[BinaryIdiot]

I don't get the negativity. This is kinda awesome! News feeds will be good to monitor what's going on across many groups / teams, groups can help your team post and communicate across various topics (same with messaging). Honestly the live video streams on demand is kinda huge; this isn't always something easy for companies to do especially large companies but Facebook can pull this off and make it look great for thousands of users.

Overall this seems like a great tool for a workplace. Trouble is it has to compete with Slack and, arguably, things like Confluence.

[gjolund]

The last place I want to have work related conversations stored is FB servers.

[BinaryIdiot]

Because you'd rather your work related conversations stored in Slack? Google Hangouts? Skype? GoToMeeting? There are not very many on prem solutions that are very good, so do you not use any of them or is it specifically against Facebook and if the latter why so?

[losteric]

Well my company uses Mattermost in place of slack... on premise, open source, and free.

[mcmoose75]

It's also not very good- both the desktop and iOS clients (that I use) are horribly slow to load, clunky, and require multiple (laggy) clicks just to get to a notification of a message. I'd much rather pay for something else, on-prem and open source be damned.

[it33]

Hi @mcmoose75, highly appreciate the feedback.

Our open source community is always looking to improve and all feedback helps.

May I ask how your experience was on the web with Mattermost?

Regarding mobile performance, may I also ask what iPhone model and network speed you're using?

We publish mobile benchmarks, and I'm just wondering if your results are the same or different: https://docs.mattermost.com/deployment/push.html#mobile-perf...

The Mattermost iOS app works best on a fast connection. To accommodate slow connections, we're adding React Native (same technology as Facebook) to get competitive with Facebook's iOS app performance over time.

Here's the new Mattermost iOS app roadmap and backlog: http://forum.mattermost.org/t/react-native-roadmap/2339

Regarding the Mattermost desktop apps, on September 30 we had one of our largest product update addressing user issues. Here's the changelog: https://docs.mattermost.com/help/apps/desktop-changelog.html

Latest versions now available for download: http://about.mattermost.com/download/

Overall, we created an open source, self-hosted alternative to proprietary SaaS communication for organizations that want to minimize security, lock-in, and privacy risks.

We're constantly improving, thanks to hundreds of people around the world contributing to the project.

Whatever issue you're experiencing, please consider nominating an improvement to help us get to where you want us to be? https://www.mattermost.org/feature-ideas/

[enraged_camel]

Last time I checked, Slack's business model was not based on advertisements and they did not have an incentive to give/sell your data to third parties (I'm sorry, partners).

[Pamar]

I work in an European company. I doubt this will get any traction outside of US.

[cheriot]

It was made in London. At least until someone triggers article 50 it's more European than American :) More to your point, the article mentions getting the privacy/security certifications that companies look for. And if you're paying for the product, there's not the privacy concerns as when you are the product, etc. I'm actually impressed with this thing so far.

[Pamar]

I am in Germany. The NSA debacle made a lot of important people quite unhappy here, not to mention the current tensions between DBank & DOJ and so on... - so I am afraid we would interpret this a bit like Apple's labels, except in this case we would read:

Designed in NSA - Made in UK.

[cheriot]

Is there an IT angle on the DBank/DOJ story or is this just anti-USA?

[Pamar]

Some have interpreted the DOJ fine to be a sort of retaliation for fines applied by EU to Apple/Google (especially the first for the Ireland tax rebates).

I have no particular authority in saying if this is actually the case or not, but my feeling is that in Europe (and especially in Germany) there will be a lot of resistance towards Facebook solutions (the recent Whatsapp decision to share data with the parent company is another thing that did not sit well here, for example).

[soft_dev_person]

Norway is one of the major beta markets and full of early adopters. Though some of the companies among them likely just want to be one of the cool kids.

[pinaceae]

https://workplace.fb.com/stories/#europe

really?

[pmlnr]

I work for a European company - unfortunately owned by a US holding. We're already using it.

This, unfortunately, might get traction here as well.

[notyourwork]

I don't understand your concern. Could you expand here?

[EliRivers]

I, your competitor, will pay FB for your conversations. I expect we can work out a way to do it that isn't so brazen.

[BinaryIdiot]

But if that's possible in any way FaceBook and the company paying would be subject to breaking many corporate espionage laws in addition to destroying FaceBook's enterprise business IN ITS ENTIRETY should it be found out.

Seems like an insane amount of risk for such a very tiny reward.

[nickpsecurity]

Yet, each of the major carriers and RSA did it for the NSA in exchange for $30-(80?) million. Happened at plenty of other companies with or without nation state involvement. The big ones are still in business.

Besides, what does the EULA say on the product? Their EULA usually says something along the lines of they can do whatever they want with your data. I'm interested to see if anyone sees something similar in the enterprise agreement.

[notyourwork]

I would be interested to diff the user agreement and business agreements.

[notyourwork]

This is exactly why I don't see how a company would be concerned. Lots of b2b relationships exist and are based on trust with legal ramifications for when that trust is broken.

[quickben]

No, Airbus as an example.

[scient]

I think you have no idea how to real world works. Most of the arguments against Facebook sadly seem to be wildly out of touch with reality. Amazing that these essentially conspiracy theories are cultivated by otherwise pretty smart people - software engineers.

[EliRivers]

Real world? You must be aware of real world events in which this sort of thing really has already happened.

The ultimate arbiter is reality, and in reality this sort of thing does already happen. We could do it brazenly over the counter, or alternatively I could pay Facebook to act as a consultant; to give me their view of my market. To satisfy the legal chaps, we can just scrape the names off the data and then summarise it in a nice binder. A number of financial companies do this today. The fines are peanuts compared to the profits.

Even when it isn't company policy in some way, it is easy to bribe an employee to simply hand over a big chunk of data. The "real world" shows us that this does and will happen.

As an aside, I would suggest that the "real world" in the sense of which you are speaking doesn't even exist. Everyone, everywhere, builds their own cocoon of social mores and illusions and local conventions, and from my perspective it is you who doesn't understand it. If you're going to suggest that laws will stop it happening, I remind you that the law is whatever you can successfully negotiate and argue and persuade and influence as necessary, and big companies with deep pockets can do that very well. Some things are very hard to argue; shooting someone for no reason on live TV. Some things are eminently arguable; the Chinese wall between the data holding division and the business consultancy division. Really happening, every day, in the real world.

[notyourwork]

Its disappointing that you are trying to counter my question and keep suggesting this happens in the real world all the time with no citation to support it.

Lots of illicit things happen should we just shut down the world entirely? Cars kill people so we shouldn't approach the streets. Food can make you ill if supply chains don't handle it properly so we should stop eating.

You are suggesting that because people break laws we should not do things. That's not how it works.

[matwood]

I agree. If FB did such a thing it would end whatever enterprise business they hoped to gain.

[lunula]

Except there is no evidente that anyone would care. They are sharing huge amounts of data on individuals with third parties. People continue to use and pay for the service.

[baby]

If you're doing anything sensitive obviously this is not a product targeting your company. I don't see what ranting about this will accomplish.

Like you my company won't use it for privacy issue (we're dealing with sensitive things), but I still find that awesome.

[M_Grey]

I think people have largely gotten the message that companies which thrive on collecting and selling user data, are poison to be avoided at all costs.

[lunula]

But that message has translated to precisely zero actual change in habit.

[M_Grey]

Have you seen how many people use ad blockers? I'm finding people on Reddit and Imgur who talk about using NoScript and uMatrix! People are learning, but as with all things, it takes time.

[ohnomrbill]

I try very hard to separate my work life and personal life. This would make me do one of two things:

- Stop using facebook for personal purposes and treat it like a more featureful LinkedIn

- Quit my job and find another which doesn't require me to give work information to a company which has a trove of my personal information

[j2bax]

This is a completely separate account not tied to your personal Facebook account.

[pmlnr]

Lol. The moment you add a picture, it's tied together.

[nickpsecurity]

Yep. They had an automatic system for doing that in the past for people who used the product and people who didn't but were in photos uploaded by users. I still don't have a picture on Facebook with my name for that reason. They've figured out a lot about me anyway. The many mistakes are hilarious, though.

[Aco-]

if you think for one minute that FB isn't going to be able to link this back to your personal FB account you're a fool

[j2bax]

While I appreciate being informed what does or doesn't make me a fool by internet strangers, I don't think that was the concern of the parent post. I believe their concern was that they would be seeing work related content popup while they were on their personal Facebook account thus mixing work/personal life.

I think the point of making it a completely separate account is to ease companies fears of users getting sucked into the endless scroll vortex while at work, and I would doubt they'd be jumping you back and forth and showing you notifications from personal/work Facebook when logged into either service. It would also be an obvious security/privacy issue if project info was popping up in users personal notifications.

Whether or not they are going to link the accounts on the backend for their data mining purposes, was not the intent or subject I was addressing/speculating about.

[ohnomrbill]

Nope, the concern of the parent post was that they would link my work and personal profiles behind the scenes. I don't want to see work-related content pop up, but it's a secondary concern. I don't want Facebook to know what I do both when I'm at work and when I'm on personal time, because I don't trust their company.

[j2bax]

Sorry for misreading you and making assumptions. Can I ask why you are more concerned about Facebook having your workplace's information than your own personal information? Assuming that your workplace chose to offer their information up to Facebook by subscribing to their service...

[what_ever]

Are you okay with working at a company using Google Apps for Work/GSuite?

[pmlnr]

No, I'm not. But it appears that HiPPO decisions and their personal preference of Gmail over [other email software] is driving the world these days.

I'm well aware self-hosting can be hard, especially for global companies, with broad userbase, but I'm astounded how little managers and directors care about company "secrets" getting stored at providers these days.

I never thought I'm going to miss the old Microsoft, but at least those servers and services were bought and locally hosted. Sure, they may have had backdoors, but at least it was not obviously given to a company who's making their profit out of scanning contents and selling it to the highest bidder.

We don't know for sure it a paid Gmail is scannig mail or not; if a paid Dropbox is being treated the same way for, for example, "copyrighted" content the free tier is, but I would be surprised if it was completely different.

[ohnomrbill]

Yes, because I use Duck Duck Go for browsing and my personal emails are generally not very revealing. Google certainly has a good deal of my personal information, but I purposefully keep it limited. For that reason, I'm okay with having them as my work email provider.

[meira]

Microsoft, Google and Facebook are totally Lost haha. They seem to be converging to the same point, all of them as laggards.

[pmlnr]

I see this as an interesting circle of life, which is yet to reach hardware manufacturers: the fact the real, reliable money can only come from businesses.

The money - and the attention - of the generic population is momentary.