Alibaba’s DingTalk, Microsoft Teams’ Rival, Gets New Features

Alibaba Cloud has added new features to DingTalk, its enterprise-focused instant messaging software. The new move is oriented towards making it a collaborative workplace platform. It targets more and more enterprise customers, in and outside China.

DingTalk is an enterprise-focused alternative to Microsoft Teams from Alibaba Cloud, a leading cloud computing and date management service provider. With over 500 million users, it has grown as a solid competitor for Microsoft Teams in a short period of time joining with Zoom, Google Meet, Webex, Slack, etc. DingTalk intends to offer a single app for most collaboration needs just like Microsoft Teams.

DingTalk is an all-in-one platform that combines messaging, task management, audio, and video conferencing, live-streaming, real-time translation, etc. As per sources, the app is accessible to Chinese SMBs free of cost. Alibaba Cloud has added three advanced and paid versions for enterprise users. It has plans to make it extensible and is working with third-party developers to realize this goal.

The pandemic has played a core role in enhancing the growth of DingTalk as an office automation SaaS. It has successfully adjusted its strategies to meet the peak demands and sharp growth curve. It was originally designed for small to medium-sized businesses. It captured the attention of large corporate clients when it got integrated with Alibaba’s cloud computing platform in 2020.

It rolled out the first English version of the app in 2018 in Malaysia marking its first foray outside China. Its versions are now available in Japanese, Thai, and Vietnamese.

DingTalk also comes with a range of monitoring features that the other US apps don’t have. It includes an optional attendance system. It is a generally unwelcome feature as it tracks employees’ locations in real-time. Managers can ping specific employees using the Ding message.

Alibaba claims that more than 19 million organizations use DingTalk. About one-third of these organizations have 2,000 plus employees.