DIFFERENT companies have different requirements to maintain productivity while working together remotely. For companies new to having a remote workforce, beyond ensuring all employees have access to laptops and reliable internet, having the right software is crucial to ensuring communication and collaboration across teams.
To help companies going through these challenging times smoothly, Alibaba has introduced DingTalk, its enterprise communication and collaboration platform, designed to overcome help companies empower their workforce with the tools they need to be productive, healthy and connected.
Collaboration platform
According to Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Malaysia's general manager, Jordy Cao, DingTalk is Alibaba's lite edition of enterprise communications and collaboration platform tailored for Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong and Macau at no cost, to support virtual communication at scale for local businesses and schools with challenges brought by the Covid-19 pandemic.
"During the Covid-19 outbreak, there's a surging demand for remote working and learning, especially on video conference. Therefore, DingTalk expanded the video conference from 100 participants up to 300 plus at the same time across time zone. And it's for free during the outbreak," he said.
The platform is supported by Alibaba Cloud, the data intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group and Alibaba DAMO Academy, the global research unit of the Group.
He said the platform is supported by Alibaba Cloud's elastic and secure cloud infrastructure.
"High-scalability is one of the key advantages of cloud computing. Our cloud infrastructure has been tested by 11.11 global shopping festival and powered US$1 billion of gross merchandise value (GMV) in just 68 seconds," he added.
On instant messaging function, DingTalk supports 11 languages. AI-powered real-time machine translation is made possible by DAMO's NLP (natural language processing) technology.
Local usage
Locally, the DingTalk platform is already used widely by companies, which include MDEC, PappaRich and TNG Wallet.
MDEC's e-commerce director, Song Hock Koon, said the organisation utilised various cloud-based tools to ensure employees can communicate and collaborate properly and to keep the teams connected while working apart.
"MDEC leverages on DingTalk as a one of the platforms to engage the e-commerce community in Malaysia. The discussions in DingTalk aims to facilitate SMEs and e-commerce enablers who are keen to explore business potential in domestic and cross-border e-commerce to connect and seek expert guidance from the industry," he said.
Song said the platform also provides a resource centre called 'Ding Learning' where enterprises can conveniently upload published reports, recorded workshops and seminars for easy access. DingTalk also has push notifications for information updates, hosting of workshops and seminars and contact sharing. "All these have become beneficial functions for over 4,000 business users in the Go-eCommerce community. This is especially useful during this movement control order period where people need to stay home," he said.
Besides MDEC, PappaRich also uses the DingTalk app for work communication.
"We have found DingTalk to be a very useful and efficient digital mobile tool for controlling and automating daily business processes," said PappaRich's director, F&B sector, Phoebe Ong.
She said the platform also empowers Pappa Rich's staff with tools to manage their tasks and team more effectively.
"For example, during this challenging Covid-19 crisis, we disseminated training videos and group wide memos to all our outlets and staffs using the DingTalk platform.
"Our outlet team then uploaded photos/videos of their application of training videos at the store. The team enjoyed the learning as well as interacting with colleagues from different outlets. This enhances team spirit and a healthy level of team competitiveness," she explained.
Meanwhile, for TNG Wallet, the company uses DingTalk exclusively for teams' collaboration.
"We have found it a very useful communication and collaboration platform for digitalising and automating software engineering business processes, such as on-duty alerts and workflow approvals," said the company's chief technology officer, Aman Kapoor.
"It also empowers our people with tools to manage their tasks and team more efficiently and effectively," he added.