Team chat + video that works for everyone

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koala

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  • #1
    So I'm working at a small startup. We have O365 because it's what our investors like.

    However, all employees dislike Teams heavily. Mostly because simple stuff like we have not found a way to do code blocks in chat without having to click through dialogs. (Actually, I just tried again, and on "old Teams" it's working, but not in "new Teams", WTF?)

    The other issue we have is that many employees are on Linux.

    I have worked in a company with many Linux-using employees and we used successfully:
    • Google Workspace (Meet + Chat). This actually worked pretty well for A/V, working well across people on Linux/Mac and phones. But the chat functionality was pretty bad
    • Slack. This also worked well and people tend to like Slack, for some reason.
    • BlueJeans. Which even had RPMs... But it's a bit clunky and it really doesn't do chat.
    At my current company we've tried:
    • Discord. Actually much nicer than I expected. But not really proper for a business. And Linux has issues around screensharing and video.
    • Teams. Strong dislike by everyone.
    • Jitsi. Actually this works flawlessly for everyone, save for a Mac user- and I think it's solvable (just some Continuity unexpected behavior, probably). But it'st just for conferences, so we would need to combine it with something else.
    • Matrix. Very complex, and calls with more than two people are with Jitsi at the moment, and it works worse than standalone Jitsi. There's a beta for a new conferencing system which looks promising from quick tests.
    On the cards:
    • Zulip. I've actually used this with some OSS projects and the chat is very... quirky, but I've liked what I've seen. But conferencing is either Zoom, Jitsi, and BigBlueButton. If Jitsi worked well (like standalone Jitsi, not Matrix-embedded-Jitsi), it could be an option
    • ...
    Is there some player missing? I kinda suspected 8x8 (the guys behind Jitsi) would have some UCaaS solution, but it looks expensive and "call us". And even though Jitsi is so flawless under Linux that I suspect 8x8 employees are using Linux internally, their UCaaS doesn't mention Linux support anywhere.

    (For me, I could switch to Windows... but we do have to work with some Linux-only stuff too..)
     
    Ardax

    Ardax

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  • #3
    grahamb said:
    Code blocks work fine in Teams chat, but you have to put a space after the three backticks for it to trigger.
    Click to expand...
    Fuckin' really Teams?

    (Edit: Actually, it seems like I have to use a space every time, but it's worked in both chats, posts, and post replies for me so far in New Teams.)

    For the OP, seems to me I'd recommend Slack or Google if everyone is down on Teams that much.

    Is Zoom pushing into the workplace chat space yet? I'd be surprised if they aren't.

    Meta also has Facebook Workplace. Don't consider this a recommendation, rather a notification that it -- for some reason -- exists.

    Discord is honestly pretty nice, but... I'd have concerns. For a business, I'd feel better if there was someone to pay and someone to blame. That might have some unfortunate side effects for their product on the personal side though.
     
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    koala

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  • #4
    grahamb said:
    Code blocks work fine in Teams chat, but you have to put a space after the three backticks for it to trigger.
    Click to expand...
    Awesome, thanks. You can also do triple backtick + language name + space to get syntax highlighting. But Rust is not supported...

    ... and code blocks are truncated by default, you need to click "see more"...

    Slack is on the cards for evaluation, I think. Google Workspace would be bizarre because we already have O365.

    Yeah, Zoom seems to have some team chat now. Plus whiteboarding. I feel they had the most polished videoconferencing at some point (and I never had issues with them on Linux), but I thought they had stagnated a little bit.

    ...

    Yeah, it's weird because Discord is really nice and featureful, but it focuses on a different market. We have issues getting invoices from them, for example. Plus we started seeing ads...

    ...

    (It's fun because for personal stuff I've started using IRC more, and it's surprising that you really can provide a modern experience easily nowadays. There's OAUTH-ready bouncers, web interfaces, and smartphone apps which feel like the modern chat solutions. But faster, and with client choice. I think you could integrate Jitsi on top of that and build something quite nice.)
     
    papadage

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  • #10
    Ardax said:
    Fuckin' really Teams?

    (Edit: Actually, it seems like I have to use a space every time, but it's worked in both chats, posts, and post replies for me so far in New Teams.)

    For the OP, seems to me I'd recommend Slack or Google if everyone is down on Teams that much.

    Is Zoom pushing into the workplace chat space yet? I'd be surprised if they aren't.

    Meta also has Facebook Workplace. Don't consider this a recommendation, rather a notification that it -- for some reason -- exists.

    Discord is honestly pretty nice, but... I'd have concerns. For a business, I'd feel better if there was someone to pay and someone to blame. That might have some unfortunate side effects for their product on the personal side though.
    Click to expand...
    Zoom chat is super rudimentary. Unformatted text only and no topics. It’s strictly person to person/group with no topics or any other additional functionality.
     
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    Sunner

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  • #11
    Have you checked out Mattermost? We ran the free self hosted version where I worked though they have the usual paid cloud stuff as well. I'd say we generally found it pretty agreeable, it was easy to write bots for, API for stuff like various alerts and so on worked as expected, etc etc. We never used video calls though so I can't speak to how well that works. We're now on Teams as well, and much like at your job everyone hates it. Especially me. 😡
     
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    koala

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  • #12
    IIRC, before I joined, the company was self-hosting Mattermost (or Rocket Chat?). But they didn't want to self-host, so they settled on Discord.

    Everything is pointing to Matrix, currently. Element Call seems to be the most flawless call experience for everyone- besides standalone Jitsi Meet. Once it's integrated, I think Matrix will be it.
     
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