Microsoft offers new Outlook add-in for China’s Didi Chuxing ride sharing service

Arif Bacchus

Microsoft is offering a new Outlook add-in for China’s Didi Chuxing ride-sharing service. It all is part of efforts to ease the pains of business customers who use the ride-sharing service to get around town and from their offices to appointments.

As part of the Outlook add-in, DiDi Enterprise customers in China can arrange for business transportation with a simple click or tap from  the command bar from within their Outlook email screen. This ultimately eliminates the hassle of payments and paperwork which companies usually face when it comes to providing transportation. According to Microsoft, The add-in itself is also able to recognize keywords in email subject lines or the body of emails, such as “meeting” or “airport,” and instantly issue a prompt to an employee with a link to the DiDi add-in.

The add-in itself is available exclusively in China for Outlook 2016, Outlook 2013, and Outlook on the web users with Office 365, Exchange 2016 and Exchange 2013 mailboxes. Use of the service requires a DiDi Enterprise account, which can be accessed here. 

Office, Outlook, Add-ins
A similar Outlook add-in with command buttons on the ribbon

Derk Du, Vice President of Didi Chuxing and general manager of DiDi Enterprise, nonetheless, expressed appreciation for the power of Office 365. He also looks forward to what the add-in will offer to the company’s reach, and said:

“Office 365 is the leading and open platform supported by all the mainstream operating systems and devices, and the add-in is easy to integrate… Together with Microsoft, DiDi Enterprise will be able to reach a vast global customer base… This innovative partnership will be a lighthouse attracting more independent software vendors to be part of our new, thriving ecosystem, and help our Office 365 customers save operation costs, improve productivity and reinvent business processes.”

DiDi Enterprise is a relatively new service in China, and it was originally launched about a year ago. According to Derek Du,  DiDi Enterprise has served about 30,000 active corporate customers and had provided  for more than 5 million employees.