My small company (less than 30 employees) has been using Skype for internal group meetings and messaging. Since it’s closing, we’re looking for alternatives.
I think few people in the company are privacy minded (one of the higher ups had to get scolded to stop using some random AI to listen to all his meetings and write summaries), so we need something with a low barrier to entry.
We have basically no IT department, so self hosting would be a challenge. We do self host a redmine server via docker, and we have to connect to it via VPN when we’re off-site (we have several full time remote employees).
Our feature requirements are:
-Group and individual messaging
-Screen sharing
-Meetings up to 2 hours
-Inexpensive
-Meetings with up to 10 participants
-Windows (some people use Skype from their phones also, but not a requirement)
-Minimal friction to setup and use
-Minimal bugs (mature)
Some of the ideas floated:
-Teams
-Discord
-Google Meet
-Signal
-Telegram
-Jami
I really don’t think we could pull off Matrix, but am I wrong? Which of these ideas bothers you the least? Is there something else I’m overlooking?
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Zulip is the best chat application, from a “design” perspective at least, but slack has huddles and works really well and is pretty standardized. Screen sharing with slack is amazing as you can draw on your coworkers screen without them needing to enable anything. Discord has the best long term voice calls, but is really weird for messages. And screen sharing isn’t as nice for work stuff but is great for video games.
As someone who’s been on Discord for almost 10 years: don’t use Discord for your company. There’s no backups, account management, or other kind of enterprise / B2B support.
For the meeting point: Lokas - Record and transcribe your meetings in complete privacy.
Your sound file is then sent to our not-for-profit association’s servers, where free software installed by us will transcribe it. These files will be automatically deleted after processing.
In complete privacy, but sending it to them? I expected something different from the “complete privacy” label/claim.
Is Lokas RGPD compliant?
From a legal point of view: it’s a work in progress.
[Framasoft, the publisher of Lokas, is] A non-profit association founded in 2004, financed by your donations, which is limited to a dozen employees and about thirty volunteers (a group of friends!)
It a proof of concept. I don’t know if they plan to keep working on it as it wasn’t received well because it’s AI
It does work pretty good and from a simple app
Slack can do most of that.its owned by Microsoft so if you were already comfortable with Skype it’s not a huge departure. There is HIPAA compliance, but there is also Microsoft.
However it enshittifies over time and I’m planning to move away for my team.
Slack is not owned by MSFT. Maybe you are thinking of Teams. Slack is owned by Salesforce.
Oh, sorry, you’re right. Looks like Microsoft was interested at one point but didn’t.
Why would you not go with Teams? I assume you all are using Microsoft Office if you were using Skype. Pretty sure Teams is included in the Office 365 license.
It’s literally Microsoft’s successor to Skype.
We don’t have 365 licenses, so it’s $4/user/month that we weren’t paying before. But this was my chance to get the company on something better, so I was investigating options.
I really think the hour meeting limitation is going to be a problem for the free accounts, but dealing with that seems more likely than the company paying $800/year, or whatever the headcount is.
Teams is sort of a drag though. Very resource intensive for what it does. But if everyone in your company has ram and CPU to spare, it’s mostly painless.
