We Chat, We Work, We Write
Chinese internet giant, Tencent, gets frequent attention and plenty of well-deserved praise for its revolutionary app, WeChat. Starting out as a homegrown Chinese answer to the phenomenally popular WhatsApp, it has evolved into an platform in itself and boasts almost 650 million monthly active users as of Q4, 2015.
But also equally worthy of attention are the huge number of app builders who are working within the strict confines of WeChat to build third-party features that make it easier and easier for users to stay within WeChat to do almost anything. One such developer who has come to attention in recent weeks is Yiqixie, better known to the outside world by their English name, Write Together.
Creating and sharing a simple text document with Write Together in WeChat
Office Suite in WeChat
Write Together provides an almost-complete Microsoft Office-type suite to create documents, forms and spreadsheets all from within WeChat itself. Choosing to ‘follow’ their official account (the WeChat equivalent of ‘liking’ a Facebook page) allows you to access the application at anytime and use the menus at the bottom of the screen to create new documents all from within the WeChat window. The functions are surprisingly well-developed for a simple app-in-app and more than satisfactory for creating and editing simple office text documents and spreadsheets. By following them inside WeChat, a user’s WeChat account is used for log-in, and therefore a Write Together account is automatically created. This then opens the door to the sharing of documents with your WeChat contacts with a few simple clicks.
Desktop version of Write Together spreadsheet
The innovation doesn’t stop there either. Thanks to WeChat’s desktop application, files can be edited and shared either straight inside the Windows desktop version of WeChat, or if you are on a Mac, in a separate browser window, accessed by scanning a QR code on Write Together’s homepage. All this makes Write Together a truly multi-platform solution and an easy option for workers on the go.
Sharing documents straight from the desktop version through WeChat
Few Work-Life Boundaries
WeChat is a way of life in China, and the failure of enterprise messenger services such as Slack, and their Chinese copycats like Mingdao, to gain market share can be largely attributed to WeChat’s ubiquity. Chinese users seem to be a lot less concerned with separating personal and business contacts than their Western counterparts, and so WeChat offers a simple solution to work messaging as well as socializing with friends.
The rolling out of WeChat Enterprise Accounts earlier in the year will help to solve even the problems of those few who do desire separation of work and social, by adding on some key functions. The ability to create Slack-style work groups within WeChat, the removal of the need for all employees of a company to be ‘friends’ before engaging in a chat, and the ability to ‘snooze’ work chats at certain times of the day, means that WeChat is likely to increase its presence in Chinese work life as much as it has done in people’s personal lives. Viewed through this lens, Write Together seems to have arrived at the perfect time.
Google Drive
Filling a Void
It also helps to fill a large void in cloud office solutions within China. While Chinese netizens have coped with the blocking of cloud storage providers such as Dropbox by developing their own (360 and Baidu being amongst the most popular), few alternatives to the in-browser office suite solutions provided with cloud drives, such as Microsoft’s OneDrive and Google Drive, have emerged. Most Chinese office workers continue to be restricted to using offline versions of Microsoft Office and the sharing their files back-and-forth, resulting in a lot of overwriting and many wasted hours. Write Together helps to solve this market gap, and by integrating with WeChat, is definitely a company to watch in the near future.
(Written with Write Together — of course)
Images: Google Images and Personal
This post was imported from my Medium, which I used for blogging between 2015 and 2019.
