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Element Matrix Services Launches Bridging for Microsoft Teams
- bilal4hmed 6y agoThats awesome. They seem to be doing a great job of building out a business on top of an open protocol. Slowly but surely their apps are also getting better.
- schoolornot 6y agoWill this bridge be be open source?
- unclekev 6y agoNo > The bridge itself is not going to drop into the open-source Matrix code any time soon. Hodgson explained: "This is an entirely new bridge that we've built as Element exclusively for Element Matrix Services, which is the SaaS hosting platform we provide in order to keep the lights on for Matrix development and for Element in general. > "We are taking the position that people who are rich enough to buy into Team's ecosystem and throw lots of money to Microsoft might as well throw a little bit of money to Element to keep funding Matrix development."
- ssivark 6y agoCan’t fault them for it, but it does feel a touch petty — falling below the high standard that Matrix has implicitly led us to expect.
- baby 6y agoHow so?
- ssivark 6y agoWhy not open source this bridge too, like everything else in the Matrix ecosystem?
- baby 6y agoWhat good would that do?
- blendergeek 6y agoIt would remind the community that Freedom(R) is very important. I think the least they could do is release it under the AGPLv3. That license is accepted by the Free Software community while being universally rejected by business as toxic and dangerous. No business will pick up the bridge and use it, while Free Software people can still use it for their own purposes (whatever those might be).
- mannerheim 6y agoIt's a bridge to a proprietary service. Free software adherents don't have MS Teams subscriptions, and those with MS Teams subscriptions aren't going to care about the bridge being proprietary.
- e3bc54b2 6y agoThere are people who might have to use Teams due to network effect, but prefer to keep closed source crap off their machines. Such people like myself might use Reddit (closed source for some time now), but use open source app like Slide or plain old Firefox. For such people, an open source element bridge to teams is best of both worlds.
- ssivark 6y agoIt’s a matter of principle, more than anything else.
- tabbott 6y agoInteresting, I hadn't appreciated that Matrix was switching from fully open source to an open core model.
- thekyle 6y agoI'm not sure if I would go so far as to say this is an open core model. This is more like someone developing a proprietary WordPress plug-in, but WordPress itself is completely FOSS.
- e3bc54b2 6y agoSimilar to how vscode is open source but all the important extensions (remote dev, CPP, Python,new Python LSP) are all closed source? I would call that open core.
- ntw1103 6y agoI didn't really think about it like that, though i guess accurate. Matrix, the spec is open, and synapse the server is open. anyone can make a bridge, they are pluggable, and the author can choose their license. I guess you could call Matrix+spec the core.
- vlmutolo 6y agoI think that's a mischaracterization of what's happening. Matrix the protocol is fully open source. Element the matrix client is fully open source. Synapse the matrix server is fully open source. Dendrite, the next generation matrix server, is fully open source. All of these are developed by the New Vector team. The only thing here that isn't open source is an external bridge to microsoft teams, a platform that itself is already closed source. In this case, "open core" would probably look like the Matrix team closing the Element client and Dendrite homeserver, and then extending them with closed matrix event types. Honestly, they could probably pull it off, but I doubt they want to go that route. They've been dedicated to federation since the beginning.
- tabbott 6y agoYeah, "Open core" doesn't have a great definition. Certainly I agree this is a pretty contained feature, and I shouldn't have written "switching ... to an open core model" given the evidence in this thread. But "Element Matrix Services" (aka New Vector) launching and marketing a product/feature that is not open source is AFAIK something new, and it'd be very surprising if this is the last such feature they announce. (Before today, they were one of the very few examples I knew of a VC-funded open source company where their product remained entirely open source.)
- zeta0134 6y agoOh man, what an unfortunate view. As a user, I wanted the freedom to set this thing up so I could have a teams client that doesn't use 100% of my CPU at idle, but of course I am an end user at my company. It doesn't matter how deep my personal pockets are, I'm not able to make a company-wide decision. It's impossible for me to pay them for this, even if I wanted to.
- ldarby 6y ago> "We are taking the position that people who are rich enough to buy into Team's ecosystem and throw lots of money to Microsoft might as well throw a little bit of money to Element to keep funding Matrix development." This is a mistake. If they're already paying for Teams, then what exactly is the incentive to "throw a little bit of money to Element"? They aleady have a communications tool (Teams), so a) why are they going to pay for another one, and b) people who already bought Teams most likely do not care about the values Matrix stands for.
- imwillofficial 6y agoThis is potential huge. I hope it works more seamlessly than the Element/IRC bridge, which is a hot pile of garbage and almost got me kicked off an IRC channel due to the formatting issues that the Element bridge introduces. Best of luck to them!
- ddevault 6y agoAye, my condolances to anyone on Teams who will have to deal with annoying Matrix users. Their client has been a major nuisance to IRC.
- viraptor 6y agoHave you got more details on this? Why do you think matrix users are annoying on IRC bridges?
- superkuh 6y agoIf a matrix user tries to write something too long for matrix+bridge to handle it will instead just paste a link to a website that shows the users text. Only the link to this web text clip will be sent to IRC. If a matrix user responds to someone their matrix client + bridge will inline copy the previous lines and send it to IRC with their response. Basically, the matrix bridge is extremely spammy even with normal behaviors. The sane thing would be to just break up the message into to parts and send it. The sane thing would be to assume anyone looking at IRC already knows what comment they are responding to and there's no reason to re-post it inline. There are more annoyances but those are what come immediately to mind.
- crocodiletears 6y agoDoes Matrix have decent mod features yet? I want to take people off Discord, but user-friendly role creation/assignment, moderation tools, and granular permissions are a must before that'll be possible.
- jakecopp 6y agoI haven't tried, but it seems to! The table of contents seems quite broad. https://matrix.org/docs/guides/moderation https://matrix.org/docs/guides/moderation
- gerdesj 6y agoMatrix is a protocol, Discord is a system. For want of better terms. Perhaps you could compare git with Github or Gitlab. Matrix might be able to fulfil your requirements but you don't state them. Why not start with: "I need a communication system for my organisation that satisfies the following criteria and I accept that there is no ideal and I am willing to reform my requirements as I evaluate the options available" * End to end encrypted * Check up on governance: Local requirements * Media * Text * Voice * Video (plus voice) * Supports emoji etc, etc. What do you really want and are you prepared to put some real work in to actually evaluate some possibilities? If not, then stick with Discord. It probably won't kick your kitten but it now belongs to Microsoft who also own LinkedIn and sadly themselves.
- crocodiletears 6y agoI've evaluated Rocket Chat, Mattermost, Zulip, and Element+Synapse at various points over the last year and a half. That included compilation and deployment on AWS instances. I've done leg-work. Matrix's official server and client are often touted as a competitor to other team and community-oriented chat platforms by its proponents. As a signal competitor it's solid enough, but in the community space it fails to be competitive. I'm really hoping to see Matrix mature more, and codify moderation apis in order to keep the protocol client/server agnostic for all standard use-cases. The Matrix documentation itself admits that the community-management portion of the standard is underspecified. https://matrix.org/docs/guides/moderation/#removing-users-rooms-and-content https://matrix.org/docs/guides/moderation/#removing-users-ro...
- kovek 6y agoThere needs to be a nice link to a nice document explaining how to run a client/server and how to add bridges to it. I tried before and it seemed like WIP.
- pkulak 6y agoPretty straight forward: https://matrix.org/docs/guides/installing-synapse https://matrix.org/docs/guides/installing-synapse Took me a couple hours as a a non-infra guy.
- deadbunny 6y agoDoes video/voice work? Can you screen share? Can I share files? All these bridges seem fine for basic text but modern chat programs do a lot more these days and I personally can't see the point without 1:1 feature parity. This seems doubly true for a service like Teams versus something like Discord where Teams is going to be installed and configured by a central IT team for all users. I know a lot of this falls on companies building their own proprietary, non-interoperable messaging platforms and this is an effort to unify them and I don't mean to shit on those efforts but it just seems like it's a lot of effort for becoming a third class citizen when interfacing with those platforms.
- ashton314 6y agoRecently had to start using MS Teams at work. What a terrible UX: truncated message widths, even for code. No syntax highlighting, markdown-ish syntax only works when you type it in their little editor—when you paste it in it doesn't format, isn't smart enough to auto-start a new message when I start typing, hides bottom of message—even when there's only one line left, etc. Just a bunch of little stupid things that add up to one, in the immortal words of Strong Bad, suckquake of a user experience. In short, I would have loved to have the option of using Element to chat with my team instead of MS Teams. Thank you for making this!
- chrisweekly 6y agoYeah, it's astonishing how bad Teams is.
- Jtsummers 6y agoThe markdown formatting doesn't even work consistently. Some days things show up bold, some days they don't, some days I get inline code, some days I don't. It's very random and seems to be based on my typing speed at the time. That is, type ` and then wait a moment before typing the next bit and it works more reliably, but if I type like normal (around 100 wpm) it rarely registers properly.
- danmur 6y agoYes! What is with that inline code thing? The only time single backticks seem to work is when I don't want them to.
- ridethebike 6y agoMicrosoft Teams Cons: slow, consumes lot of memory plus all of the above Pros: not as buggy as Skype for Business
- sandrone 6y agothat's exactly my thought, despite all the suckiness, the experience is still better than skype for business
- encryptluks2 6y agoI still see absolutely no benefit in using Matrix compared to other open source options. The only thing they have going for them is they sure spend a lot of money on marketing and PR.
- fastball 6y agoWhat are the other open source options with Matrix's feature-set?
- encryptluks2 6y agoIRC, XMPP, email, etc. Please also see: https://gitlab.com/libremonde-org/papers/research/privacy-matrix.org https://gitlab.com/libremonde-org/papers/research/privacy-ma...
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y agoIRC is great, but it most certainly is not at feature parity. XMPP works iff everyone has the right set of extensions, which can work but often doesn't. Email doesn't even solve the same problem (real-time multiuser chat).
- MattJ100 6y agoI think "works iff" is slightly inaccurate here, and "different sets of extensions" thing is overblown (not by you personally, but in general discussions like these). The big problem is actually the opposite: that XMPP continues to work when both parties support different levels of the protocol. Many modern XMPP clients are comparable in features to Matrix clients, but many people still reach for e.g. Pidgin and Adium, despite those not seeing active XMPP development for many years (that is hopefully changing, at least for Pidgin). Despite the evolution of the protocol, these clients are perfectly able to function, just without the modern stuff people expect. Discovering the right XMPP software (and that it exists) is the hard part for users, and that's part of what we're trying to solve with the Snikket project. All decentralized protocols face the difficulty of evolution over time. Email has outlived many attempts to evolve it (but maybe there is still hope with initiatives like JMAP). I'd say XMPP is doing a decent job, and is still evolving. Matrix has yet to really face this issue as it's still relatively young. IRC... I think the majority of its remaining users consider its lack of evolution a feature :)
- jpalomaki 6y agoWhat’s the tech behind this? Have they worked with Microsoft to implement this? Does Microsoft offer some something that enables these kind of bridges?
- Arathorn 6y agoIt has been independently implemented using the Teams GraphQL API.
- denysvitali 6y agoI'll post it here in the hope of getting more project exposure: I'm working on a Teams library and Teams CLI written in Go and I'm looking for contributors. Feel free to check out the project, together we can solve this Teams problem! https://github.com/fossteams/teams-cli https://github.com/fossteams/teams-cli
- obiwanpallav1 6y agoThis definitely looks great!
- dep_b 6y agoIt's interesting how Microsoft both showcases a really bad example of a JS hybrid application (Teams) and the more rare good example of it (VS Code). These guys should have talked sometime I hoped.
- DaiPlusPlus 6y ago> These guys should have talked sometime I hoped. Hah. DevDiv never talks to the Office org. For one thing, they’re on opposite sides of the campus; secondarily (and most disappointingly) the golden-age of Office/VS integration ended by Office 2007 when it was clear the VB6-derived VBA editor in VS was frozen on ice (and remember the InterDev-derived Script Debugger in Office 2003?). For the past 14+ years, the Office org built up their own UI/UX framework completely separate from both OSG/Windows and DevDiv/VS/etc: that “DirectUI” stuff. It has a lot of potential (and room for improvement...) but instead we get exports like WinUI 3.0, aka “We won’t let XAML die, but we won’t invest in tooling or making it not horribly verbose despite the fact it’s now 15 years old”. I don’t understand why Microsoft seemingly wilfully abandoned any semblance of a roadmap or reasonable guidance for the Windows desktop dev story. It’s insane because Office+VBA+VB6 is the reason people still buy Windows licenses even though 75% of people have no other reason to be bound to Windows.
- dep_b 6y agoThanks for the insights. I would like to hang around for a few months at Microsoft just to see how such a big organisation (dis)functions. I really enjoy using MS tools for development, always had as I discovered C64 BASIC was made by them and I was a C# developer for about ten years (if I'm allowed to forget about WebForms). All of the other stuff I don't really care about anymore. I'm fine using Numbers and Pages or LibreOffice and macOS replaces Windows since I'm not a gamer and not doing any non-cross platform C# / F# development anymore.
- DaiPlusPlus 6y ago> I would like to hang around for a few months at Microsoft just to see how such a big organisation (dis)functions. Put in a job application. The company has always been hiring. Judging by the fact they employed me right after uni I guess they’ll hire anyone who can explain mergesort on a whiteboard. ——— I believe we’re witnessing the slow death of Windows into irrelevance, the same way mainframes and minicomputers aren’t relevant today, the way most “apps” for business are just public web-apps or Electron distros - Windows is just another fungible host for Chrome.exe.
- dest 6y agoDoes it work for videoconferencing? Edit: yes > Microsoft Teams Bridging supports both group and individual messaging, as well as voice and video conferences.