Don’t foreign workers use WeChat for Business, DingTalk, or Lark? Then what do they use?

After quickly seizing the domestic online collaborative office market, Tencent, Alibaba and ByteDance have all gone overseas to make money. WeChat for Business launched an overseas version, Wecom, DingTalk launched an overseas version, Ding Talk, and Feishu launched an overseas version, Lark. However, like most Internet products that have gone overseas, these three softwares have not become mainstream online office collaborative software. Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Slack are more commonly used by foreign companies.

Zoom

Zoom is a cloud-based remote conferencing software that has been welcomed by many companies since its first launch in 2011. This software has some origins in China, and its founder is Chinese-American entrepreneur Yuan Zheng.

In the 1990s, Yuan Zheng was rejected eight times in a row when applying for a US visa because he could not speak English. He finally succeeded in his ninth application and went to the United States to work alone.

Just like Liu Qiangdong founded JD.com, Yuan Zheng's inspiration for founding Zoom also came from his girlfriend. When he was a freshman, he and his girlfriend were in a painful long-distance relationship, so he came up with the idea of ​​developing a device that can make video calls. In 2011, Yuan Zheng founded the video conferencing software company Zoom and served as the company's CEO.

The main function of Zoom is multi-person video calling. It provides users with a free cloud video calling service that combines high-definition video conferencing and mobile network conferencing. Using Zoom, you can have online video exchanges with multiple friends or colleagues, and it supports screen sharing. The sharer can also use brush annotation, paragraph selection, network link jump demonstration and other functions during the screen sharing process.

Zoom adopts a monthly payment model. The highest version can support video conferencing for 500 people. There is no limit on the capacity of cloud storage and the price is US$240 per year.

As the epidemic raged in early 2020, many companies and schools began to adopt remote work and learning methods, which led to a sharp increase in the number of Zoom users. As of May 2020, Zoom had more than 300 million daily active users, making it one of the most popular online collaborative office tools in the world.

Microsoft Teams

The field of online collaborative office is a big pie, and naturally, it is indispensable for giant companies to participate. Microsoft Teams is a chat-based intelligent team collaboration tool launched by Microsoft at the Office conference in 2016. It can share documents synchronously and provide members with instant communication tools including voice and video conferencing.

The advantage of Microsoft Teams lies in the Microsoft ecosystem. It is closely connected with Office 365 services and OneDrive. You can create new word documents in the application, use Skype for business meetings, or share files directly from OneDrive.

In addition, Microsoft Teams also has a function similar to "Post Bar", where you can @specified colleagues in the post for discussion.

Microsoft Teams has set limits on meeting duration, participants, cloud storage space, etc. The free version only supports 60-minute group meetings, up to 100 participants and 5G cloud storage space. The most advanced version does not have too many restrictions and costs $12.5 per month.

Slack

The birth of Slack is quite legendary. During the development of the game Glitch, Slack was just an internal tool of Stewart Butterfleld's company. Later, the project failed, and the founder discovered the huge commercial value of Slack, so he invested a lot of company resources in the version iteration of Slack. In 2019, Slack successfully went public with a market value of up to 19.5 billion US dollars.

Compared with the previous two tools, Slack is more like a hodgepodge, which combines chat groups, large-scale tool integration, file integration and unified search. Users can use up to 65 tools and services such as email, text messages, Google Drives, Twitter, GitHub, etc. on Slack. Slack's goal is to bring together various fragmented corporate communication and collaboration tools for users' convenience.

Regardless of whether at home or abroad, most companies will choose mainstream online collaborative office tools, but due to the needs of security, privacy and special functions, some companies will still choose to customize and develop instant messaging tools that meet their own needs.