A month after the leak of WeChat’s enterprise edition, Tencent officially launched the work-only WeChat on Monday, which is named “WeWork” in English according to the installation package.
The app, as AllChinaTech reported before, is a Slack-like cloud-based team collaboration communication tool. But in contrast to Slack’s price of USD 6.67 per daily active user per month for an annual plan, WeWork will be free, at least for now, according to the WeWork team.
“WeWork is Tencent’s essential product in a business context. We expect it to vastly improve enterprises’ working efficiency,” Pony Ma, CEO of Tencent said at the China IT Summit earlier this year.
Confirming earlier leaks, WeWork has two primary functions as both a corporate internal communication tool and an office automation (OA) system.
For internal communication, WeWork offers WeChat-like chatting functions, but also allows users to make phone calls via corporate lines at the price of RMB 0.06 per minute. WeWork accounts can also be connected with Tencent’s enterprise email system.
For the OA system, highlights include “one-hour break” and “off work” functions. These two features can shut off messages when switched on, which, as has been said, will improve users’ work-life balance.
As a business-use application, WeWork also highlights its information security capacity. According to a public post by the WeWork team, all information transmitted via the application will be encrypted.
WeWork’s team claimed the application can be applied to enterprises with a size ranging from several dozen people to several thousand, but unverified companies can only register up to 200 accounts under their company.
“The focus of our development work in the next stage will be optimising and improving the application based on feedback while at the same time, extending its open-source capacity,” the WeWork team said in a WeChat post.
Marked as WeWork 1.0, the software is now available on iOS, Android, Mac and Windows. WeWork can be downloaded at work.weixin.qq.com.
WeChat’s number of monthly active users surpassed 700 million in March making it far and away China’s most popular social messaging app.
(Top photo is a screenshot from its official website work.weixin.qq.com)