elgana is a business chat service from the telecom carrier NTT West, built to be usable by staff with little IT experience. It targets small businesses without IT staff and workplaces with field crews, shift workers or older employees. The service runs in data centers in Japan.
For each talk room, members can hide read status, show a read count, or also show who has read each message. Task templates for scheduling, work reports and announcements let staff assign work or notify everyone at once. Voice calls are built in, but video meetings rely on an integrated external service.
Administrators register every user, and a dedicated audit role can extract message logs. Login can be limited to approved devices or specific IP addresses, and removing a device logs it out and erases its app data. A digital watermark warns users against screenshots and photos.
Signup is online, in the name of a company or organization. There is no free plan, only two paid per-user plans billed monthly or yearly. A yearly contract has a minimum term and number of users and renews automatically. Companies apply for a free trial of the Base plan through a form, and billing starts automatically when it ends.