Which chat client should we use?

General
1

I’m putting this here so more people can see it. We need to choose a chat client that everybody can use, that includes.

  • The Old Farts (The Board)
  • The Minions
  • Internal Volunteers
  • External Volunteers (Digital Champtions)

We have to rule out Whatsapp due to safeguarding as it shares peoples phone numbers.

We tried Zulip https://chat.inclusivebytes.org/ which potentialy works well, but is an unessecary expensive if only used internally.

We have been using Google Chat internally but the issue with using that externally is to talk to people outside of inclusive bytes we have to upgrade which will double our cost.

Does anyone have any thoughts?

2

Sadly I don’t do much chatting other than on Whatsapp and we use Skype at work as a lot of our clients use that.

3

havent used Skype in yonks… have to have a look again.

4

I still like Zulip

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5

Potentially migrate from Google and transfer over to using Microsoft (roughly same price im pretty sure) as much as I hate teams, I feel like it’ll be the simplest way to integrate internal and external conversations together

6

The issue with teams is it doesnt play well with people outside the domain, ie when we have a meeting with the council we have to log out and join as a guest

7

When I used Teams for WorldSkills meetings (both organisations use Microsoft), I never had to log out of my college account; I was just shown as an External user in the meeting.

8

That could well be down to how the organisation have it configured. The council like to make things difficult lol

9

Just seen this thread!

Yeah, I personally dispise using teams.

I think best choices that I know of (with out much research) in no order:

  • Zulip
  • Discord
  • google chats
  • slack
10

So… we have come to the conclusion that Google Chat is the best option, mainly because the minions share computers so it needed to be something that could be tied to their user profile or else it just gets forgotten about.

The problem with Google is they set it up so on the lower tier that we use you cannot chat with people outside of the organisation.

Think I may have a way round that, so I’m going to give it a try