Kaizala, the made-for-India Microsoft chat app is retiring soon: What this means for its users

Tech giant Microsoft is planning to discontinue its 'made for India' group-messaging service Kaizala on August 31 next year.

According to ZDNet, after that date, support for and access to the service will be discontinued and users will be migrated to Microsoft Teams. Until then, existing Kaizala customers will be able to continue using the service.

Meanwhile, no new users will be on-boarded onto Kaizala; instead, they will be on-boarded directly to Teams for chat, meetings and calling.

According to a note Microsoft has shared with Microsoft 365 partners, "many Kaizala users have Office 365 or Microsoft 365 licenses and have not fully enabled them".

The app, launched in India in 2017, was designed for large group communications and work management, even for remote locations with 2G optimisation.

Powered by the Azure Cloud platform, 'Kaizala' would help organisations seamlessly communicate, collaborate and complete tasks and bring together desktop users and mobile-only users who may be within or outside their organisations.

In India, the company had also launched 'Kaizala Pro' -- an enterprise version that allows organisations to have full administrative control of their groups -- for purchase at a list price of Rs 130 per user per month.