I’m curious about how business messaging software actually supports remote work in practical terms. Specifically, I’m looking to understand the key features and capabilities that help distributed teams stay connected and productive — for example, real-time chat, presence indicators, audio/video collaboration, file sharing, integrations with task management tools, and security aspects like encryption and access control.
I’m also interested in self-hosted messaging solutions. Do platforms that offer whitelabel or self-hosted options give more control over branding, data ownership, and compliance compared to cloud-hosted alternatives? Examples I’ve come across include MirrorFly, TrueConf, and Troop Messenger — but I’d love to hear about others too.
If you’ve used or evaluated these or similar platforms in a remote work environment, I’d appreciate hearing about your experiences, including any pros/cons around setup, maintenance, security, and team adoption.
Welcome the community, @kathirn! There is a whole universe of libre - i.e. free and open source - messaging options. These include the Matrix stack (comprised of set of technologies like Element & Synapse which implement the ‘Matrix’ open messaging standard), Mattermost, RocketChat, Zulip, as well as NextCloud Talk. These offer many (perhaps all) of the features of proprietary messaging systems (like Microsoft Teams, Salesforce Slack, and the ones you’ve mentioned) as well as more advanced features.
For example, governments, security forces, and military around the world have adopted Matrix because of its focus on full end-to-end encryption for messages, audio, and video conferencing. The proprietary options do not offer similarly strong encryption. The agencies using Matrix also cite their ability to fully audit all the code involved in the service (which is not allowed with proprietary options).
These systems are all self-hostable - deployable by individuals (I’ve run all of those listed) and organisations for their own use, and all of these can be hosted by other vendors (at no cost to the vendors) on behalf of paying customers. Systems like Matrix have perhaps a hundred million users globally, so they are not ‘small’ players. (Note, user numbers are based on self-reporting, which is necessarily conservative as no all users report. There are no sales figures on which to base them) The data for all libre solutions is owned and managed by whoever is providing the hosting.
I’ve written this in the past as a commentary on ‘open communities’ who have chosen to adopt closed (proprietary) tools for those wanting to participate despite the imposition that places on those participants. The same would be true for ‘open’ organisations with remote workers.
For what it’s worth, I’ve worked remotely (along with all my colleagues) for the past decade, and these messaging systems have been crucial to allowing it to work smoothly. After years of using Rocket.Chat, we moved to Matrix about 5 years ago, which is superb.