wenc, do you folks in your organization use the channel messaging part of Teams? Aka the teams chat part, or do folks tend to use the one on one or small group chat.
We see folks actively avoid the channel based messaging in teams. Like 99.5% of messages are in chat.
We use Teams. It's ok for 1:1 stuff. It all depends on the actions and preferences of the user base. I try to use single recipient chats whenever possible, but others like to create group descriptions.
I like that Mattermost treads Channels as Groupchats, and you can reply to a Chatmessage or just add to the Conversation where in Teams you have Conversations where you can reply to or start a new one, this leads to people replying via new conversation or replying while it's a new conversation.
I also dislike the notion of Teams with Subchannels in Teams and the hard cut between Chat and Teams - I like the way Mattermost does it more: a <hr> Element between Channels and Chats.
With the increasing presence of digital communication tools in the workplace I'm finding that people tend to gravitate towards chat rooms instead of talking.
Is that true to you and your team as well? What are your team interactions like?
With the increasing presence of digital communication tools in the workplace I'm finding that people tend to gravitate towards chat rooms instead of talking, lessening the bond between people and even making team outings awkward at times.
Is that true to you and your team as well? What are your team interactions like?
I see folks use both, but definitely most lean heavier to group chat for some reason. It's an interesting sociological phenomenon. If I had to guess, the reasons are probably: there's no #random or #general channel, so they use group chat as a substitute; they prefer linear rather than threaded discussions; similar to Slack, there's no user security in channels, so group chat is a way to include/exclude certain people from conversations.
I hate everything about how chats are organized in teams.
From the chat announcements from meetings I didn’t join.
Meeting chats mixed with my individual chats.
Channel chats where you’re often accidentally starting a new thread.
Why meeting chat in chat window but not channel threads?
It has "private" group chats in Chats tab and all meetings auto-create group chats. At various points I've tried to push conversations into a proper Team and threaded chat, but the "convenience" of just sending a chat message in last week's meeting chat or some hand-built group chat rather than just finding the right Team channel seems to keep winning out more often than not.
Not the parent commentator but I've been in both situations described above too. If I understand what's was written, it's that if you don't have the option of group/team chat rooms in the software you're using then, it forces 1:1 chat conversations instead. I believe GP is then describing how the dynamics are different in a group-level broadcast of information, versus a one on one chat.
I would strengthen this statement to "use group channels unless inappropriate."
There are definitely topics that shouldn't be discussed publicly, but for everything else, I think it's best to default to using a public channel.
I can't tell you how many times people give me a bunch of details in a direct message, only to have to replay all those details when someone else is added to the conversation.
Using direct messages is also rude if you are doing so in an attempt to bypass a team's normal process for handling incoming requests.
Well, for our purposes a group based chat is much, much nicer. Especially with logs. People drop to IM at times (or private messages in IRC), but we seem to get more out of the virtual watercooler/mass meeting room. The one on one stuff generally works better through email, where it's less transient and people can easily reference it later.
If you have people who haven't touched IM before, you should definitely checkout Campfire. One mass "company" room can get crazy so you can always fragment it off into a couple of area specific chats alongside the primary.
For full context: teams came out during my current employment and I have not moved to another company to see it used any other place.
From my understanding; at least how it's configured for my company... A "channel" is more like a series of threads, reminiscent of a forum post per message which can be replied to. This is what I mean when I say it's like email; it's heavily thread based.
"Chats" are ad-hoc, un-ordered and will become inaccessible/removed when they cycle out of the sidebar (as in, you can have 20~ chats, the one last interacted with the longest ago will be dropped if you add a new chat).
It's effectively group chat. I believe 37 signals themselves use it. Scales well to most situations, where you have groups of under 20 people working on any one project at a time.
Bad analogy though because persistent channel-based chat is a good way to handle ephemeral and interactive collaboration, especially in a Covid world where few lightweight options exist. Do we have to open a Zoom, send an email or start a doc for every single thing?
I get that some environments might be fine without group chat, but for others it's indispensable.
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