We Spent a Day Working in WeCom. Your Job May Soon Depend on It

Put simply, it's WeChat with the entertainment stripped out.

How many times a day do you check WeChat? And how many of those times are for work?

WeChat has become the office tool of nearly everyone in China. Small businesses, giant state-owned enterprises, even foreign firms that already have Skype and SharePoint: all of them now handle more and more of their daily communication, announcements and even file transfers on WeChat.

The trouble is that WeChat has everything, so you have to check it all the time, and you never know whether a ping is work or some unrelated push notification. Our already limited time gets chopped into even smaller pieces.

WeCom, which surfaced recently, is a version of WeChat that tries to keep your work and your life apart. QDaily got into the beta, and we spent a day working in it.

Here is what working on WeChat may look like in the future.

What is it like to work in WeCom?

Download and login: no need to add your colleagues as friends all over again.

WeCom is still in closed beta, so you can't download it from the iPhone or Android app stores yet.

If your company already uses Tencent Enterprise Email or WeChat Enterprise Accounts, it can apply to the WeChat team for free beta access.

Although WeCom hasn't officially launched, it already runs on iOS, Android, Windows and Mac. Compare that with WeChat, which took nearly three years to ship a Windows client. The Mac version of WeCom can also load your message history, which the regular Mac version of WeChat cannot.

An administrator who receives an SMS invitation opens an account through the link, then imports the employee directory and org chart already stored in Enterprise Email or Enterprise Accounts. New hires no longer have to add their colleagues' contact details one by one.

Employees who aren't in the existing directory have to be added separately: the administrator enters their phone numbers in the back end and sends them an invitation.

Invited employees get a text message with a download link. Once the app is installed, they log in with their WeChat account by entering their phone number. The invitation can also be shared through WeChat. After an employee registers, an administrator only has to approve them.

Messaging: a stripped-down WeChat, with no stickers and no video calls.

If you use WeChat for work, you have probably noticed how easily Moments and the push notifications from official accounts pull you away and slow you down.

In WeCom, every feature that has nothing to do with work has been removed.

The chat screen is a pared-down WeChat. Short-video recording, business-card sharing, coupon sharing, red envelopes, money transfers and voice input are all missing from the chat toolbar.

The emoji panel offers only QQ's default set, and you can't add or send custom stickers. Perhaps the WeChat team decided nobody needs them at work.

The walkie-talkie feature and video and voice calls are gone too. In WeCom you can send only the two most common kinds of message: text and voice notes.

Company-paid calls: voice calls with several colleagues at once

Like Alibaba's DingTalk, WeCom lets you make free calls, either one-on-one or as multi-party conference calls. For now every team, whatever its size, shares a pool of 1,000 minutes. Beyond that, you can top up at 0.06 yuan a minute.

Company-paid calls don't mean employees can make personal calls as they please. Administrators can see every call record and its length in the back end.

Read receipts: you'll know whether someone has read your message

WeCom does more than cut features from WeChat. Its new "read receipt" feature marks a message as read as each person sees it. If some people still haven't read it after a while, the sender can easily find them and send it again. The feature is off by default, though: you have to turn it on in the plug-in panel before sending each message.

Curiously, at an event in 2012, Zhang Xiaolong, the father of WeChat, said: "If your boss messages you [on WeChat] and you read it but don't reply, that's a real problem. We have to give people the chance to lie. What is human nature? Giving people the chance to lie." One wonders whether read receipts are a concession to the enterprise market.

Reminders and breaks: something like to-do alerts you can set for colleagues

WeCom also adds a reminder tool to the chat plug-ins. You can set a reminder time in a one-on-one or group chat, and everyone is notified when the time comes.

If someone agrees to do something in a conversation, you can long-press that message and turn it straight into a reminder. That makes the app a task-management tool as well.

WeChat assumes you are online 24 hours a day. WeCom's home menu, by contrast, has a feature called "Take a Break," with two options: "Short Break" and "Off Work." The first silences WeCom notifications for an hour; the second silences them until 9 a.m. the next day.

The catch is that if someone calls you, the call still gets through. If you were hoping to dodge last-minute overtime, this feature won't help.

Attendance, expenses and clocking in, built for Chinese companies

WeCom also has features for administrative work. Announcements, attendance, leave requests and expense claims can all be handled in the app.

How useful they are is another matter. Expense claims, for example, don't connect to the finance system. An administrator has to export an Excel sheet from the back end and forward it to HR by hand.

There is also a rather alarming clock-in feature. It records the employee's location directly and can count toward attendance, and employees can't manually change their location to clock in from somewhere too far away.

For now, WeCom is positioned as a messaging platform for use inside a company. If you need to deal with people outside it, you will probably still have to use WeChat.

How is it different from other collaboration tools?

The rival at home: DingTalk

DingTalk, which Alibaba launched in January 2015, is the main rival to WeChat Enterprise Accounts. The product looked crude at launch, but after a year of improvements and heavy marketing it has signed up more than one million companies, including Uber, Smartisan and Toutiao.

DingTalk stresses features built specifically for companies, such as:

• Every message you send shows whether the recipient has read it;
• Important messages can be converted to speech automatically and delivered to the recipient's phone as a call;
• "Bathhouse Mode," in which all employees of a company can chat anonymously.

As a messaging tool, DingTalk favors managers. A boss's message, for instance, can become an automated phone call to employees, with the boss's name on the caller ID.

WeCom is more even-handed and gives managers no such special powers.

Where DingTalk is ahead for now is its platform of business services. Since the 2.0 upgrade last August, it has brought in third-party services such as MikeForm and Tower, so companies can collect forms, manage tasks and even run simple ERP inside DingTalk.

A major service provider on DingTalk told QDaily that it would like to build similar features for WeCom, but WeChat hasn't opened its platform to outside developers yet.

In a post on its official account, the WeChat team described WeCom as just "a small fish splashing in a puddle" of the enterprise app market, because "China has at least several million companies of real scale." Yet in China, clearly, only Alibaba is competing at WeChat's scale. In January this year Alibaba appointed Wang Hao, founder of the music service Xiami, as DingTalk's vice president of business.

The leader abroad: Slack

The most closely watched workplace chat tool in the world is surely Slack, a startup founded only in 2012 and already valued at $4 billion.

Its biggest difference from WeCom and DingTalk is its channels, which work like discussion groups. Members can browse every public channel, join whichever they like and read the full history of past discussions.

In short, Slack is a far more open product. That openness extends to integrations: most major Western services already connect to Slack, and companies can easily build new features of their own. As a result, a Slack channel can become almost any tool: booking hotels, hailing cars, reading news, filtering information...

WeCom, by comparison, is simply a WeChat better suited to work. For most Chinese companies, though, it may also be the better fit.

Tencent has been selling to businesses for more than a decade. What did it make before?

Yesterday the WeChat team said in an official statement that "WeCom was developed and refined on the basis of RTX."

On September 9, 2003, at the Kerry Centre in Beijing, Tencent launched RTX (Real Time eXchange), an instant-messaging tool for companies. That same year, besides launching QQ.com and QQ Games, Tencent created BQQ (Business QQ), a brand for its enterprise business. RTX was its first finished product.

To keep it well apart from personal chat, RTX began as a QQ that ran on a local network: colleagues could message each other and send files without an internet connection. But on top of installing the client on every employee's computer, the IT department had to set up a server, which made it very hard going for small and mid-sized companies.

Tencent carried its habit of making its own teams compete with each other into enterprise services. Three months after RTX, it released another instant messenger designed for office use: Tencent Messenger (TM).

TM worked with QQ accounts but dropped almost all of QQ's entertainment features, leaving only text chat, video, voice and file transfer. It ran only on Windows PCs, and updates stopped in June 2014.

RTX survives to this day, but mainly as a tool Tencent uses in-house. That may be the usual fate of failed messaging products from China's internet giants: Baidu Hi and NetEase Popo also ended up as internal company messengers.

Tencent's second attempt at enterprise services was Enterprise QQ in 2008. Unlike RTX, it could import customers' QQ numbers, so conversations weren't confined to one company. Enterprise QQ never became a widely used workplace tool; it turned into a marketing and customer-service product instead. Open the website of a small study-abroad agency, and the first thing to pop up is a QQ customer-service window.

It is fair to say that, to this day, Tencent has never really built office collaboration software. Unless you count talking about work on WeChat.

Reportedly, Tencent's WeChat business group began seriously considering office software in early 2014. WeChat Enterprise Accounts entered beta in August 2014, and a month later it opened its interfaces to outside developers for testing.

But Enterprise Accounts were only a kind of official account for a company's internal operations. They offered mobile-office features such as clocking in, business-trip requests and expense claims online, but people still did their everyday talking on WeChat itself. Private messages, work, sales promotions and official-account articles all flowed through one feed. The underlying problem remained.

What else does WeCom mean?

China has no tradition of digital collaboration tools. Most companies rarely even use email. The digital tools in the office mostly stop at Microsoft Office and software tied directly to the business, such as the property-management back end of a rental-housing company.

Yet work keeps getting more intense, and people need to talk in real time whether or not they are in the office. WeChat, which already reaches more than 500 million Chinese-speaking users, is now used for work, and for most companies that is their first large-scale use of "mobile office" tools, whether or not WeChat releases a professional version.

But WeChat is not a good collaboration tool. It mixes people's work and private lives, and it comes with a reader, shopping and a wallet. Work can catch you at any hour (think of the weekends when a WeChat notification made you worry it was a new assignment). On top of that, all sorts of unrelated things interrupt us while we work.

DingTalk, Alibaba's collaboration software, spotted this need. Even though Alibaba has little social-network data of its own, DingTalk is doing well.

Now WeChat has built a rival product and brought it out within two months. WeChat may be late, but its advantage lies in its social network: its 500 million users were already using it to talk and work together.

To shake off a competitor like WeCom, DingTalk and its peers will probably have to become much better than they are now.