The European Center for Nuclear Research (better known as CERN) recently conducted a ad in which he explainedto the cessation of the use of the platform "Facebook Workplace" which was used for internal communication between employees.
Instead henceforth CERN will use open Mattermost packages for quick messages, chat and Discourse for lengthy discussions and exchange of information that can be referenced in the future and that in addition to instead of an email notification mechanism, it is planned to implement solutions based on PUSH notifications and bulletins.
Mattermost is positioned as an open alternative to the Slack communication system and allows you to receive and send messages, files and images, track your conversation history and receive notifications on your smartphone or PC.
Slack-ready integration modules are supported, and a large collection of native modules is provided for integration with Jira, GitHub, IRC, XMPP, Hubot, Giphy, Jenkins, GitLab, Trac, BitBucket, Twitter, Redmine, SVN, and RSS / Atom. The server-side code for the project is written in Go and distributed under the MIT license.
Platform Discourse provides a system of linear discussions offered to replace mailing lists, web forums, and chats.
It supports topic separation based on tags, updating the message list into topics in real time, and the ability to subscribe to sections of interest and send responses by email. The system is written in Ruby using the Ruby on Rails framework and the Ember.js library (data is stored in PostgreSQL DBMS, fast cache is stored in Redis).
About the change
This movement by CERN stems from an initiative by the corporation to save expenses and bet on the use of free software. Such is the case of the change they made to stop paying licenses for use to Microsoft and bet on MAlt (Microsoft Alternatives Project) a project that is intended to avoid the use of Microsoft products in favor of alternative solutions based on open source software.
As Microsoft withdrew support for an academic institution from CERN in which, once the current contract is finished, CERN should pay the total cost in relation to the number of users and where the calculation showed that the cost of purchasing licenses in the new scenario will increase by more than 10 times, which is why which they bet on MAlt.
On the part of the refusal of continue using Facebook Workplace at CERN it is in the foreground because it is a corporate product provided by Facebook to organize internal communication between employees within the company and this raises concerns and doubts about confidentiality, the lack of control over your data and the desire not to depend on the policies of an outside company.
CERN has been using Facebook Workplace for some years (since 2016), but since 2019 when Facebook announced a change in the rate policy, where the new rates begin to operate in October 2020 and involve the payment of 4 to $ 8 per user per month, this became another point to stop using Facebook Workplace.
And it is that even that Facebook Workplace provides free access, this did not turn out to be useful since it is significantly limited by the number of groups, members and functionality.
With this, CERN had a choice: whether to start paying for continuous access to a service that had previously been provided for free or download a free version of Workplace Essential, without technical support, without the possibility of using a single sign-on (SSO) system and involving sending all your data to Facebook.
Finally, CERN decided to replace Facebook Workplace by their open counterparts that can be run on their servers.
On January 31, 2020, the migration to open source software was completed and CERN removed his Facebook Workplace account.
? Marvelous!
And why don't they use Nextcloud which, in addition to communication, has more options in file sharing, even artificial intelligence for security, double authentication, etc. etc.? It's a question, surely these people know more than I do.