“channel members from both sides can … upload files”
Sounds more like a primitive DropBox to me.
Use Sync instead - it's encrypted and Sync.com doesn't have the key so the NSA and pals can go screw themselves.
Slack has re-invented some stuff Lotus Notes did 20 years ago and declared it will make you more productive. Slack's big new thing is called “Shared Channels”. They “work just like the Slack channels you’re used to using with your internal teams, but connect two separate organizations, giving both sides a shared space to work …
Prior evidence seems to indicate that encryption is not any priority at Slack. Your chat history has to be stored unencrypted and indexed for their product to even work. They also can't encrypt at rest because they promise unlimited history. I expect any shared documents to be similarly indexed so to come with the same caveats.
There was nothing wrong with the Notes idea, it was just the awful user interface and resource hog client app. And all that messing around with knowing the exact path of replicas. And the stupid client key thing that meant you couldn't access from more than one location. And the email integration.
What Slack does well is an easy to user interface, so matching the two sounds ideal.
We run cross-company Slack already, but it means having a second, shared account and switching in the client. Just adding external people to your conversations sounds perfect.
I worked with Notes/Domino many years ago. I thought it was a nice idea overall, badly implemented on the client side with some good features on the server side (notably replication, in the days before pervasive connectivity). That was just my experience of it though.
IMO one of the main problems, apart from the incredibly crappy client software, was that world+dog seemed to buy it as an email system. At best, for email, it was no better than the competition. If you deployed and used it as "groupware" (eugh) or an intranet/extranet though, it wasn't half bad for its time.
Interestingly, CouchDB was apparently originally inspired by the Domino database technology.
Okay. Lets imagine I had a distributed, replicated directory service with PKI (RSA no less) built right in, so you had an immediate, no-fuss PKI based replicated document store, with a simple set of application development tools which allowed you to build secure, authenticated apps in a few hours (Absolutely crappy looking, yes), deploy them across your environment, lock down the data (and optionally encrypt).. And they were business critical in a heartbeat. Oh and you could run all this on just about any damn server infrastructure you might have lying around, and on all the popular desktops (and even OS/2) of the day. Security is worked out at the document level - something that Sharepoint has failed to ever do.
Yup. We had that almost 20 years ago, kids. Before The Cloud ("Its just someone else's computer!").
Today, thats Mongo, some PKI infrastructure, Docker, React/Angular+Javascript, some pretty freaky Linux skills, and you still take 10+ days to build a simple application. Some Notes applications are still running (and still looking crappy) 20 years later. I challenge anyone to keep any Javascript app running more than two before NPM package decay causes stuff to become obsolete/removed or require serious work.
Colleagues of mine migrated to Sharepoint, and proudly say, after years of becoming expert in it - 'It only takes 2.5 times longer to do the same app in Sharepoint as it used to in Notes'. Progress.
Yes, pig ugly. Yes, IBM didn't know jack shit what they had (and continue to not know jack shit), and now, whilst still supported, is let out to die by the Websphere (remember that?) management at IBM. (Aside from one notable exception in South East Asia).
Does it work? Hell yeah. Is it easier/faster/more secure/more reliable? Hell yeah. And whilst the licenses actually cost money, it's not that expensive.
Hate it as much as you like, but no-one has came up with anything that can be installed and running in less than a day that even comes close.
I do mourn its passing, as it paid for a number of my houses...
(And yes, Damien Katz was hired to reverse engineer the @Formula language engine in the Notes/Domino 6.x release - did a magnificent job. Understood implicitly the power of functional programming, distributed and replicated document stores, platform independent and highly scalable languages, and of course PKI. And went out and self-funded the development of CouchDb. Legend. We all thought he was mad, of course ;) )
---* Bill
http://www.Marykirk.com.
Sick of BT screwing up broadband? So were we. We did our own.
Interview "It's our data, it's our intellectual property. Being able to migrate it out those systems is near impossible... It was a real frustration for us."
These were the words of communication and collaboration platform Mattermost's founder and CTO, Corey Hulen, speaking to The Register about open source, sovereignty and audio bridges.
"Some of the history of Mattermost is exactly that problem," says Hulen of the issue of closed source software. "We were using proprietary tools – we were not a collaboration platform before, we were a games company before – [and] we were extremely frustrated because we couldn't get our intellectual property out of those systems..."
The COVID-19 pandemic may trigger the end of email's dominance in business communications.
That's the word from Spiceworks Ziff Davis (SWZD), which today published its first quarter report on the state of communications software in the workplace.
For the first time since it started measuring in 2016, a slim majority of respondents (51 percent) said real-time communication apps like Slack and Microsoft Teams were their preferred method for internal communication.
Slack has fallen over for a subset of users, as the messaging platform admitted that "something's not quite right" with a number of its critical services.
The outage coincides with the return to work from a three-day weekend for many of the company's US users.
Signs that all was not running perfectly were posted on Down Detector at around 14.20 UTC (08.20 Central), and minutes later Slack's own status page subsequently confirmed issues with log-ins, connections, messaging, posts/ files and notifications.
SaaS sultan Salesforce has announced a new CEO: Bret Taylor, previously the company's president and chief operating officer.
Taylor co-created Google Maps, served as Facebook's chief technology officer from 2009 to '20, and came to Salesforce after it acquired his cloudy document collaboration company Quip. Co-CEO is Taylor's second new job this week: he was also elevated from a mere board member at Twitter to become the avian network's president.
Salesforce has had dual CEOs before – Keith Block shared the gig with founder Marc Benioff from 2018 to '20. On the company's earnings Q3 earnings call on Tuesday, Benioff reminded investors of that history and that the arrangement worked rather well.
Google Cloud's UK and Ireland boss Pip White has quit to return to Salesforce and take control of the EMEA operations at collaboration division Slack.
White was in place for just 15 months at Google, after being brought in by former Google Cloud Platform veep Chris Ciauri as one the generals for country operations in the region – he himself left the Chocolate Factory earlier this year.
It seems the lure to exit Google and become senior veep and GM for EMEA at Slack was too tempting for tech sales veteran White to turn down.
Updated Websites and apps are suffering or have suffered outages around the world for at least some netizens today due to connectivity issues.
Though the exact causes of the IT breakdowns are in many cases not fully known right now, there has been a sudden uptick in downtime right as Let's Encrypt, which provides free HTTPS certificates to a ton of organizations, let one of its root and intermediate certs expire.
This expiration should be invisible to software, services, and users relying on the certificates for encryption, tamper-proof communications and whatnot, however not all systems appear to have handled the expiry well. Thus, it is assumed the expiration and at least some of today's outages are interlinked. Other downtime, such as Slack's teetering, is not tied to Let's Encrypt.
Salesforce has completed its long-awaited mega-slurp of Slack Technologies, Inc for an eye-watering $27.7bn.
The intention to buy was made public back in December 2020, when the business run by Marc Benioff said: "Slack will be deeply integrated into every Salesforce Cloud."
The CRM firm said Slack, which at the time had listed just 18 months before on the NYSE with a valuation of $16bn+, would also become the interface to Salesforce's CRM platform.
Slack says it has identified a scaling failure in its AWS Transit Gateways (TGWs) as the reason for the chat service's monumental outage on 4 January. As a result, Amazon's cloud computing arm said it is "reviewing the TGW scaling algorithms".
The comms platform's outage came at a bad time, just when people were getting back to work after the holiday period. This, said Slack in its detailed report, was a large part of the problem. Users re-opening Slack for the first time in a while had out-of-date caches and therefore requested more data than usual. "We go from our quietest time of the whole year to one of our biggest days quite literally overnight," said the Slack team.
The problem with the TGW scaling was not immediately apparent. As so often happens, a large part of the challenge was understanding what the core problem was. The first symptom was that the "dashboarding and alerting service became unavailable." This itself was a problem for troubleshooting since it has "dashboards with their pre-built queries."
Feature Just because the internet is always on doesn't mean that we should be. People need time away from work to relax and recharge, unencumbered by phone and email when working outside the office.
Advocates of work-life balance call this the right to disconnect. Many in the UK had hoped that the government would enshrine it in law. No such luck.
Earlier this year Prospect, the union representing professionals across a range of industries in the UK, pushed Her Majesty's Government to put the right to disconnect in an Employment Bill. Unfortunately, said Majesty failed to raise it in her speech to Parliament in May, which means that it's unlikely to happen, at least in the near term.
Salesforce has signed a definitive agreement to buy Slack for $27.7bn in cash and stock, and plans to make the collaboration tool the interface for Salesforce Customer 360, the system it sells to create a single customer ID and profiles.
The CRM giant’s announcement today stated Slack will become “an operating unit of Salesforce and will continue to be led by [Slack] CEO Stewart Butterfield.”
“Slack will be deeply integrated into every Salesforce Cloud,” the blurb continued. “As the new interface for Salesforce Customer 360, Slack will transform how people communicate, collaborate and take action on customer information across Salesforce as well as information from all of their other business apps and systems”.
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