Microsoft to retire its ‘Made for India’ group messaging service in August 2023

|HT|

Microsoft will retire its ‘Made for India’ group messaging service, Kaizala, in August next year, according to media reports.

“On August 26, Microsoft officials told partners that they are planning to retire Kaizala as of August 31, 2023. After that date, support for and access to the service will be discontinued,” reported ZDNet, a business technology website which first carried the story.

Until that date, existing users can continue to use the service, but no new user will be onboarded, the report further said, adding that all new customers will be directly onboarded to Teams, the tech giant's business communication platform.

According to ZDNet, Microsoft has shared a note with Microsoft 365 partners, informing them that several Kaizala users, who have Microsoft 365 (also called Office 365) licenses are yet to enable these; Teams is a part of MS 365 family of products.

“Discontinuation of Kaizala is an opportunity for our partners to move its users to Teams,” the note said.

As an ‘incentive’, the company will allow Kaizala users to check out Teams for free for the next 12 next months.

The platform derives its name from Kaizala, the Marathi phrase for ‘What happened?’ It was launched in India in July 2017 to facilitate large group communications and work management, even for remote locations with 2G optimisation.

It is available as free Android, iOS and web application.

(Except for the headline and the pictorial description, this story has not been edited by THE DEN staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)