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Comment by juancampa | Hacker News Reader

Reminder: have a secondary form of real-time communication for your team (e.g. Telegram).

What is everyone using?

Disagree. You will spread out the communication and cause problems. People will use their preferred client instead of the one that everybody should be using as the primary. You also have to manage accounts and permissions for both. Unless you like people sending information around to their personal accounts, which I'm sure a lot of places do.

E-Mail is good enough to let people know that something like Slack is down. It's close enough to real-time to be used as a backup for something like this, and everybody already has an e-mail address.

My company already has Slack, HipChat and Teams, and it's a communications nightmare. People are constantly confused and asking for which chat client one manager uses, while others don't know where to go for the support channels.

Maybe this sounds like old-school IT, but the new-school "set everything up ad-hoc using your personal shit" just sets you up for disaster down the road.

> My company already has Slack, HipChat and Teams, and it's a communications nightmare. People are constantly confused and asking for which chat client one manager uses, while others don't know where to go for the support channels.

I'm curious about how many people in the company are affected by these problems. Most developers and infrastructure people use the same communication tools, but perhaps support and sales may use their own tools. Given that, how often do developers and infrastructure need to communicate in real time with sales or support?

I would suspect that it's not often enough that email wouldn't work as a way to handle issues or open support tickets. Now managers have to deal with communications between their own team and other teams and parts of the org, but, in my opinion, having to deal with different chat platforms is part of their job and they should be the ones to deal with it rather than forcinng everyone to use the same platform, even if it's suboptimal for certain users.

You couldn’t do this with Telegram, but if you were using Hipchat or Teams or Mattermost or Discord as your backup, you could just keep the instance locked down most of the time. Open up permissions when Slack is down.

You can do that with Telegram if you have a bunch of centrally-managed groups; simply mute them until you need them. Admins can unmute them as necessary.

That being said, I don’t think I’d want Telegram to be my failover. They have a tendency to experience regional issues with great frequency, and if you’re in a lot of active chats, things start to get buggy.

My IRC bouncer (using thelounge, hosted on my own systems) continues to survive through various O365, Slack, etc outages. Can highly recommend.

Discord (we're a game company). Email too. And some folks are starting to use Google's chat.

Aether. In fact looking at it to replace Slack entirely. Much better controls.

Getaether.net/pro

Ha, Great to see our thing here. Let me know if you (anyone) ha(s|ve) any questions.

Are you the head that pops up on your website?

Yup.

We have a Keybase group that gets used twice a year when Slack takes a dirt nap. We also use Zoom so I guess the buyout doesn't have security implications for us?

hangouts/teams (if you already use gsuite/0365 ). More important problem is our own devops relies heavily on slack based monitoring and chat ops, all integrations don't port without work and never designed for DR

Not official, but our team just made a seamless transition to chatting in Keybase.

that's unfortunate

Google Hangouts Chat, because our whole company has the G Suite For Business

Everyone in the team is once again learning the ins and outs of Google Chat after 5-10 years as we speak...

Matrix :)

Which you can bridge to your slack rooms to keep the existing conversation going!

If you’re going to recommend something non-e2e for a business team, go with email that is already distributed to everyone’s contact lists, policy controlled, 2fa’d, et c - not some snake oil like Telegram.

Tandem

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