a new MS account, or use their company's email and become an external user under your tenancy and taking away one licence from your pot, or they might have a federated account and they would log with that one, or you might give them a one time access, one that you will have to ask your global admin to revoke if that client becomes more frequent.

My point, chatting with external users using Teams Convo is only for those few external entities you communicate all the time. Because Teams Convo is made for internal staff Then you get Kiazala, where you post a link and the whole universe can join by clicking that link. It is the chat for the external entities of your organisation. Simples

And you need Kaizala as a tab (shortcut) in Teams (O365 user Dashboard) so you can use it from that one O365 Dashboard, the same way you use it to access pages, files, forms etc etc. Then you will have Internal threaded Chat focused on projects (conversations) and External whatsupy Chat (Kaizala) focused on non-business chat and external users.

[Praveen Maloo]

@Edward Whishaw - there are no changes to Yammer with this announcement. Yammer continues to be a core part of our Microsoft 365 portfolio to foster employee engagement and build communities of practice by connecting and engaging across the organization.

[Gary Naseby]

Whilst I can access Kaizala Admin Center (via a link) and use the app on my mobile, I cannot see it officially in our Office365 E2 (non-profit) licence assignments ? 

Is this correct? Also there is no launcher icon for it, or link in admin centers? 

Furthermore, the option to sync with AAD in the Kaizala Admin Center is missing. 

Be great if someone could shed some light on this. 

[Fahad Shaikh]

Looking at some comments on why would Kaizala be used when Teams is already deployed. Kaizala and Teams are different products. Please read this article to get more clarity on the use cases of each product

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/microsoft-kaizala-teams-different-products-heres-why-fahad-shaikh/

[Workram]

12-18 months to get coherent integration with Teams seems a long time but then with Skype as well I can see why and then Yammer too? 

Secure chat with frontline and connected third party groups makes sense but disappointing it is not there yet. Has this been rushed out because of Other tech floatations of Chat apps?

can we get flow as a bridge between Teams and Kaizala? Not going to confuse users with yet another app when it does not integrate. Security of who gets added in could be an issue. But think you will be ahead of us and have a plan. I see the point but it lacks gravitas for those using teams until integrated.

if competitor products can give me a flow like integration into teams I am thinking Flow should be able to sooner rather than later? Need a work around 1.5 years is too long to wait. Positive long term but short term without integration difficult to run with Teams. Please give us a connector and then....

[Tom Noels]

One of the reasons whatsapp is still an used alternative is because it works in an independent environment. 

So for example if outlook,yammer or teams is not available (like a few months ago) people need an alternative.

Is this the case with kaizala? 

[Marc Vanderstraeten]

Kaizala uses Azure as backend, so if Azure is there, Kaizala is there :)

[Albur720]

hi

when the Arabic version will be released?

thanks

[chrispdan]

Looking for documentation on how to create organic communication with external users. Desire the ability for potential customers to make initial contact. Can Kaizala do that?

[rakbot]

Microsoft Kaizala Connects 3 million Indian Railways employees with healthcare services
https://technoidhub.com/news/microsoft-kaizala-connects-3-million-indian-railways-employees-with-hea...

[tamalik]

@chrispdan - Kindly refer to the blog post Engage your customers and consumers leveraging Kaizala

[chrispdan]

@tamalik Thanks for the reply! Unfortunately I think the link is incorrect. It links to an article titled "Data File cannot be configured SkypeForBusiness/Outlook". Looking forward to using this new application.