Corporate Wechat or Wechat Work
It’s no secret that there is a world of difference between messengers for personal needs and messengers for work communication. Using personal Wechat for work communication is a sure sign that somewhere your company has taken a wrong turn.
If in the Western world there is simply no alternative to the great Slack, then in China, there was no normal alternative until recently. Slack, for all its undeniable merits, has several drawbacks:
- it is really pretty heavyweight (especially when overloaded with plug-ins)
- for those who are in China – Slack is after all outside the Chinese firewall, which, as you perfectly understand, does not give any guarantees about its performance and availability.
This was the case until recently. When registering Wechat public accounts and widgets, I saw a notice that it is possible to register a beta of corporate Wechat from 2016. However, only since December 2019, with the release of version 3.0, it finally became something that can be used relatively regularly. Although it is not officially in beta status, nevertheless, every now and then you come across untranslated places, ridiculous mistakes, and so on. But one already perceives that the main childhood illnesses have been overcome and all this can be utilized at the level when the benefits of employing it exceed the costs of implementation and usage.
So what is it anyway? In short, this question can be answered with the first rule of Linux. If you don’t know what it is, then you don’t need it. But if you think you need it, please read on.
It is a system with thousands and thousands of functions integrated with a messenger, task organizer, corporate cloud, corporate mail, meeting planner, office document editor, a tool for obtaining approvals, monitoring of employee communication with clients, file archive. Moreover, this system allows you to integrate external solutions for specific tasks (both third-party and developed by yourself).
To put this long story even shorter, it is a full-fledged company management from one application.
And the main thing is that it’s Wechat after all. That is, it is fully integrated with all the countless services from Tencent, as well as with the personal version of Wechat. For example, in this particular chat I can be sure that I am communicating with a representative of the Ping An insurance company.
That is, instead of struggling to convince someone that s/he is communicating with a company representative, it is much easier to add them from Wechat Work. The fact that the company is responsible for everything that is said from the corporate Wechat is reminded in large letters when employees are added there.
It’s very easy to get started. You go to the Wechat Work website, register an account there (or, if you have previously registered a Wechat Public Account, Wechat mini-app and so on, you go to their admin panel) and press the “开通” button. After a simple registration, you get to the admin panel and get verified in the way habitual for China, that is by transferring a certain amount from your company’s account (in our case it was 0.43 yuan) to a one-time account provided by Tencent – and that’s it. You can start using it.
In principle, even a novice user who doesn’t want to bother with fine-tuning for their needs – even s/he will find here a large number of templates and processes that will make things much easier. Various approvals – for business trips, for requesting documents, for affixing seals – everything has already been created, you just need to give someone administrator rights and the right to approve requests.
There is a whole infrastructure underlying each button. Should you need to share the document with the necessary colleagues – welcome to 微文档. Should you need to hold a conference – welcome to 会议. Should you need a task scheduler and execution control – welcome to 日程. And so on.
And if standard templates are not enough for you, then you can head directly for third-party applications. Smart warehouse with full Wechat integration – yes please. Do you want a smart 考勤机 – here is a Wechat Work brand store, which sells face scanners tailored for it, with the ability to register upon arrival at work, a thermometer and an automatic report to the employee’s health status (which can call an ambulance from the hospital if it is above 37.3. I’m joking). If you want a full-fledged management of electronic contracts that are drawn up according to state standards, approved in one click and automatically registered with the relevant authorities – welcome here again. The list is endless, and if something is missing, you can always order the development of a specific product for your needs.
Wechat Work has English localization (so far with flaws, but every month it is getting better), which lowers the entry threshold for foreign users. It is completely free of charge (although in the free version the number of company’s employees is limited to 300). There you can create groups of up to 2000 people and make video calls with 300 participants. To put it in a nutshell, if you were looking for something that will save you from bureaucracy and allow you to do a lot in one click – this is what you were looking for.
Well, there is not much to elaborate on. This, like Slack, Dingtalk and similar applications, is a constructor that everyone assembles for themselves.
Thank you for your attention