Chinese eCommerce giant Alibaba Group is piloting a mobile messaging app that aims to combine social networking with enterprise, part of its expansion of business services.

The app, Dingtalk, was soft-launched in beta in December, and is capable of hosting conference calls and group messaging discussions. The app is targeted at small- and medium-sized companies, many of which already work with Alibaba on its various eCommerce platforms.

Alibaba has attempted to break into the mobile messaging space before with an app called Laiwang, but this was seen by many as a failure and never managed to have an impact on the Chinese market.

The companys main rival, Tencent, operates WeChat (known as Weixin in China), which boasts 468 monthly active users and is estimated to be worth $64bn (£42.2bn).

The announcement comes the same week as Facebook has launched its Facebook At Work platform, which also aims to blend social networking and enterprise software, providing users with collaborative working tools and group messaging features.