TITLE: Too many software options for group working
DATE: 2020-03-30
AUTHOR: John L. Godlee
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I've been working from home since I moved to London so the new
phase of everybody working from home isn't that much of a change
for me. The thing that has changed for me is that my colleagues are
suddenly very pre-occupied with organising group meetings online
and configuring a whole load of different software to allow them to
do that. Microsoft Teams seems to be the preferred choice for many
people in my department, presumably because it is included with the
University's Microsoft Office 365 subscription. Microsoft Teams
works the same as Slack, there are groups, each group has its own
message feed and can have different channels. Files can be shared,
you can chat with other users, and there is a facility for group
video chat.
My first issue is that some people are using Slack and others are
using Teams. I don't want to have both open on my laptop all the
time, and I guess other people feel the same way, because often
messages I send go unnoticed, kind of defeating the purpose of
trying to replicate the office environment, where you can quickly
turn around to ask your colleague a quick question. If there was
only one platform, I think this issue could be partially solved.
Teams is filled with features, but there is a lot of streamlining
needed. An issue I keep having is that there are multiple places to
upload a file. While in a group video chat someone might want to
share a plot they made to show some results. They can upload the
file to any of the following places:
- The group home tab
- The group files tab
- The group posts feed
- The video chat sidebar chat
This means that every time a file is uploaded, there is at least 20
seconds lost to people crying "where did you put the file? Did you
upload it yet?".
Other issues I have are that there are multiple interfaces for
calling, one on the calls tab, and then another in the video
meeting feature for each group.
There are other platforms which focus on the group video chat
feature, further muddying the waters. Notably Zoom, Skype and
Google Hangouts (shutting down soon). I have an issue with Google
Hangouts and Zoom, because of all the personal data they harvest
during use. I feel these services aren't meant for business and
it's irresponsible to require people to use them in a workplace
setting. One thing that Teams has going for it above all these
other platforms is that as far as I know, it can do all of the
things the other apps I mentioned can do, all in a single app. Even
if Teams is the best program for the job however, getting everybody
to use it remains a problem. I've been through similar struggles
with IM apps on smartphones, with friends using WhatsApp, Facebook
Messenger, Telegram, Signal, Matrix/XMPP and others. I've found
that it's basically impossible to get people to change their mind,
even if presented with hard evidence why they should use one app
over another. It's just too much effort convincing people over and
over to use a different platform, so I gave up having those
arguments a long time ago, life is too short.
Slightly related to this are all the issues I have with Calendar
apps. Some of my colleagues like to schedule meetings on Outlook
Calendar through Office 365. Trying to sync Outlook's Calendar with
the default Calendar.app on macOS is a massive pain and fails a
lot. Again, Teams could be an answer to this, but for some daft
reason the Calendar on Teams doesn't sync with the Calendar on
Office 365, which is unfathomable to me.
One solution to all of this software mess is to let people use the
software they want, but allow those software to interface with each
other through a common protocol. In my opinion, the services people
need are:
- Text chat
- Video conferencing
- File sharing
- Calendar
For text chat there is Matrix/XMPP. Matrix recently added support
for video conferencing with Jitsi, so that could be an option. For
file sharing I'm tempted to recommend a simple sharing of URLs
linking to personal file servers, but I think this might be too
complicated for most people to set up, so I'm at a loss on that
issue. For Calendar / meeting scheduling there is the CalDAV
protocol, which people could use on their own Calendar apps. I
actually have no idea why CalDAV isn't presented to users of Google
Calendar or Outlook's Calendar, there might be a good reason I'm
missing because I don't know enough about how it works, but on the
surface it seems like an obvious fix.
As the UK government has been exercising some sense of control over
the population to try and limit the spread of COVID-19, I've been
thinking about the potential bliss of having these fundamental
internet communication services provided in a single universal
platform deployed by the government and made free to access for
all. It sounds like totalitarianism and maybe that's how it would
turn out, but it would remove all this unnecessary choice and
conflict between different platforms.
