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Lark makes teamworking easy with online collaboration tools: Vinay Bhartia

Lark’s free version comes with unlimited video calls with upto 100 participants, live streaming, 200GB of cloud storage, covert voice to text as message

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Pradeep Chakraborty
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Lark combines video conferencing, online docs, cloud storage, calendar and more. It makes teamwork easy with top online collaboration tools‎, all making work from home and remote working very easy. Vinay Bhartia, India Head, Lark, tells us more. Excerpts from an interview:

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DQ: How are you dealing with the Covid-19 situation? What plans do you have in place?

Vinay Bhartia: Today, every industry across the world is facing its own set of challenges and trying to adapt to the new norms of business. As a result, more and more organizations have started to use digital platforms to operate everyday tasks and conduct business continuity. As they continue to gain experience on such platforms to manage and execute their tasks, there is more acceptance towards them.

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With Lark, we are empowering professionals and organizations to become productive and adopt new age tools and solutions. We emphasize on reaching out to more businesses across verticals that are looking out for best options for working remotely and can provide full office automation to make their work more productive, efficient, and support them to smoothly transition to a remote working scenario.

With our robust outreach programs and multiple channel partners, we are building a loyal customer base by providing a dedicated customer success team, creating awareness around our platform while educating our potential customers through webinars/workshops and engaging with influencers to highlight our differential offerings.

DQ: How are you facilitating digital work?

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Vinay Bhartia: Looking at the current scenario, the lockdown will lead to a cultural shift in a way the businesses currently operate today. Today remote collaboration has become imperative for business continuity.

Presently, we are facilitating digital work by helping people and businesses in need. Recently, we announced Lark suite being available for free in India. As businesses across the world are rapidly responding to the COVID-19 outbreak with initiatives ranging from travel restrictions, mandatory work from home and remote learning policies, Lark bridges the gap as a robust, easy-to-use collaborative and communication tool that helps people to stay connected.

The service is also extended for free to the individuals, businesses and educational Institutes including, schools, colleges and coaching classes across India, enabling remote working between teachers and students that will effectively and rapidly manage workflow.

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Currently, Lark’s free version comes with unlimited video calls upto 100 participants, (with advanced screen sharing), live streaming, 200GB of cloud storage, covert voice to text as message, supports localization for customers and markets, customizable attendance/approval workflows, etc. These features are all synchronized so there is no longer any need to juggle between applications to get work done.

DQ: How are the latest technologies going to redefine workplace?

Vinay Bhartia: With the ongoing lockdown, businesses across the world discovered the benefits of technologies that enabled us to communicate and collaborate remotely while maintaining social distancing. Remote collaboration proved to be beneficial as it is more economical and time-saving.

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More and more small and large businesses are leveraging it and thus, making it a new norm. This is a cultural shift that we will witness even after the lockdown is over. During these challenging times, technology empowered people to achieve success in business continuity and their livelihood with online meetings, classes, lectures, and sessions. Remote collaborative platforms have brought together people from different groups to work together to achieve desired goals across sectors and verticals.

Some of the technologies that will redefine the workplace are:

Digital communication – The way we work is redefined today, digital communication tools such as video conferencing, chat, announcement and file sharing apps ensure that meetings across organizations are conducted seamlessly without any glitches or delay. This will continue to happen as now we have experienced the benefits personally. Many SMEs will also gradually start video conferencing to conduct meetings, reviews, etc., and will get a competitive advantage over others.

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Project management tools - Project management tools help in better remote collaboration. Teams can collaborate virtually, share their ideas and get approvals on them seamlessly. These apps also come with to-do lists, calendars that keep track of meetings facilitating remote connectivity on another level.

Cloud computing - It facilitates business to store data online which can be accessed from anywhere beyond the confines of the office walls. Cloud services are not new and have been here for some time and many organizations have invested in these to ensure a paperless office. Given the pandemic and remote communication and collaboration system, the demand for cloud services is further going to increase.

Office automation – Office automation will lead to ‘phygital’ offices that will be a combination of digital and physical office space. With the tools available today business can fully automate their processes by integrating all the collaborative tools under one app making it a faster and more organized system. The way work is conducted, and business will run will change drastically with a heavier reliance on these collaborative tools.

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DQ: What are the solutions that you are now offering for Future of work/WFH?

Vinay Bhartia: Lark is a next-generation all-in-one collaborative platform that offers:

Seamless connectivity: On Lark, various components of the suite (Messenger, Docs, Calendar, Video Conferencing, Workplace) are deeply integrated and this allows to have some unique features like Insert a group chat in a Doc, check team members' schedules right from a chat, launch a video call right from a calendar event. Also, Lark Workplace which includes native apps like Approval and Attendance, as well as customizable third-party integrations that allows organizations to unite internal workflows and in-house applications into one single platform. It is mobile-friendly as well - the work that is created and stored on Lark is synced in real-time across all devices

Affordability: Lark is the only product in the market that offers an enterprise-grade collaboration suite for free, with no limit on duration/team size. When it comes to large companies that have special need for customized customer success service, Lark provides a paid enterprise version as well as value added services.

Advanced collaborative tools: Users can make the best use of the features like instant messaging, smart calendar, Lark Docs and Sheets, and online space and drive. Users get the freedom of conducting video conferencing with up to 100 people with unlimited minutes and can also Broadcast live to your teams and external users with chat mode.

Safe and secured platform: Lark has passed most of the certified security standards in the world, including ISO 27701, ISO 27018, ISO 27001, SOC 2 and SOC 3 certifications. We are now certified to ISO 27701, the international standard for Privacy Information Management.

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