Online offices become popular in China

Online offices have rapidly developed in China, according to the 48th Statistical Report on Internet Development in China released by the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC).

The report shows that there were 381 million online office users in China by June 2021, accounting for 37.7 percent of the total number of netizens and an increase of 35.06 million over December 2020.

Online offices have become popular since the COVID-19 outbreak. [Photo/IC]

Rising online office demand

More people are enjoying online offices, as there's no need to catch the early bus or subway, or struggle to make appointments for meeting rooms. Everything can be done through a computer, smart phone and coordinated online platforms.

Online office demand has been rapidly increasing during the COVID-19 outbreak, as both government policies and enterprises have encouraged people to work from home.

In July 2020, 13 government departments jointly issued a guideline on activating the consumer market and promoting employment through new business patterns and modes. The guideline encourages improving basic infrastructure of digital applications like electronic contracts, invoices, seals, signatures and authentication to support online offices.

According to the report, the number of online office users went up by 91.2 percent within a year, and in the first half of 2021, the average daily online meeting time reached 36 minutes. By June this year, usage of online video/teleconferencing and online document writing/editing were at 23.8 percent and 23.8 percent, up by 1.0 and 2.6 percentage points respectively compared to December 2020.

Pan Helin, executive dean of the Digital Economy Research Institute at the Zhongnan University of Economics and Law, said distance offices save both time and money. Online offices will continue to develop and gradually become a regular part of life as people get used to them.

Online offices save both time and money. [Photo/IC]

Developing technological innovation

The livestreaming platform Dingding announced on Oct 13 that its number of users, which includes enterprises, organizations and institutes, had exceeded 19 million, while Tencent Meeting, which provides a platform for online meetings, said it had nearly 200 million users by Nov 3. The total attendance of online meetings on the platform exceeded 4 billion in the past year.

The growing number of users has pushed online offices to upgrade their offerings.

The report indicates that online office service providers will focus on improving response speed, storage capacity and functional suitability with construction of a new type of infrastructure based on 5G, big data, the Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI).

Take AI for instance. Many applications like Tencent Meeting, Baidu AI Cloud and Fengyun Software can convert voices directly into text during meetings by using automatic speech recognition (ASR) and natural language processing.

Low-code development has been an industrial trend in recent years. It uses a visualized application development approach to enable developers to quickly create web pages and mobile applications, which lowers the application threshold.

In 2021, customized low-code development services started to emerge on online office platforms. This August, Dingdingda, the first low-code composition platform in China, was launched. More than 100 low-code development models for human resource assistance, administrative management and marketing management can be found there. Users can complete an application within a few seconds.

Emerging technologies contribute to the improvement of online office applications. [Photo/IC]

Promoting enterprise management efficiency

Online office platforms will play a role in promoting digital transformation of enterprises.

Miao Rong, chief researcher of the research department at the China Enterprise Confederation, said the increasing demand for online offices will promote coordinated online and offline work in enterprises and push forward informatization, intelligentization and automatic construction and management.

The report shows that internet enterprises are offering highly-efficient and professional services by launching various applications and optimizing their ecological systems.

For example, in addition to livestreaming, Dingding also provides solutions for medical and new retail industries, while WeChat for Work has initiated a fund to help with enterprises' digital transformation.