What makes RocketChat appealing to you?
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@wirestyle22 said in What makes RocketChat appealing to you?:
@stacksofplates said in What makes RocketChat appealing to you?:
@wirestyle22 said in What makes RocketChat appealing to you?:
@scottalanmiller said in What makes RocketChat appealing to you?:
@stacksofplates said in What makes RocketChat appealing to you?:
@scottalanmiller said in What makes RocketChat appealing to you?:
@kelly said in What makes RocketChat appealing to you?:
@stacksofplates said in What makes RocketChat appealing to you?:
We use Mattermost at work. I can't say much for RocketChat, but I do really like Mattermost. I'm a fan of the IRC style chat apps and the ability to add them into automation and such.
I ended up rolling out Mattermost at my last workplace. I didn't do any testing of Rocketchat because Mattermost checked all of our boxes. It was fast, clean, stable, had all of the clients that we needed (Windows, Mac, Linux), and the documentation was solid. I wished that 3rd party authentication (AD in our case) wasn't a pay feature, but that was a minimal consideration at our size.
We get that all with Rocket.Chat, all of it, for free. I didn't realize Mattermost had "pay only" features, that's a huge reason I'm glad that we didn't go with them. Overall, they were so close it was hard to tell which one to prefer. Rocket seems to have pulled ahead of Mattermost in popularity and being completely free makes a bit difference.
It looks like it's just "AD/LDAP". GitLab has Mattermost integrated natively and you can use it as an OAUTH provider. So OAUTH is definitely free (which is the better way to go anyway).
Oh, OAUTH is really nice.
RocketChat supports OAUTH as well I believe. I doubt my company would allow it though. They are in love with AD
They aren't mutually exclusive.
I just mean they wouldn't allow OAUTH even though you're saying its superior. Can't use AD for free with Mattermost, so kind of counts it out unfortunately. At least for now.
I'm saying you can use OAUTH with AD.
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@stacksofplates said in What makes RocketChat appealing to you?:
@wirestyle22 said in What makes RocketChat appealing to you?:
@stacksofplates said in What makes RocketChat appealing to you?:
@wirestyle22 said in What makes RocketChat appealing to you?:
@scottalanmiller said in What makes RocketChat appealing to you?:
@stacksofplates said in What makes RocketChat appealing to you?:
@scottalanmiller said in What makes RocketChat appealing to you?:
@kelly said in What makes RocketChat appealing to you?:
@stacksofplates said in What makes RocketChat appealing to you?:
We use Mattermost at work. I can't say much for RocketChat, but I do really like Mattermost. I'm a fan of the IRC style chat apps and the ability to add them into automation and such.
I ended up rolling out Mattermost at my last workplace. I didn't do any testing of Rocketchat because Mattermost checked all of our boxes. It was fast, clean, stable, had all of the clients that we needed (Windows, Mac, Linux), and the documentation was solid. I wished that 3rd party authentication (AD in our case) wasn't a pay feature, but that was a minimal consideration at our size.
We get that all with Rocket.Chat, all of it, for free. I didn't realize Mattermost had "pay only" features, that's a huge reason I'm glad that we didn't go with them. Overall, they were so close it was hard to tell which one to prefer. Rocket seems to have pulled ahead of Mattermost in popularity and being completely free makes a bit difference.
It looks like it's just "AD/LDAP". GitLab has Mattermost integrated natively and you can use it as an OAUTH provider. So OAUTH is definitely free (which is the better way to go anyway).
Oh, OAUTH is really nice.
RocketChat supports OAUTH as well I believe. I doubt my company would allow it though. They are in love with AD
They aren't mutually exclusive.
I just mean they wouldn't allow OAUTH even though you're saying its superior. Can't use AD for free with Mattermost, so kind of counts it out unfortunately. At least for now.
I'm saying you can use OAUTH with AD.
Right. I'm not arguing, I understand
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Nothing, it is very slow. I mean last time I used it, i figured also their marketing recommends it for less than 100 users.
That said I support sites with slow bandwidth, so Pidgin/OpenFire usually works best but it is very basic.
It is good cause of being an easy snap install, but if I were you I would steer away from the DB engine that RC uses and use Zulip or Mattermost
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Has anyone looked at this yet?
https://nextcloud.com/blog/rocket.chat-and-nextcloud-announce-partnership-and-integration/
Things that bugged me about Mattermost...
- Limit on the number of characters in a channel name. Last I had it running, it was too short to be useful...like 20 characters only.
- Deleted channels did not also delete files so any files you had uploaded would permanently remain on the server. I think that's still the case. Have not tested whether that also exists with RocketChat.
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@nashbrydges said in What makes RocketChat appealing to you?:
Deleted channels did not also delete files so any files you had uploaded would permanently remain on the server. I think that's still the case. Have not tested whether that also exists with RocketChat.
It doesn't.
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@emad-r said in What makes RocketChat appealing to you?:
Nothing, it is very slow. I mean last time I used it, i figured also their marketing recommends it for less than 100 users.
That said I support sites with slow bandwidth, so Pidgin/OpenFire usually works best but it is very basic.
It is good cause of being an easy snap install, but if I were you I would steer away from the DB engine that RC uses and use Zulip or Mattermost
?
The test server rocket chat uses has over 200k users on it
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Zulip actually does have subchannels too. Gotta test
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@wirestyle22 said in What makes RocketChat appealing to you?:
Zulip actually does have subchannels too. Gotta test
Don't know that one, should check it out.
What's the goal of sub channels? What does that gain that normal channels does not?
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Zulip has conversation threading, like that weird thing Google tried years ago, Wave maybe? That didn't work well in the real world.
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@scottalanmiller said in What makes RocketChat appealing to you?:
Zulip has conversation threading, like that weird thing Google tried years ago, Wave maybe? That didn't work well in the real world.
I'd like to be able to expand it. It's organization for me. I have something for X medical group but for only a specific site of many sites. Something that applies to a specific site should be separate imo, even though it applies to the group.
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@wirestyle22 said in What makes RocketChat appealing to you?:
@scottalanmiller said in What makes RocketChat appealing to you?:
Zulip has conversation threading, like that weird thing Google tried years ago, Wave maybe? That didn't work well in the real world.
I'd like to be able to expand it. It's organization for me. I have something for X medical group but for only a specific site of many sites. Something that applies to a specific site should be separate imo, even though it applies to the gro
How does sub groups influence that?
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If you're storing important information in your chat you're doing it wrong imo. You might receive important information that way, but none of them are going to be great for sorting and filtering information in a retrieval scenario.
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@kelly said in What makes RocketChat appealing to you?:
If you're storing important information in your chat you're doing it wrong imo. You might receive important information that way, but none of them are going to be great for sorting and filtering information in a retrieval scenario.
Yeah. There should already be a policy in place defining how long things should be kept when using different communication methods. IE: Anything in chat gets flushed every 24 hours. Protect yourself and the company!
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@kelly said in What makes RocketChat appealing to you?:
If you're storing important information in your chat you're doing it wrong imo. You might receive important information that way, but none of them are going to be great for sorting and filtering information in a retrieval scenario.
Like we use it as a way to create tickets, but the important info always goes to a ticket.
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@kelly said in What makes RocketChat appealing to you?:
If you're storing important information in your chat you're doing it wrong imo. You might receive important information that way, but none of them are going to be great for sorting and filtering information in a retrieval scenario.
It's not that I want to use it as a wiki or ticketing system, but I would like to be able to reference something someone said at some point. "go here, do this, explain this concept to this person, take pictures of this" etc. I can talk to 15 different people at the same time and I'd like to not need to search through every 5 minutes of conversation to reference something they said in skype for business.
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@wirestyle22 said in What makes RocketChat appealing to you?:
@kelly said in What makes RocketChat appealing to you?:
If you're storing important information in your chat you're doing it wrong imo. You might receive important information that way, but none of them are going to be great for sorting and filtering information in a retrieval scenario.
It's not that I want to use it as a wiki or ticketing system, but I would like to be able to reference something someone said at some point. "go here, do this, explain this concept to this person, take pictures of this" etc. I can talk to 15 different people at the same time and I'd like to not need to search through every 5 minutes of conversation to reference something they said in skype for business.
Wouldn't most of those conversations occur through direct messages rather than channels? I agree that having to sort through requests or information within general channels would be a headache. I encouraged my users to talk to one of my team directly. In a larger environment I might have a "Helpdesk" channel, but I would discourage "chatting" in that channel in general.
On another note, why are you looking at getting off of SfB/Teams? If you're not moving off of O365 entirely that is an expensive decision.
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@kelly said in What makes RocketChat appealing to you?:
@wirestyle22 said in What makes RocketChat appealing to you?:
@kelly said in What makes RocketChat appealing to you?:
If you're storing important information in your chat you're doing it wrong imo. You might receive important information that way, but none of them are going to be great for sorting and filtering information in a retrieval scenario.
It's not that I want to use it as a wiki or ticketing system, but I would like to be able to reference something someone said at some point. "go here, do this, explain this concept to this person, take pictures of this" etc. I can talk to 15 different people at the same time and I'd like to not need to search through every 5 minutes of conversation to reference something they said in skype for business.
Wouldn't most of those conversations occur through direct messages rather than channels? I agree that having to sort through requests or information within general channels would be a headache. I encouraged my users to talk to one of my team directly. In a larger environment I might have a "Helpdesk" channel, but I would discourage "chatting" in that channel in general.
On another note, why are you looking at getting off of SfB/Teams? If you're not moving off of O365 entirely that is an expensive decision.
We aren't entirely O365. Everything here is Hybrid and I hate it. Our entire IT team hates our communication tools. I do want the ability to talk in channels because it allows us to discuss things as a group as well as let people know what is going on at certain sites. Instead of reaching out to us to find out they can check the channel for that site. At least if they have questions we can answer them directly there so when someone else checks it they don't need to ask it again. There's a lot of communication breakdown here.
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@wirestyle22 said in What makes RocketChat appealing to you?:
@kelly said in What makes RocketChat appealing to you?:
@wirestyle22 said in What makes RocketChat appealing to you?:
@kelly said in What makes RocketChat appealing to you?:
If you're storing important information in your chat you're doing it wrong imo. You might receive important information that way, but none of them are going to be great for sorting and filtering information in a retrieval scenario.
It's not that I want to use it as a wiki or ticketing system, but I would like to be able to reference something someone said at some point. "go here, do this, explain this concept to this person, take pictures of this" etc. I can talk to 15 different people at the same time and I'd like to not need to search through every 5 minutes of conversation to reference something they said in skype for business.
Wouldn't most of those conversations occur through direct messages rather than channels? I agree that having to sort through requests or information within general channels would be a headache. I encouraged my users to talk to one of my team directly. In a larger environment I might have a "Helpdesk" channel, but I would discourage "chatting" in that channel in general.
On another note, why are you looking at getting off of SfB/Teams? If you're not moving off of O365 entirely that is an expensive decision.
We aren't entirely O365. Everything here is Hybrid and I hate it. Our entire IT team hates our communication tools. I do want the ability to talk in channels because it allows us to discuss things as a group as well as let people know what is going on at certain sites. Instead of reaching out to us to find out they can check the channel for that site. At least if they have questions we can answer them directly there so when someone else checks it they don't need to ask it again. There's a lot of communication breakdown here.
Teams is roughly the equivalent of Slack/Rocketchat/Mattermost in terms of functionality. I'm not trying to dissuade you from using Rocket, just adding to the options for something you don't have to support and maintain the infrastructure on.
As for hybrid, are you using AD Sync or whatever they're calling it now? I found that it takes most of the issues of having local AD and Azure AD out of the equation once you have it up and running. On the Exchange side of things, I haven't found much need for local Exchange. In two different orgs I just handled all the mail functions in O365 either via Powershell or the web UI. There were some annoyances, but most of the "unsolveable" issues originated with users that were trying to use their email for something it was never intended to be used for.
Channel sprawl/exhaustion is a thing. At first people may like having things sorted out, but over time (sometimes very quickly) those additional channels will become a ghost town because people don't like having to maintain all of the different avenues of communication, and will just dump things into the most convenient channel. For example if you have an IT channel and then you have Site A, Site B, Site C, etc. over time people without your vision will stop using the site specific channels and just dump them in the general channel. This is one of the reasons why chat is terrible for documentation and reference.
Did you make any headway with the wiki project? It sounds like that is what you need more in general, perhaps with the ability to take notes on a given job as an adjunct so that the next person can see what was done and who was talked to. Notes should probably be in a ticketing system, so that they're tied to a task and a site.
Sorry for the wall of text. I hope that is helpful. I'm not trying to shoot you down, just trying to see the bigger picture and let you know what I've experienced in the past as successes and failures.
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@kelly said in What makes RocketChat appealing to you?:
@wirestyle22 said in What makes RocketChat appealing to you?:
@kelly said in What makes RocketChat appealing to you?:
@wirestyle22 said in What makes RocketChat appealing to you?:
@kelly said in What makes RocketChat appealing to you?:
If you're storing important information in your chat you're doing it wrong imo. You might receive important information that way, but none of them are going to be great for sorting and filtering information in a retrieval scenario.
It's not that I want to use it as a wiki or ticketing system, but I would like to be able to reference something someone said at some point. "go here, do this, explain this concept to this person, take pictures of this" etc. I can talk to 15 different people at the same time and I'd like to not need to search through every 5 minutes of conversation to reference something they said in skype for business.
Wouldn't most of those conversations occur through direct messages rather than channels? I agree that having to sort through requests or information within general channels would be a headache. I encouraged my users to talk to one of my team directly. In a larger environment I might have a "Helpdesk" channel, but I would discourage "chatting" in that channel in general.
On another note, why are you looking at getting off of SfB/Teams? If you're not moving off of O365 entirely that is an expensive decision.
We aren't entirely O365. Everything here is Hybrid and I hate it. Our entire IT team hates our communication tools. I do want the ability to talk in channels because it allows us to discuss things as a group as well as let people know what is going on at certain sites. Instead of reaching out to us to find out they can check the channel for that site. At least if they have questions we can answer them directly there so when someone else checks it they don't need to ask it again. There's a lot of communication breakdown here.
Teams is roughly the equivalent of Slack/Rocketchat/Mattermost in terms of functionality. I'm not trying to dissuade you from using Rocket, just adding to the options for something you don't have to support and maintain the infrastructure on.
As for hybrid, are you using AD Sync or whatever they're calling it now? I found that it takes most of the issues of having local AD and Azure AD out of the equation once you have it up and running. On the Exchange side of things, I haven't found much need for local Exchange. In two different orgs I just handled all the mail functions in O365 either via Powershell or the web UI. There were some annoyances, but most of the "unsolveable" issues originated with users that were trying to use their email for something it was never intended to be used for.
Channel sprawl/exhaustion is a thing. At first people may like having things sorted out, but over time (sometimes very quickly) those additional channels will become a ghost town because people don't like having to maintain all of the different avenues of communication, and will just dump things into the most convenient channel. For example if you have an IT channel and then you have Site A, Site B, Site C, etc. over time people without your vision will stop using the site specific channels and just dump them in the general channel. This is one of the reasons why chat is terrible for documentation and reference.
Did you make any headway with the wiki project? It sounds like that is what you need more in general, perhaps with the ability to take notes on a given job as an adjunct so that the next person can see what was done and who was talked to. Notes should probably be in a ticketing system, so that they're tied to a task and a site.
Sorry for the wall of text. I hope that is helpful. I'm not trying to shoot you down, just trying to see the bigger picture and let you know what I've experienced in the past as successes and failures.
I appreciate your advice. You can wall of text me anytime. I am in the testing phase of all of this and I want to beta test some of these with my team and get their impressions on whether or not they think it's useful. I have a nextcloud instance and rocketchat currently. The next things I build will be Bookstack and wiki.js. I want to compare the two. A wiki would definitely help of course.
There will not be a general IT channel for that exact reason. It will be broken down by site but I also have to separate departments to keep everything relevant. I could create each instance as department.domain.com to accomplish this.
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@wirestyle22 said in What makes RocketChat appealing to you?:
@kelly said in What makes RocketChat appealing to you?:
@wirestyle22 said in What makes RocketChat appealing to you?:
@kelly said in What makes RocketChat appealing to you?:
@wirestyle22 said in What makes RocketChat appealing to you?:
@kelly said in What makes RocketChat appealing to you?:
If you're storing important information in your chat you're doing it wrong imo. You might receive important information that way, but none of them are going to be great for sorting and filtering information in a retrieval scenario.
It's not that I want to use it as a wiki or ticketing system, but I would like to be able to reference something someone said at some point. "go here, do this, explain this concept to this person, take pictures of this" etc. I can talk to 15 different people at the same time and I'd like to not need to search through every 5 minutes of conversation to reference something they said in skype for business.
Wouldn't most of those conversations occur through direct messages rather than channels? I agree that having to sort through requests or information within general channels would be a headache. I encouraged my users to talk to one of my team directly. In a larger environment I might have a "Helpdesk" channel, but I would discourage "chatting" in that channel in general.
On another note, why are you looking at getting off of SfB/Teams? If you're not moving off of O365 entirely that is an expensive decision.
We aren't entirely O365. Everything here is Hybrid and I hate it. Our entire IT team hates our communication tools. I do want the ability to talk in channels because it allows us to discuss things as a group as well as let people know what is going on at certain sites. Instead of reaching out to us to find out they can check the channel for that site. At least if they have questions we can answer them directly there so when someone else checks it they don't need to ask it again. There's a lot of communication breakdown here.
Teams is roughly the equivalent of Slack/Rocketchat/Mattermost in terms of functionality. I'm not trying to dissuade you from using Rocket, just adding to the options for something you don't have to support and maintain the infrastructure on.
As for hybrid, are you using AD Sync or whatever they're calling it now? I found that it takes most of the issues of having local AD and Azure AD out of the equation once you have it up and running. On the Exchange side of things, I haven't found much need for local Exchange. In two different orgs I just handled all the mail functions in O365 either via Powershell or the web UI. There were some annoyances, but most of the "unsolveable" issues originated with users that were trying to use their email for something it was never intended to be used for.
Channel sprawl/exhaustion is a thing. At first people may like having things sorted out, but over time (sometimes very quickly) those additional channels will become a ghost town because people don't like having to maintain all of the different avenues of communication, and will just dump things into the most convenient channel. For example if you have an IT channel and then you have Site A, Site B, Site C, etc. over time people without your vision will stop using the site specific channels and just dump them in the general channel. This is one of the reasons why chat is terrible for documentation and reference.
Did you make any headway with the wiki project? It sounds like that is what you need more in general, perhaps with the ability to take notes on a given job as an adjunct so that the next person can see what was done and who was talked to. Notes should probably be in a ticketing system, so that they're tied to a task and a site.
Sorry for the wall of text. I hope that is helpful. I'm not trying to shoot you down, just trying to see the bigger picture and let you know what I've experienced in the past as successes and failures.
I appreciate your advice. You can wall of text me anytime. I am in the testing phase of all of this and I want to beta test some of these with my team and get their impressions on whether or not they think it's useful. I have a nextcloud instance and rocketchat currently. The next things I build will be Bookstack and wiki.js. I want to compare the two. A wiki would definitely help of course.
There will not be a general IT channel for that exact reason. It will be broken down by site but I also have to separate departments to keep everything relevant. I could create each instance as department.domain.com to accomplish this.
How big is your org (sites, departments, and employees) and your IT team?
