With the novel coronavirus pneumonia (COVID-19) sweeping the country, a number of companies and organizations have set in motion the remote/home office mode to avoid gathering of people as a way of minimizing the risk of epidemic spreading.

In response to this demand, Tencent launched Cloud Office Portfolio, which encompasses a variety of collaborative office products such as Tencent Meeting, WeCom*, QQ, Tencent Doc, TAPD, Lexiangla, and CODING. In addition to offering its own SaaS products, Tencent will work with partners including Kingdee, Yonyou, wbg.do1.com.cn, Fadada.com, and KNX to provide users with more capabilities.

Tencent Meeting, a representative product in the Cloud Office Portfolio, is an Internet-based collaboration tool that covers a wide range of scenarios including online teaching, remote conference, telemedicine, and mobile office. Its real-time audio/video chat feature, which is available for free during the epidemic, supports communication between up to 300 people.

Beijing Urban Construction Design & Development Group is among the companies using Tencent Meeting for their online office. In order to ensure uninterrupted production during the epidemic, more than 8,000 employees of the Group work remotely with others using Tencent Meeting, which allows them to synchronize their work with others and report project progress online. With the tool, more than 100 online meetings are held every day.

Likewise, many companies have chosen Tencent Meeting as their online office tool during the Spring Festival. Tencent has been optimizing the product to adapt to the companies' ever-changing business need. From January 29 to February 6, to cater for the rapidly growing demand for remote office during the epidemic, Tencent Meeting scaled up its capacity of computing resources by putting over 1 million CPU cores in place, with a daily addition of 15,000 CVMs and a total addition of more than 100,000 CVMs. 

At the same time, the education sector has a burgeoning demand for online teaching. As schools and universities nationwide have delayed their opening as a result of the epidemic, many teachers and students have turned to online class to continue their teaching and learning.

Mr. Zhang is working at a senior high school in Hubei, which is among the schools using Tencent Meeting for online teaching. With a teacher in the school diagnosed with COVID-19 and quarantined for treatment, how to enable nearly 500 teachers to continue their teaching for more than 6,000 students safely became the biggest concern of Mr. Zhang. With the help of his daughter, he started to try online teaching with Tencent Meeting. Mr. Zhang's school has set up a number of meeting rooms using Tencent Meeting to hold meetings for assigning tasks or notifying/reporting the progress of battle against epidemic. Many third-grade students, who are preparing for the national college entrance exam, have started to use Tencent Meeting for online learning.

As a proprietary SaaS product, Tencent Meeting is designed to accommodate complex needs of vertical industries, such as medicine, education and judicatory, by coming in multiple editions and providing a rich variety of capabilities. At the development stage of the product, Tencent gave a lot of attention to its API design, in a bid to broaden its coverage of scenarios together with independent developers. 

WeCom is another signature product in the Cloud Office Portfolio. As a communication tool for employees to increase communication efficiency within and outside organizations, WeCom supports a chat group of up to 10,000 participants. During the epidemic period, WeCom announced a free upgrade facilitates up to 300 participants per audio/video conference call. With a range of free applications including Announcement, Attendance, Approvals, Report, Calendar and collaboration tools such as WeDoc and WeDrive, WeCom helps enhance productivity for companies and their employees.

Besides collaborative office capabilities, WeCom incorporates a series of epidemic-related services, such as online consultation, which allows doctors to provide services online to reduce the pressure on hospitals and minimize the risk of infection. Hospitals can also use the Emergency Notifications feature to notify medical workers of any emergency during the epidemic.

Some products in the Cloud Office Portfolio have rolled out services to give various supports during the outbreak. Meanwhile, Tencent launched Collaborative Office Security Solution, which is offered for free during the epidemic. It can help companies authenticate employees' identities and trace various operations to ensure the security of data and devices, giving companies and employees a worry-free working experience.

Keeping everything on track and undisrupted is of great significance to the fight against the epidemic, whether for businesses and for educators. Tencent will join hands with more partners to deliver more products and services that empower organizations and individuals in various industries to better respond to the tough challenge.

*The product name was changed from WeChat Work to WeCom on September 20, 2020.