What makes RocketChat appealing to you?
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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?:
@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?
We have 50+ buildings right now, some small some huge. We will have 120 sites within one year. Expanding nation wide. IT team right now is around 35 people. Part of this is planning for the future obv
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I got a version of RocketChat up for testing now
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@aaronstuder Same
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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?:
@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?
We have 50+ buildings right now, some small some huge. We will have 120 sites within one year. Expanding nation wide. IT team right now is around 35 people. Part of this is planning for the future obv
At the stage you're at I would approach this from a functional and organizational perspective rather than a technical one. Given your size and apparent growth, your layout will be dictated by how the non IT people use the tools. If they have to fire up a second client to chat with you all than what they use for their team then they aren't going to chat with IT. If they need to communicate with people in ways that are not supported by your design, e.g. across functional teams, sites, departments, etc., then they will default back to the easiest/most familiar way. Finally, if they do not have input into your design they will not buy in to it either unless it is forced on them from the top.
Were I in your shoes I would locate key people in the fewest number of functional groups that will give you an influence approaching quorum and get them together for a video chat/conference call. Start with the basic problem, e.g. communication is hard, especially across teams/sites/etc. Then ask about what works well with SfB, and what could be improved. Then ask for wishlists and who their teams need to communicate with on a semi regular basis. Have someone with you to take notes because this will probably be very eye opening to you if you haven't done anything like this in the past.
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@kelly This is only the IT team. I'm not giving it to anyone else. Different departments within IT. Desktop Support, Helpdesk, Health Information Systems, etc
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@wirestyle22 said in What makes RocketChat appealing to you?:
@kelly This is only the IT team. I'm not giving it to anyone else. Different departments within IT. Desktop Support, Helpdesk, Health Information Systems, etc
Oh, that makes much more sense. I totally misunderstood your aim. Well, you can disregard a bunch of what I said
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@kelly said in What makes RocketChat appealing to you?:
@wirestyle22 said in What makes RocketChat appealing to you?:
@kelly This is only the IT team. I'm not giving it to anyone else. Different departments within IT. Desktop Support, Helpdesk, Health Information Systems, etc
Oh, that makes much more sense. I totally misunderstood your aim. Well, you can disregard a bunch of what I said
I wasn't clear, sorry. It's my fault.
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@kelly said in What makes RocketChat appealing to you?:
@wirestyle22 said in What makes RocketChat appealing to you?:
@kelly This is only the IT team. I'm not giving it to anyone else. Different departments within IT. Desktop Support, Helpdesk, Health Information Systems, etc
Oh, that makes much more sense. I totally misunderstood your aim. Well, you can disregard a bunch of what I said
In that case I would look at which one has the most API integration for your tools. It is great when you can have all your logging alerts in your chat agent as well.
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@kelly 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 This is only the IT team. I'm not giving it to anyone else. Different departments within IT. Desktop Support, Helpdesk, Health Information Systems, etc
Oh, that makes much more sense. I totally misunderstood your aim. Well, you can disregard a bunch of what I said
In that case I would look at which one has the most API integration for your tools. It is great when you can have all your logging alerts in your chat agent as well.
One of our programmers really likes Slack. RocketChat seemed like a perfect fit at the very least for our DevOps
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@aaronstuder said in What makes RocketChat appealing to you?:
I got a version of RocketChat up for testing now
Using snap?
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@black3dynamite said in What makes RocketChat appealing to you?:
@aaronstuder said in What makes RocketChat appealing to you?:
I got a version of RocketChat up for testing now
Using snap?
Yup, in a LXD Container. More to come soon!
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@aaronstuder said in What makes RocketChat appealing to you?:
@black3dynamite said in What makes RocketChat appealing to you?:
@aaronstuder said in What makes RocketChat appealing to you?:
I got a version of RocketChat up for testing now
Using snap?
Yup, in a LXD Container. More to come soon!
We do that, too.
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@black3dynamite said in What makes RocketChat appealing to you?:
@aaronstuder said in What makes RocketChat appealing to you?:
I got a version of RocketChat up for testing now
Using snap?
That's definitely the way to do it.
