cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/26910708
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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I haven’t tried it myself, but Nextcloud talk seems to be an option as well. Doesn’t need to be self-hosted, but wouldn’t be free. I think it should be possible to find it at a reasonable price though.
What does your company use for IT services? Do you call Bob In A Truck? Or do you have a relationship with a Small Business IT consulting firm that understands proper long-term management?
Hopefully it’s the latter (or even an MSP) - they’ll (hopefully) have some experience here (it really depends, better consultants have the focus, some just implement what you tell them to implement).
We mostly DIY. We’re a collection of engineers, but not network or anything relevant. Hence the hubris.
We hire out the website design. I think for initial setup of the server and backup system they hired a consultant, but I don’t think they’re in the picture anymore.
I’m just a minion; I can’t actually spend money, but I can make recommendations. The owners were happy with Skype, so they don’t care about data security or FOSS. They care about convenience and cheap.
Matrix doesn’t require self-hosting. There’s a very good host out there etke.cc. They take care of everything, are European, and you just have to connect. It’s 20€/month for hosting a medium sized server that can handle room with up to 3000 users (if I understand it correctly). They can bridge your server to other client services likes Google and Slack, and they can even bridge to WhatsApp and Signal meaning that people in your company could be added to rooms from WhatsApp or Signal. They even have an email bridge with which you can allow email users to chat in matrix rooms!
There is of course no limit to how long meetings can be, matrix has a wide range of clients (of which element is the most popular).
I would’ve recommended Element.io, but they have a “minimum number of users” 🤷
Zulip with bigbluebutton or/and whereby
I only have used privacy-invasive solutions, and I don’t know if there exists an easy way to do that securely.
Discord, Signal, Telegram: forget it, it’s good to send a grocery list to my wife, but that’s it.
Teams: I hate it, it’s resource hungry and I always had issues with it.
I use Google Meet nowadays at my new job and it’s fine. Everything is on the web, no need to install anything. Of course it’s Google and it’s bad, but so far I don’t mind.
I’ve heard about https://jitsi.org/jitsi-meet/ once but I have never tried that.
I’ve found Telegram performance to be excellent.
As for privacy with it… I wouldn’t trust it overly much. Which is frustrating, because from a performance standpoint it’s solid. Messages show up instantly, on all devices, Android, iOS, Windows, etc.
Check out Teleguard from SwissCow.
I haven’t seen an analysis of their privacy claims, so I’m not really sure (so when I say check it out, maybe you’ll find info that I haven’t).
What I know is I like how the connect new device process works - you essentially restore a backup to a new device, which requires the user ID (not your user name) and a code. Which likely means individual device data isn’t sitting in the open somewhere.
They have a free and a paid tier, which they seem to be marketing toward business.
They claim messages are ephemeral on their servers, but I haven’t found a third-party analysis of them, which is disappointing.
We use Zoom at work and that is quite good. I used Teams, Jitsi, BigBlueButton and Citrix and so far Zoom has had the least problems (Citrix being a close second place). It also has clients for all major platforms and OS.
Their latest update greatly improved the chat functionality (in my opinion) and it is slowly replacing all other internal communication channels (mail/phone).
I wouldn’t consider Zoom to be privacy minded at all.
Yeah…I honestly didn’t look where this was posted. The text alone didn’t quite make the privacy focus obvious.
No worries, you still added useful info to the subject.
It’s quite a challenge to wade through all the different tools today. Used to be you found a solution and went with it. Today it’s always changing, with your favorite tool getting changed in some crappy way, making you find something new. It’s tiresome.
