Onboard your organization to Microsoft Kaizala in 3 simple steps

[Rahul.Mittal]

Microsoft Kaizala enables you to connect and coordinate work across your network – your organization, vendors, partners, suppliers, and customers. Once you have installed Kaizala, this blog can help you introduce it to your wider organization and/or bring everyone from your external networks to Kaizala.

Kaizala management portal 

Open the management portal https://manage.kaiza.la, from your desktop and add your phone number to get started.

1. Create Kaizala groups and add users

Kaizala supports thousands of users in a group and has different group types catering to different communication and scenario requirements. Learn more about different Kaizala groups

Create flat groups and add members

Suited for employee communications, partner discussions, training, event coordination etc, flat groups in Kaizala are like standard chat groups. Using bulk upload in management portal, you can add thousands of users to a group or even create multiple flat groups in one go.

 

If your organization is already having groups and user memberships in the form of AAD groups (Office 365 groups or Distribution Lists), you can also create flat groups from them and users are automatically invited to join the Kaizala group.

 

Create broadcast groups and add subscribers

Broadcast groups are best suited for customer engagement (B2C), government to citizen connections (G2C) and feedback scenarios. Group admins can connect with a large number of people without them seeing each other in the group or their responses to Kaizala Actions. Get started simply by creating a broadcast group from portal and uploading a CSV of subscribers' phone numbers.

2. Configure your groups

Kaizala enables group moderation and control through group policies. For example, you can restrict users to copy or share content in a group.

 

Kaizala Action cards allow users to easily coordinate work or digitize a business process within the context of a group conversation. Some of these Action cards like jobs, surveys, checklists, polls etc. are available out-of-the-box. You can also create new Actions from templates and manage them using the management portal. Learn more.

3. Drive Kaizala adoption

Once you have completed the group setup, you are all set to start sending messages, surveys or any other Kaizala Actions to get work done on chat. The users who are already on Kaizala will start seeing the groups and the posts in the App. For rest of the users who are still not on Kaizala, you can do the following:

• Copy the invite link of the group from Management Portal or the mobile App and share it with users through email, WhatsApp, social channels like Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook. You can also post the link on your website or intranet sites within your organization.
• Download poster from the Portal and print/post it in your office.
• Remind people through SMS to install Kaizala. This is available from the Portal, but currently limited to certain countries.

Using built-in analytics, you can easily monitor the adoption of Kaizala - for your entire organization or any of the specific groups.

Feedback

We’re constantly looking for ways to improve Kaizala and invite you to send us your feedback, suggestions or requests at kaizalafeedback@microsoft.com.

 - Rahul Mittal, Senior PM, Microsoft Kaizala

[Cary Siemers]

Ok, we now have distribution lists, Groups, Yammer, Teams, and now Kaizala for communication, and an individual phone app for each. I'm sorry, I'm not seeing the benefit of this over any of the other myriad ways of communicating. The hardest part about getting adoption, is not the wiz bang features, but my users asking me "what do I use to do X?"

Let's see Groups for email collaboration

Yammer for organizational collaboration/discussion

Teams for chat collaboration

Now I have to add Kaizala . . . Kaizala for discussions?

I can't hardly wait for the next tool!!!

Why can't Groups, Teams, and Kaizala be combined? So much of the functionality is already crossing over. Just make it one product already and I can tell my users . . . Yammer is for organizational discussion . . . GTK is for work group collaboration. Oh how much simpler that would be.

/soap box off

[ahjeremy]

Our small Organization Team recently incorporate Kaizala into our work flow. We like it!

We normally use Whatsapp for our group communication. Even with Kaizala, we still use WhatsApp for non-essential conversation. Kaizala still require very much development effort, to match WhatsApp User Experience.

Yeah, many feedback the reason for Kaizala's existence and the duplication of features.

Kaizala is just another way of collaboration. Not everyone or organization follow a strict rules (this for that and that for that). Everyone and organization have their set of unique environments and work flows. Kaizala just expand the horizon. So far, we like how Kaizala improve productivity and enhance our workflow a lot.

Hope the Roadmap will be announced soon. It has been quite quiet since its global rollout.

[TonyWilson]

Cary, let me give it a go and explain the differences: Groups are groups of users with common security and access rights. Every user is placed in a group and the best way to deploy O365 is by grouping users together If this was football, groups are the different teams. Nothing to do with chat or how to play the games. Just everyone is grouped to their own cluster. (Yammer is gone. Forget Yammer. Yammer is now Teams. The company wide chat in Yammer is now Org Wide Team in Teams) Then there are two apps that people can chat. But they are not just chat. They are other things that people can do with them than just chat: Teams is a dashboard for all your O365 apps, focused on chats. Sharepoint is the other one, focused on websites. You can use either. Teams has on the front chats so people can talk about their projects, but you also get there all the other info, tools and files about the project. Sharepoint has on the front websites, where people can get info about the project, but also document, apps etc. If you have lots of brainstorming and conversations about the project, better use Teams. If there is no much chat about the project but just have people doing the job and using files or getting news updates, you use Sharepoint Kaizala is a rich chat and tasks app for people outside your organisation, like 10K clients, volunteers etc. They don't have access to your network and you don't pay licence for them. Imagine volunteers on a political campaign. They can join your group for just two days and want to easily get some news, or a simple app with appointments etc. In Teams, they would need a licence, admins to add them, training, security considerations etc. Multiply that for 10000 of them, at 50$ per licence. Teams is not made for that.... Kaizala is free, people can get in with just a link and they can chat but also get some appointments from simple mini apps to organise them. Those two different applications are just structural totally different things in simplicity and usability. The Teams app is a dashboard full of tabs that have different productivity apps. Kaizala is not a full on productivity dashboard. it is just rich chat like Whatsapp. I even use Kaizala for personal chat just to keep Teams more focused on projects. They are both needed. If you can not see the differences, it is simply because you don't need them, so just use whatever works for you :)

[Cary Siemers]

Tony,

Oh, I already knew the difference between the products but I think you've demonstrated my point exactly how overly complex (for non-techies especially) the products are and how they overlap in functionality. I have one 70+ year old user that has great difficulty with technology and trying to explain the nuances is nearly impossible.

Most of my users have been email and network share users for many years. That's what they are comfortable with and trying to get them to use Groups, Teams, etc. has been a challenge and Microsoft isn't making it any easier.

[TonyWilson]

That is hard Cary. Changing the way people always do things is hard. I guess when kaizala becomes a tab in Teams, it will make our lives easier. But Kaizala is more user friendly for chat than Teams, as it is less complicated. In the end, it is whatever works for us :)