My company is largely comprised of remote workers. It causes a lot of

communication issues. I go into HQ 3 days a week specifically because

of that.

You go into HQ 3 days a week to collaborate with remote workers? How's that working out for you?

Remote collaboration is fine when it's *ongoing*. As in, if you have a channel that's open all the time and people just sling messages back and forth all day, like they do on a good old fashioned IRC channel (and no, Slack and Teams are *not* acceptable substitutes for IRC).

But when it's organized into meetings ... yes, that's a complete productivity killer. Too many people like to hear themselves talk.

While I admit to missing IRC at times, Teams does suck and Skype is a bloated hog of uselessness. But Slack can be useful.

Yeah, I don't see us going with Slack, as they want money, and we're too cheap, from what I can see.

I can hear it now: Why use Slack when we can use Google Hangouts?

And then Google Hangouts disappears unceremoniously, and they wonder what to do.

Skype for Business... yeah, that's actually been pretty useful when it works.
When everyone can install it in a way that works with our servers. When ... (etc).

Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if we used Discord. About the only thing you can't do with Discord that you can do with the other stuff (from what I can tell), is share your desktop for presentations.

2019-04-22 09:55 from IGnatius T Foobar

My company is largely comprised of remote workers. It causes a lot

of

communication issues. I go into HQ 3 days a week specifically

because

of that.

You go into HQ 3 days a week to collaborate with remote workers?
How's that working out for you?

Remote collaboration is fine when it's *ongoing*. As in, if you have

a channel that's open all the time and people just sling messages back

and forth all day, like they do on a good old fashioned IRC channel
(and no, Slack and Teams are *not* acceptable substitutes for IRC).

But when it's organized into meetings ... yes, that's a complete
productivity killer. Too many people like to hear themselves talk.

The rest of the senior management team goes into the office, so I do as well.

fleeb - the important thing missing from discord is exactly that.. screen sharing.

I've been using many screen sharing tools for about 10 years from many different tools. I gave up on GoTo Meeting when Cytrix bought them and totally made it useless and undependable. For most of the last couple of years I've been using Zoom Meetings, which works great. Just this week a client at a gov't institution went to connect from her new laptop and it's blocked. She called IT and they said it wasn't approved. She didn't tell them that 3 other employees were in the same meeting without a problem. Seems the gov't doesn't know how to effectively block things on existing systems. They told her to use an approved tool. "Skype for business." I wanted to cry. I can use it. But ugh.

While I admit to missing IRC at times, Teams does suck and Skype is a

bloated hog of uselessness. But Slack can be useful.

Teams is included with Office 365, which many organizations are already paying for.

You already know how this movie ends. Slack is toast.

So, if Discord can provide that feature (maybe via third party), then one can embrace it.

Heh. Seems so easy when you just word it in a sentence like that.

Heh, I just read about that this morning. I probably don't share to more than 9 anyway, so it wouldn't phase me.

So, at least I have Discord as a fall-back if I need to go there.

Bring Your Children To A Secured Government Facility Day

2019-04-22 11:35 from wizard of aahz
While I admit to missing IRC at times, Teams does suck and Skype is a

bloated hog of uselessness. But Slack can be useful.

We dumped Slack for a local installation of Zulip.

I hate Teams, WebEx Teams and Slack. Who the hell really searches back?

The only thing I like is when working on an issue real time with a group.
Otherwise? Bleh.

It's great to be able to just sling some conversation back and forth when working in real time. It puts other team members at your fingertips without the full-attention commitment required for a conference call.

The problem I'm seeing right now is that the organizey people are trying too hard and creating too many teams for too many purposes. Good luck finding the right one when you need it. Glancing at my list right now, I'm part of the network team, the engineering team, the network engineering team, the architecture & engineering team, and the architecture team, plus half a dozen others for specific projects. Good luck finding a channel that has the right people listening when you need it.

Perhaps there just needs to be a channel to use as a sort of hailing frequency to find the right people, and then you break off onto a different one for the conversation.

I go searching back all the time actually. "Client X has this problem.. I know we talked about how to fix it.. Dang it was like 6 months ago.. Ah yes.. Search.. There it is. Solution. Done."

2019-05-02 07:42 from wizard of aahz
I go searching back all the time actually. "Client X has this problem..

I know we talked about how to fix it.. Dang it was like 6 months ago..

Ah yes.. Search.. There it is. Solution. Done."

So, another place to search. Email and Slack? Yuck.

WE don't have the conversation in email.. It needs to be real time. I'd have to drop an anvil on Monochrome's head to go look in his email, find what I sent him and have him reply. Much easier to poke him and say "Yo.. Dude.. WTF is up with xxxx... and get a reply."

Slack - AIM for grownups.

Slack - AIM for grownups.

Naah. Slack is IRC for children.

You will certainly remember when we used AIM internally simply because we all already had it, until I eventually brought our instant messaging service in-house because we didn't want it crossing an untrusted third party network.

Now everyone's doing the exact opposite. It's as if they *want* the government ... or WORSE, the big tech companies ... to scan, read, and index everything you write.

I dont' write anything important. It's fine.

2019-05-09 17:13 from wizard of aahz
I dont' write anything important. It's fine.

We know.