17 ms·

CERN Ends Trial of Facebook Workplace

306 points by sohkamyung 7y ago

montyhallpy 7y ago
My company too has bought into this Facebook Workplace hype. The feedback from users is mixed. Some people like it. Most find it clumsy and cluttered. The notification system is totally useless and spammy. Almost every little update by anyone in your org is a notification. I see 100+ notifications everytime I log in. I don't know what value it brings or what problem it solves that is not already solved by email / distribution lists / IM.
- sangeeth96 7y ago
  What was your company using before Workplace?
  - DailyHN 7y ago
    > email / distribution lists / IM
  - KozmoNau7 7y ago
    No the OP, but my employer has also adopted Workplace. Before that we used our own internal website for section-level and company-wide updates, with commenting and a small discussion board where dicussions not directly related to updates were had. I'm sick and tired of Facebook, and now I'm forced to endure it at work, unless I want to miss out on important updates.
- mstade 7y ago
  We use workplace too and this mirrors my experience precisely, especially the bit about notifications. It seems you can't control it either, you can turn off individual workspaces or whatever they call them, but new ones are added by default it seems so it's a cat and mouse game. Given it's so noisy, and full of the same dark patterns as regular Facebook, it's all but useless in sending out comms across the wider organization, let alone for communicating with other team members. There was a big push last year to get everyone on Workplace, which was kind of ironic since the internal firewall blocked facebook so you had to use an external network (e.g. phone.) They fixed that, but despite the big push, most truly important notices are still sent via email distribution lists and published on internal web properties. It really feels like something forced on the org, and I wouldn't be surprised if I'm a year they backtrack and say it's too expensive and doesn't provide any value beyond what email and internal sites already did. What we really need is a good chat solution with solid search functionality. Slack would do, but I'd prefer something more like IRC with all chats archived and fully searchable. Slack is too meme friendly...
  - pbalau 7y ago
    > We use workplace too and this mirrors my experience precisely, especially the bit about notifications. I have a solution for you: https://imgur.com/a/QnIsBUw https://imgur.com/a/QnIsBUw Even better, if you go to https://my.workplace.com/groups/ https://my.workplace.com/groups/ you will see a list with all groups you are part of with options, for each group, to control the notifications, follow settings and leave the group. On the same page there is a button to bulk manage groups. Both my personal fb feed and the workplace feeds and notifications (both when I used to work for fb and now at the current startup), are fairly clean, with only things I care about. Yours is noisy because you let it be noisy. At fb, our team had a public group for support requests, a main internal group for team wide comms (release notes for each service we provided, on-call reports, welcome messages for new peeps, social stuff) and a number of groups for each individual team, or service, or even inter team projects. The noise on my feed was minimal.
    - mjburgess 7y ago
      "let it be noisy" So you think it's the user's responsibility to manage ? They disagree.
    - n0rbwah 7y ago
      The fact that some (supposedly) technical users on HN are annoyed by this noisiness should be enough to tell you that the system's badly designed and that you can't expect most users to configure their feeds the way they'd ideally want it, even if the tool allows for it.
    - mstade 7y ago
      > Yours is noisy because you let it be noisy. I never "let" it be noisy, it's noisy by default since I have to opt-out to groups rather than opt-in. I've intentionally subscribed to exactly zero groups in workplace, but auto-subscribed to all. This makes notifications entirely useless to me, since it's all just noise and I don't have the time or energy to go through and change settings every time someone adds a group.
      - deleted 7y ago
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
sangeeth96 7y ago
I'm unsure why any company would prefer Workplace over Slack/Teams etc. They have far more features and basically not scathed in privacy troubles as FB is in right now.
- pdpi 7y ago
  “More” doesn’t mean better. As an ex-fb employee, I genuinely liked workplace as a replacement for slack. It forces a fundamentally different workflow, but has some very clear advantages — e.g. groups suck for near real time chat like slack offers, but is a much better format for long term search.
- blowski 7y ago
  Workplace is more like an intranet, whereas Slack is more like email (in terms of how it’s used). That said, my experience was that the Facebook layout makes people treat it like Facebook - sharing and liking good news stories, but all the serious stuff is done elsewhere.
  - flurdy 7y ago
    More like Yammer. Now owned by Microsoft. Which I found useful as an intranet long life discussion forum. But rubbish when treated like a chat app.
coder1001 7y ago
Interesting! "Reactions were not always positive. Many people preferred not to use a tool from a company that they did not trust in terms of data privacy." So the issue is just trust or the tool is not as useful? How would the results differ had someone else offered them a similar tool?
- keanzu 7y ago
  > Reactions were not always positive. Universally true: Reactions are never always positive for anything. A non-statement which will also be true of whatever replaces Workplace. > Many people preferred not to use a tool from a company that they did not trust in terms of data privacy. Many other people used the tool for 3 years during the free trial; how is this advisable if there are genuine data privacy issues? Seems negligent on CERN's part. The decision point came at the transition from free to paid, not due to a change in trustworthiness of Facebook.
rjzzleep 7y ago
I thought lack of control in the free offering of mattermost is one of the things people complain about the most. It seems riot/matrix and rocket.chat seem quite popular. I liked the e2e in riot but it seemed a bit cumbersome. Rocket.chat was quite popular at CCC so I guess it's probably decent as well.
- Arathorn 7y ago
  We just merged a rewrite of riot/web’s e2e UX to develop branch - it is hopefully going from cumbersome to balletic :)
skinnyasianboi 7y ago
Great move to go with open source solutions like Mattermost and Discourse.
- bipson 7y ago
  This has tradition at CERN. I wonder why they even considered Facebook's offering, but I guess they do not dismiss proprietary solutions as well. Whatever works? Often enough they end up writing their own tools, if nothing fitting is available, and this might end up in the public domain (since AFAIK everything at CERN is basically paid for by the public, i.e. various member states, EU etc.).
  - ahartmetz 7y ago
    CERN IT administration is sometimes pretty idiotic. When I was still in physics, they replaced the well-loved homegrown Hypernews system with Microsoft something, a move welcomed by no one.
    - Aeolun 7y ago
      For once I would like a company I work for to move to a clearly better product... So far they seem to be searching for the worst of all worlds.
saiya-jin 7y ago
Well no surprise there. FB is consistently on the dark side of the moral spectrum, at least kudos for being consistent. Scientists have privacy concerns and seemingly higher moral expectations, so paying for a tool like that with public money would not look good from any possible angle. Do I understand correctly that they changed their pricing model to paid during trial, or have all control over data revoked? In a place like CERN that would probably be even security breach, even though its international project, US 3-letter agencies (and for-profit corporations) shouldn't have internal access like that.
pdpi 7y ago
If I read it right and they had around 1k users after 3 years of trialling Workplace, I think it’s less a case of “ending the trial” as it is “pulling the cord on life support”. The article distinctly makes it sound as if they only trialled because they were offered a generous free usage period, without a clear desire to actually integrate it into their daily routine. The timeline suggests that they were onboarded in the early days of Workplace, and I would blame FB’s nascent enterprise sales team for being too immature to recognise what was a losing battle from the get go.
- keanzu 7y ago
  They fail to mention how many potential users there were and whether this was high or low take up. "The acronym CERN is also used to refer to the laboratory, which in 2016 had 2,500 scientific, technical, and administrative staff members, and hosted about 12,000 users." Is it 1000 out of 2500 or 1000 out of 14500 or am I using an invalid source and the actual staff count is completely different?
  - pdpi 7y ago
    FB’s target was almost certainly the whole enchilada, so it’s penetration of 1000 out of 14500. Even if you call it 1000 out of 2500, that’s 40% adoption over three years, for a tool that wants to be the centrepiece of your collaboration architecture.
    - Cederfjard 7y ago
      Even worse, the current top comment (clarified further by one of its children) is saying that they only had 150 active users per week.
johnchristopher 7y ago
So, what happens to all the data that is poured into Workplace ? No mattermost import, I suppose ?
- peterkelly 7y ago
  It gets sold to Cambridge Analytica
- taccie 7y ago
  Maybe we can address their concerns with our platform Open Social (getopensocial.com) as they use Drupal for most of their platforms already. I think we can get some data our of Workkplace trough https://developers.facebook.com/docs/workplace/reference/graph-api https://developers.facebook.com/docs/workplace/reference/gra... - would be an interesting case for a migration tool..!
- ThiefMaster- 7y ago
  Besides the fact that it makes no sense to import Facebook-style data into a chat, doing so would only be useful if more than a tiny amount of the data in Workplace was actually worth keeping.
TomMarius 7y ago
My previous company has used and pushed workplace. It was never useful in anyway to anyone in my engineering teams.
fkfaduc 7y ago
It's great to see CERN make more and more steps towards free software! Public money - public code
filmgirlcw 7y ago
They only had 150 active users (despite 1000 signups), so choosing not to pay for the offering makes sense. I have the utmost respect for CERN as an institution — I want to make that clear. What I don’t love, however, is this trend that seems to be using a PR offensive of “price shaming” whenever contract or license terms change. I understand CERN is publicly funded and that it doesn’t have an unlimited budget. But I’m not sure how necessary the passive-aggressive jab at the three-year free trial now becoming paid is to the fact that CERN is dropping a tool only 150 people actively used. The critiques of the product (and I’ve never used Workplace and hope I never have to) seen to be totally inconsequential, because CERN seemed to be happy doing the IT work to keep it running/integrated as long as it was free. It’s fine to drop support for a communication tool — especially one that doesn’t have a lot of adoption. But there seems to be an insinuation that Facebook should continue to give CERN access for free, and that I just don’t like.
- twic 7y ago
  It's absolutely fine to passive-aggressively shame a 500 billion dollar public corporation. There just isn't anything wrong with doing that.
- arethuza 7y ago
  Given what was invented at CERN you think Facebook would have the decency to give them a free license!
  - Cthulhu_ 7y ago
    That's basically stating that influencers should get free stuff; CERN is a company that handles hundreds of millions, and I don't believe they're too poor to pay for services.
    - lexs 7y ago
      It's kind of weird to describe CERN as "a company", doesn't quite capture the spirit of it...
    - 7y ago
np_tedious 7y ago
> Reactions were not always positive. It would be cool to hear what these reactions were. How did it suit their workflow, compare to alternatives, etc Right now all this article says is that they had data privacy concerns (valid) and that the free trial ran out.
whatsmyusername 7y ago
Wow, what a cursed product. I can’t think of a single other company I would trust less with our business communications than Facebook. Edit: Maybe pastebin? Though pastebin will honor takedown requests.
osioke 7y ago
Well, some instances at CERN are enjoying Discourse, so I guess the move was inevitable?
a012 7y ago
My company chose Workplace as a formal and only official channel for internal communication, including announcements from executives to all employees. It makes you have to actively on workplace to get information, knowing what's happening around. I think it's a wrong way to use, but it's already set by top c level.
goatinaboat 7y ago
Corporate internal social networks are a concept that just doesn’t work because of the hierarchy involved. This is obvious to anyone who isn’t in the HR department.
PunchTornado 7y ago
> CERN was then given a choice of either paying to continue with the initially free set-up or downgrading to a free version that would remove administrative rights and CERN single sign-on access and send all data to Facebook another example of paying with the data.
danpalmer 7y ago
The thing I personally found difficulty about Workplace is that it uses the same dark patterns as Facebook to increase engagement. For a business tool this is a bad thing. A tool that requires none of my time to get benefit out of is a better tool than one that requires some of my time. Workplace drained time with patterns like unnecessary notifications, email notifications without the actual content in and prompts to engage in activity on the platform in ways that weren’t productive. Business tools should save time, not drain time. I think Workplace either has this wrong, or is designed for workplaces where people don’t have enough to do and spend their days on Facebook anyway.
- TremendousJudge 7y ago
  It's also a bad thing for a "civilian tool"
  - toper-centage 7y ago
    Of course, but much harder to quantify in terms of productivity and money lost unless you time-track all your life to know how much money your off time is worth.
    - danpalmer 7y ago
      Not to mention the tricky link to what one might call the "entertainment value" of Facebook.
andresramon 7y ago
Have you ever gotten your bitcoins stolen from your wallet or invested in an ICO that turned out to be a scam, you are not alone because this happened to me too. I initially lost $90,000 in just 3 months from Cryptoallday, I contacted the authorities and they referred me to a bitcoin recovery company , SUPPORT RECOVERDWALLETS , They are the leading intelligence gathering agency for fighting fraudulent brokers and scammers . They helped me recover all my funds in less than a month I'm speaking out to improve our awareness of these cryptocurrency thieves and help you if you have been a victim yourself. Simply visit their email , support @ recoveredwallets . com or through whatsapp + 1 7 4 0 3 1 5 8 7 3 8
martijn_himself 7y ago
I don't know Workplace but how is this newsworthy and of interest to anyone outside of CERN? The article sounds quite spiteful, and why, if 'Many people preferred not to use a tool from a company that they did not trust in terms of data privacy' would you use it in the first place? Also, how can you blame a commercial company for charging for a tool?
- alamortsubite 7y ago
  > why ... would you use it in the first place? People's trust in FB has eroded greatly over the last three years. That may be all there is to it. In addition, however, the post clearly says it was a trial. The people who pushed for it were not necessarily the ones who had to eat the dog food.
Maro 7y ago
I worked on Workplace at Facebook. It's super-cheap at $1-3 per MAU. If they like it, why not pay for it. OTOH if I were FB I'd give it to CERN for free.
- swarnie_ 7y ago
  I'm forced to use Workplace in my company and i absolutely hate it. After 15 years of employers trying to keep employees off social media they're now trying to shove it back in again. While joined to around 100 groups in my global organisation the wall/feed thing becomes a very poor way to deliver technical information. Its intermingled with personal messages or a reminder about Jason from accounts upcoming birthday drinks. Everyday i'm reminded why i left Facebook in 2012 and never looked back.
  - gmueckl 7y ago
    This sounds like a terribly mismanaged Workplace instance to me. Why should anyone be joined to 100 groups? That's a red flag right there. And if you can't move personal stuff off of Workplace, create separate groups for that that can be muted or left etc. This noisy personal stuff can easily exist in public groups that can be looked into by anyone if something comes up.
    - redis_mlc 7y ago
      "You're holding it wrong."
- MuricaFYeah 7y ago
  Of course you'd say that facebook guy, but facebook has no place running anything from CERN or any other scientific org for that matter. CERN shouldn't even have considered it in the first place. Might as well just install a fibre optic cable straight into Fort Meade and Langley to cut off the middle man. Also, I'm pretty sure tomorrow or next week's news will be that facebook will in fact supply this tool out to CERN for free and cite some bs like "to give back" or "to support the scientific community". I hope I'm wrong but let's see how it goes. Will we ever learn?
HenryBemis 7y ago
I don't see this as price shaming. I see a HUGE "we don't trust these folks to begin with...". Facebook is cancer for humanity. It gives 1 and takes 50. And then dilligently finds ways to use that 50 to hurt you, for their profit. I wouldn't trust any sensitive information with them. And especially CERN? These guys have info and tech to end life. Some random admin with god-mode that will get bribed by Saudis/<insert other criminals/dictatorships> wouldn't hesitate providing them with any data. For some organizations, the value of their data/information is worth much more than the £€$5k/10k/50k that their collaboration tools cost. CERN is one of them. I prefer to pay £€$10 per year more taxes so they don't use scum like Facebook. (angry words yes, but hey.. they tried hard to earn them feelings - perhaps if they evern become less scum-my, maybe people will trust them more)
- andrepd 7y ago
  >And especially CERN? These guys have info and tech to end life. Someone has been reading too many Dan Brown novels.
- codeduck 7y ago
  > And especially CERN? These guys have info and tech to end life. Wat.
  - saalweachter 7y ago
    They have both hammers and phone books, I'm sure.
    - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
      Probably a few ladders and some cleaning agents capable of creating slippery floors scattered around their facility as well.
      - zaarn 7y ago
        I'm pretty sure you can kill people with their particle accelerator too if the particles hit you. You'd probably be int he vacuum of the accelerator though so unsure if you'd notice.
someonehere 7y ago
Fun fact. This tool was being developed internally at FB about ten years ago. They really couldn’t figure it out back then and it sounds like they can’t figure it out today. Internally before it was Workplace it was a decent tool that integrated with the public facing site. Unsure of how Workplace works today.
- tudelo 7y ago
  It works really well inside of FB -- good way to collaborate, teams have their own groups and then there are cross team groups etc. There can be a little too much information, but there are not many complaints in general about the productivity it brings. Not sure how well it works in other companies.
  - toast0 7y ago
    I guess it must work well for some people inside FB. For me, it was just another high noise, low signal thing to try to remember to check: email, workplace, workplace messenger, irc, wierd automated smses with links I couldn't load and I couldn't quite figure out but at least stopped after I quit, whatsapp messages (where i worked), sometimes phone calls and people coming to my desk. Plus diff reviews and task tickets, which theoretically sent notifications through whatever, but since it's so full of garbage, you just have to check. Of course, you can't actually rely on workspace notifications either, if you really want to know if another team did something, you need to skim through all their posts. Of course, if you asked someone directly, they would send you to their group feed, like an outsider would be able to skim it with ease. I may still be unpacking a bit
Priem19 7y ago
I'm surprised CERN has tried it in the first place. I mean, if CERN can produce things like ProtonMail, it can definitely conjure up massively superior alternatives to facecrook.
- ThiefMaster- 7y ago
  CERN did not produce ProtonMail. A few people who previously worked at CERN did.
sebow 7y ago
Why is CERN of all places using facebook or doing business at any level with facebook? This is not some "anti-americanism" or anything. Facebook is a shit corporation, and CERN of all places should have nothing to do with it, besides maybe a public verified page to announce things and similar activities. As an european and as an EU citizen, this is disgraceful.I don't think people actually realize what (should at least) kind of resources and talent CERN has. They should have their own mediums of communication and team management, etc.
donalhunt 7y ago
> Losing control of our data was unacceptable This is the biggest risk to companies as they evolve their use of products and manage costs. We found to our dismay that Dropbox do something similar if you decide to migrate off their platform (accounts get downgraded to the free plan and the company loses all control over the data in the account). Companies are not doing enough to highlight these gaps / gotchas when the decision to utilise the platform are made. (only a little bitter having had to deal with the fallout of these decisions)
ian-bateman 7y ago
Maybe they should consider following Mozilla and just self-host their own instance of Riot. A $5-$50/mo Linode + a tiny bit of ops overhead has to be less expensive than anything anyone else is charging (whether Facebook, Slack, Teams, etc.). Plus, then they at least have complete ownership / control of their data, which for an organization like CERN seems a little important...
- matoro 7y ago
  It says they already run their own internal Mattermost intance which does the same thing. Having run both MM and Riot for real users I can say that MM is the far more professional and well-designed of the two.
  - xf86alsa 7y ago
    How long ago did you try Riot? It's changed a lot in the past year, and with their encryption changes coming in the next few weeks it should be even nicer.
riffic 7y ago
Perhaps CERN can spin up its own Mastodon instance? https://toot.thoughtworks.com https://toot.thoughtworks.com is an example of an organizational adoption of a Fediverse node.
- elkos 7y ago
  As far as I know they do
tibbydudeza 7y ago
Facebook and my workplace ... no thanks ... fortunately we canned that one.

306 points by sohkamyung 7y ago

My company too has bought into this Facebook Workplace hype. The feedback from users is mixed. Some people like it. Most find it clumsy and cluttered. The notification system is totally useless and spammy. Almost every little update by anyone in your org is a notification. I see 100+ notifications everytime I log in. I don't know what value it brings or what problem it solves that is not already solved by email / distribution lists / IM.

sangeeth96 7y ago
What was your company using before Workplace?
- DailyHN 7y ago
  > email / distribution lists / IM
- KozmoNau7 7y ago
  No the OP, but my employer has also adopted Workplace. Before that we used our own internal website for section-level and company-wide updates, with commenting and a small discussion board where dicussions not directly related to updates were had. I'm sick and tired of Facebook, and now I'm forced to endure it at work, unless I want to miss out on important updates.
mstade 7y ago
We use workplace too and this mirrors my experience precisely, especially the bit about notifications. It seems you can't control it either, you can turn off individual workspaces or whatever they call them, but new ones are added by default it seems so it's a cat and mouse game. Given it's so noisy, and full of the same dark patterns as regular Facebook, it's all but useless in sending out comms across the wider organization, let alone for communicating with other team members. There was a big push last year to get everyone on Workplace, which was kind of ironic since the internal firewall blocked facebook so you had to use an external network (e.g. phone.) They fixed that, but despite the big push, most truly important notices are still sent via email distribution lists and published on internal web properties. It really feels like something forced on the org, and I wouldn't be surprised if I'm a year they backtrack and say it's too expensive and doesn't provide any value beyond what email and internal sites already did. What we really need is a good chat solution with solid search functionality. Slack would do, but I'd prefer something more like IRC with all chats archived and fully searchable. Slack is too meme friendly...
- pbalau 7y ago
  > We use workplace too and this mirrors my experience precisely, especially the bit about notifications. I have a solution for you: https://imgur.com/a/QnIsBUw https://imgur.com/a/QnIsBUw Even better, if you go to https://my.workplace.com/groups/ https://my.workplace.com/groups/ you will see a list with all groups you are part of with options, for each group, to control the notifications, follow settings and leave the group. On the same page there is a button to bulk manage groups. Both my personal fb feed and the workplace feeds and notifications (both when I used to work for fb and now at the current startup), are fairly clean, with only things I care about. Yours is noisy because you let it be noisy. At fb, our team had a public group for support requests, a main internal group for team wide comms (release notes for each service we provided, on-call reports, welcome messages for new peeps, social stuff) and a number of groups for each individual team, or service, or even inter team projects. The noise on my feed was minimal.
  - mjburgess 7y ago
    "let it be noisy" So you think it's the user's responsibility to manage ? They disagree.
  - n0rbwah 7y ago
    The fact that some (supposedly) technical users on HN are annoyed by this noisiness should be enough to tell you that the system's badly designed and that you can't expect most users to configure their feeds the way they'd ideally want it, even if the tool allows for it.
  - mstade 7y ago
    > Yours is noisy because you let it be noisy. I never "let" it be noisy, it's noisy by default since I have to opt-out to groups rather than opt-in. I've intentionally subscribed to exactly zero groups in workplace, but auto-subscribed to all. This makes notifications entirely useless to me, since it's all just noise and I don't have the time or energy to go through and change settings every time someone adds a group.
    - deleted 7y ago
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

sangeeth96 7y ago

I'm unsure why any company would prefer Workplace over Slack/Teams etc. They have far more features and basically not scathed in privacy troubles as FB is in right now.

pdpi 7y ago
“More” doesn’t mean better. As an ex-fb employee, I genuinely liked workplace as a replacement for slack. It forces a fundamentally different workflow, but has some very clear advantages — e.g. groups suck for near real time chat like slack offers, but is a much better format for long term search.
blowski 7y ago
Workplace is more like an intranet, whereas Slack is more like email (in terms of how it’s used). That said, my experience was that the Facebook layout makes people treat it like Facebook - sharing and liking good news stories, but all the serious stuff is done elsewhere.
- flurdy 7y ago
  More like Yammer. Now owned by Microsoft. Which I found useful as an intranet long life discussion forum. But rubbish when treated like a chat app.

coder1001 7y ago

Interesting! "Reactions were not always positive. Many people preferred not to use a tool from a company that they did not trust in terms of data privacy." So the issue is just trust or the tool is not as useful? How would the results differ had someone else offered them a similar tool?

keanzu 7y ago
> Reactions were not always positive. Universally true: Reactions are never always positive for anything. A non-statement which will also be true of whatever replaces Workplace. > Many people preferred not to use a tool from a company that they did not trust in terms of data privacy. Many other people used the tool for 3 years during the free trial; how is this advisable if there are genuine data privacy issues? Seems negligent on CERN's part. The decision point came at the transition from free to paid, not due to a change in trustworthiness of Facebook.

rjzzleep 7y ago

I thought lack of control in the free offering of mattermost is one of the things people complain about the most. It seems riot/matrix and rocket.chat seem quite popular. I liked the e2e in riot but it seemed a bit cumbersome. Rocket.chat was quite popular at CCC so I guess it's probably decent as well.

Arathorn 7y ago
We just merged a rewrite of riot/web’s e2e UX to develop branch - it is hopefully going from cumbersome to balletic :)

skinnyasianboi 7y ago

Great move to go with open source solutions like Mattermost and Discourse.

bipson 7y ago
This has tradition at CERN. I wonder why they even considered Facebook's offering, but I guess they do not dismiss proprietary solutions as well. Whatever works? Often enough they end up writing their own tools, if nothing fitting is available, and this might end up in the public domain (since AFAIK everything at CERN is basically paid for by the public, i.e. various member states, EU etc.).
- ahartmetz 7y ago
  CERN IT administration is sometimes pretty idiotic. When I was still in physics, they replaced the well-loved homegrown Hypernews system with Microsoft something, a move welcomed by no one.
  - Aeolun 7y ago
    For once I would like a company I work for to move to a clearly better product... So far they seem to be searching for the worst of all worlds.

saiya-jin 7y ago

Well no surprise there. FB is consistently on the dark side of the moral spectrum, at least kudos for being consistent. Scientists have privacy concerns and seemingly higher moral expectations, so paying for a tool like that with public money would not look good from any possible angle. Do I understand correctly that they changed their pricing model to paid during trial, or have all control over data revoked? In a place like CERN that would probably be even security breach, even though its international project, US 3-letter agencies (and for-profit corporations) shouldn't have internal access like that.

pdpi 7y ago

If I read it right and they had around 1k users after 3 years of trialling Workplace, I think it’s less a case of “ending the trial” as it is “pulling the cord on life support”. The article distinctly makes it sound as if they only trialled because they were offered a generous free usage period, without a clear desire to actually integrate it into their daily routine. The timeline suggests that they were onboarded in the early days of Workplace, and I would blame FB’s nascent enterprise sales team for being too immature to recognise what was a losing battle from the get go.

keanzu 7y ago
They fail to mention how many potential users there were and whether this was high or low take up. "The acronym CERN is also used to refer to the laboratory, which in 2016 had 2,500 scientific, technical, and administrative staff members, and hosted about 12,000 users." Is it 1000 out of 2500 or 1000 out of 14500 or am I using an invalid source and the actual staff count is completely different?
- pdpi 7y ago
  FB’s target was almost certainly the whole enchilada, so it’s penetration of 1000 out of 14500. Even if you call it 1000 out of 2500, that’s 40% adoption over three years, for a tool that wants to be the centrepiece of your collaboration architecture.
  - Cederfjard 7y ago
    Even worse, the current top comment (clarified further by one of its children) is saying that they only had 150 active users per week.

johnchristopher 7y ago

So, what happens to all the data that is poured into Workplace ? No mattermost import, I suppose ?

peterkelly 7y ago
It gets sold to Cambridge Analytica
taccie 7y ago
Maybe we can address their concerns with our platform Open Social (getopensocial.com) as they use Drupal for most of their platforms already. I think we can get some data our of Workkplace trough https://developers.facebook.com/docs/workplace/reference/graph-api https://developers.facebook.com/docs/workplace/reference/gra... - would be an interesting case for a migration tool..!
ThiefMaster- 7y ago
Besides the fact that it makes no sense to import Facebook-style data into a chat, doing so would only be useful if more than a tiny amount of the data in Workplace was actually worth keeping.

TomMarius 7y ago

My previous company has used and pushed workplace. It was never useful in anyway to anyone in my engineering teams.

fkfaduc 7y ago

It's great to see CERN make more and more steps towards free software! Public money - public code

filmgirlcw 7y ago

They only had 150 active users (despite 1000 signups), so choosing not to pay for the offering makes sense. I have the utmost respect for CERN as an institution — I want to make that clear. What I don’t love, however, is this trend that seems to be using a PR offensive of “price shaming” whenever contract or license terms change. I understand CERN is publicly funded and that it doesn’t have an unlimited budget. But I’m not sure how necessary the passive-aggressive jab at the three-year free trial now becoming paid is to the fact that CERN is dropping a tool only 150 people actively used. The critiques of the product (and I’ve never used Workplace and hope I never have to) seen to be totally inconsequential, because CERN seemed to be happy doing the IT work to keep it running/integrated as long as it was free. It’s fine to drop support for a communication tool — especially one that doesn’t have a lot of adoption. But there seems to be an insinuation that Facebook should continue to give CERN access for free, and that I just don’t like.

twic 7y ago
It's absolutely fine to passive-aggressively shame a 500 billion dollar public corporation. There just isn't anything wrong with doing that.
arethuza 7y ago
Given what was invented at CERN you think Facebook would have the decency to give them a free license!
- Cthulhu_ 7y ago
  That's basically stating that influencers should get free stuff; CERN is a company that handles hundreds of millions, and I don't believe they're too poor to pay for services.
  - lexs 7y ago
    It's kind of weird to describe CERN as "a company", doesn't quite capture the spirit of it...
  - 7y ago

np_tedious 7y ago

> Reactions were not always positive. It would be cool to hear what these reactions were. How did it suit their workflow, compare to alternatives, etc Right now all this article says is that they had data privacy concerns (valid) and that the free trial ran out.

whatsmyusername 7y ago

Wow, what a cursed product. I can’t think of a single other company I would trust less with our business communications than Facebook. Edit: Maybe pastebin? Though pastebin will honor takedown requests.

osioke 7y ago

Well, some instances at CERN are enjoying Discourse, so I guess the move was inevitable?

a012 7y ago

My company chose Workplace as a formal and only official channel for internal communication, including announcements from executives to all employees. It makes you have to actively on workplace to get information, knowing what's happening around. I think it's a wrong way to use, but it's already set by top c level.

goatinaboat 7y ago

Corporate internal social networks are a concept that just doesn’t work because of the hierarchy involved. This is obvious to anyone who isn’t in the HR department.

PunchTornado 7y ago

> CERN was then given a choice of either paying to continue with the initially free set-up or downgrading to a free version that would remove administrative rights and CERN single sign-on access and send all data to Facebook another example of paying with the data.

danpalmer 7y ago

The thing I personally found difficulty about Workplace is that it uses the same dark patterns as Facebook to increase engagement. For a business tool this is a bad thing. A tool that requires none of my time to get benefit out of is a better tool than one that requires some of my time. Workplace drained time with patterns like unnecessary notifications, email notifications without the actual content in and prompts to engage in activity on the platform in ways that weren’t productive. Business tools should save time, not drain time. I think Workplace either has this wrong, or is designed for workplaces where people don’t have enough to do and spend their days on Facebook anyway.

TremendousJudge 7y ago
It's also a bad thing for a "civilian tool"
- toper-centage 7y ago
  Of course, but much harder to quantify in terms of productivity and money lost unless you time-track all your life to know how much money your off time is worth.
  - danpalmer 7y ago
    Not to mention the tricky link to what one might call the "entertainment value" of Facebook.

andresramon 7y ago

Have you ever gotten your bitcoins stolen from your wallet or invested in an ICO that turned out to be a scam, you are not alone because this happened to me too. I initially lost $90,000 in just 3 months from Cryptoallday, I contacted the authorities and they referred me to a bitcoin recovery company , SUPPORT RECOVERDWALLETS , They are the leading intelligence gathering agency for fighting fraudulent brokers and scammers . They helped me recover all my funds in less than a month I'm speaking out to improve our awareness of these cryptocurrency thieves and help you if you have been a victim yourself. Simply visit their email , support @ recoveredwallets . com or through whatsapp + 1 7 4 0 3 1 5 8 7 3 8

martijn_himself 7y ago

I don't know Workplace but how is this newsworthy and of interest to anyone outside of CERN? The article sounds quite spiteful, and why, if 'Many people preferred not to use a tool from a company that they did not trust in terms of data privacy' would you use it in the first place? Also, how can you blame a commercial company for charging for a tool?

alamortsubite 7y ago
> why ... would you use it in the first place? People's trust in FB has eroded greatly over the last three years. That may be all there is to it. In addition, however, the post clearly says it was a trial. The people who pushed for it were not necessarily the ones who had to eat the dog food.

Maro 7y ago

I worked on Workplace at Facebook. It's super-cheap at $1-3 per MAU. If they like it, why not pay for it. OTOH if I were FB I'd give it to CERN for free.

swarnie_ 7y ago
I'm forced to use Workplace in my company and i absolutely hate it. After 15 years of employers trying to keep employees off social media they're now trying to shove it back in again. While joined to around 100 groups in my global organisation the wall/feed thing becomes a very poor way to deliver technical information. Its intermingled with personal messages or a reminder about Jason from accounts upcoming birthday drinks. Everyday i'm reminded why i left Facebook in 2012 and never looked back.
- gmueckl 7y ago
  This sounds like a terribly mismanaged Workplace instance to me. Why should anyone be joined to 100 groups? That's a red flag right there. And if you can't move personal stuff off of Workplace, create separate groups for that that can be muted or left etc. This noisy personal stuff can easily exist in public groups that can be looked into by anyone if something comes up.
  - redis_mlc 7y ago
    "You're holding it wrong."
MuricaFYeah 7y ago
Of course you'd say that facebook guy, but facebook has no place running anything from CERN or any other scientific org for that matter. CERN shouldn't even have considered it in the first place. Might as well just install a fibre optic cable straight into Fort Meade and Langley to cut off the middle man. Also, I'm pretty sure tomorrow or next week's news will be that facebook will in fact supply this tool out to CERN for free and cite some bs like "to give back" or "to support the scientific community". I hope I'm wrong but let's see how it goes. Will we ever learn?

HenryBemis 7y ago

I don't see this as price shaming. I see a HUGE "we don't trust these folks to begin with...". Facebook is cancer for humanity. It gives 1 and takes 50. And then dilligently finds ways to use that 50 to hurt you, for their profit. I wouldn't trust any sensitive information with them. And especially CERN? These guys have info and tech to end life. Some random admin with god-mode that will get bribed by Saudis/<insert other criminals/dictatorships> wouldn't hesitate providing them with any data. For some organizations, the value of their data/information is worth much more than the £€$5k/10k/50k that their collaboration tools cost. CERN is one of them. I prefer to pay £€$10 per year more taxes so they don't use scum like Facebook. (angry words yes, but hey.. they tried hard to earn them feelings - perhaps if they evern become less scum-my, maybe people will trust them more)

andrepd 7y ago
>And especially CERN? These guys have info and tech to end life. Someone has been reading too many Dan Brown novels.
codeduck 7y ago
> And especially CERN? These guys have info and tech to end life. Wat.
- saalweachter 7y ago
  They have both hammers and phone books, I'm sure.
  - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
    Probably a few ladders and some cleaning agents capable of creating slippery floors scattered around their facility as well.
    - zaarn 7y ago
      I'm pretty sure you can kill people with their particle accelerator too if the particles hit you. You'd probably be int he vacuum of the accelerator though so unsure if you'd notice.

someonehere 7y ago

Fun fact. This tool was being developed internally at FB about ten years ago. They really couldn’t figure it out back then and it sounds like they can’t figure it out today. Internally before it was Workplace it was a decent tool that integrated with the public facing site. Unsure of how Workplace works today.

tudelo 7y ago
It works really well inside of FB -- good way to collaborate, teams have their own groups and then there are cross team groups etc. There can be a little too much information, but there are not many complaints in general about the productivity it brings. Not sure how well it works in other companies.
- toast0 7y ago
  I guess it must work well for some people inside FB. For me, it was just another high noise, low signal thing to try to remember to check: email, workplace, workplace messenger, irc, wierd automated smses with links I couldn't load and I couldn't quite figure out but at least stopped after I quit, whatsapp messages (where i worked), sometimes phone calls and people coming to my desk. Plus diff reviews and task tickets, which theoretically sent notifications through whatever, but since it's so full of garbage, you just have to check. Of course, you can't actually rely on workspace notifications either, if you really want to know if another team did something, you need to skim through all their posts. Of course, if you asked someone directly, they would send you to their group feed, like an outsider would be able to skim it with ease. I may still be unpacking a bit

Priem19 7y ago

I'm surprised CERN has tried it in the first place. I mean, if CERN can produce things like ProtonMail, it can definitely conjure up massively superior alternatives to facecrook.

ThiefMaster- 7y ago
CERN did not produce ProtonMail. A few people who previously worked at CERN did.

sebow 7y ago

Why is CERN of all places using facebook or doing business at any level with facebook? This is not some "anti-americanism" or anything. Facebook is a shit corporation, and CERN of all places should have nothing to do with it, besides maybe a public verified page to announce things and similar activities. As an european and as an EU citizen, this is disgraceful.I don't think people actually realize what (should at least) kind of resources and talent CERN has. They should have their own mediums of communication and team management, etc.

donalhunt 7y ago

> Losing control of our data was unacceptable This is the biggest risk to companies as they evolve their use of products and manage costs. We found to our dismay that Dropbox do something similar if you decide to migrate off their platform (accounts get downgraded to the free plan and the company loses all control over the data in the account). Companies are not doing enough to highlight these gaps / gotchas when the decision to utilise the platform are made. (only a little bitter having had to deal with the fallout of these decisions)

ian-bateman 7y ago

Maybe they should consider following Mozilla and just self-host their own instance of Riot. A $5-$50/mo Linode + a tiny bit of ops overhead has to be less expensive than anything anyone else is charging (whether Facebook, Slack, Teams, etc.). Plus, then they at least have complete ownership / control of their data, which for an organization like CERN seems a little important...

matoro 7y ago
It says they already run their own internal Mattermost intance which does the same thing. Having run both MM and Riot for real users I can say that MM is the far more professional and well-designed of the two.
- xf86alsa 7y ago
  How long ago did you try Riot? It's changed a lot in the past year, and with their encryption changes coming in the next few weeks it should be even nicer.

riffic 7y ago

Perhaps CERN can spin up its own Mastodon instance? https://toot.thoughtworks.com https://toot.thoughtworks.com is an example of an organizational adoption of a Fediverse node.

elkos 7y ago
As far as I know they do

tibbydudeza 7y ago

Facebook and my workplace ... no thanks ... fortunately we canned that one.