Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

May 2022

Tips For Successfully Leading Remote Teams

Develop explicit remote-work regulations and training in advance; nevertheless, in times of crisis or even other quickly changing conditions, this degree of planning may not be possible. Luckily, there are precise, research-based strategies like how to fill out a w9 that managers have to take to boost the employee engagement and motivation of remote employees without putting in a lot of effort.

5 Awesome Developer Tools to Make You More Productive

Your productivity as a developer will influence your career for the rest of your life. If you are more productive then you can learn faster, write code more efficiently and unlock new opportunities for you, from salary increases to becoming a tech lead. And to be a successful developer, you must adopt the best developer tools for a variety of use cases, and let them drive your daily workflow.

White label messaging app: 5 benefits and best practices

Organizations know the power of communication, and they also know the power of branding. That’s why they’re increasingly looking to purchase white label messaging apps. These apps allow them to connect with their customers or enable their employees to connect internally via instant messaging. Messaging apps can also be implemented as an in-app chat to guide users through the app or website.

14 Motivational Gifts Ideas to Boost Employee Morale

Sometimes it’s a hassle coming up with unique and affordable appreciation gifts for employees. Gone are the days when employees used to get excited from the usual and monotonous presents like notebooks with a brand logo or candy bags. To solve this problem, we have articulated a list of 14 unique motivational gifts ideas for your employees, and that too on a pocket-friendly budget. If you are a company owner your should remind your employees that they are valued and appreciated.

Announcing Courier Automations: Application Logic for Notifications

We’re excited to announce a powerful new feature for the Courier platform: Courier Automations. Courier Automations is a toolset that includes both an API and a visual builder that allows anyone to easily configure logic for notification workflows. Need to send a reminder to class attendees 10 minutes before the class starts? Need to page an on-call engineer on multiple channels until they respond? These use cases and more can be achieved quickly and easily with Automations.

How Our Culture of High-Impact Openness at Mattermost Drives Results

As an open source organization, openness is part of our DNA here at Mattermost. But that openness is about more than just opening up our source code — it’s a core part of our culture and the way we do business. I’d like to share a bit more about why we’ve adopted this culture of high-impact openness and how we practice it every day across the various communication and collaboration channels that we use.

9 Strategies To Boost Employee Motivation In The Workplace

Employee motivation plays a significant role in a company’s success. Their commitment to being the best at what they do affects their team productivity and the business’s ability to grow and serve customers. A low level of employee motivation can negatively impact your business processes and ability to convert visitors to customers. Given its importance, how can business owners boost their employee’s motivation? Fortunately, there are a lot of proven ways to do so.

White label chat app: 4 advantages over custom-made chat apps

As customer-facing businesses grow, they are trying to find new ways to serve their customers. However, they want to keep their brand aligned across all communication channels. White label chat app helps them do exactly that. Compared to custom-developed chat apps, white-labeled ones can be implemented faster and require fewer resources. Read on to find out what are the advantages of white label chat over custom-made chat apps, and why organizations opt for white-labeled chat products.

Forrester's 2022 Now Tech report on secure communications platforms includes Element

Forrester, the research and advisory firm, recently published its Now Tech: Secure Communications, Q2 2022 report which provides an overview of 25 providers and helps enterprises understand the value of a secure communications platform. And (we’re all flushed in the face), Element is listed as one of the secure communication providers (available to view here).

11 Key Steps Towards Achieving a Safe Workplace

No company is immune to accidents, but certain companies, by virtue of their safety standards and procedures, are more likely than others to suffer them. By taking the right precautions, you can create a safer workplace and reduce the risk of injuries. Here are the 11 most important steps to take.

Rocket.Chat and Nextcloud Integration: Your Open Source Digital Collaboration Hub

The COVID-19 pandemic hugely accelerated digital collaboration in businesses across industries and geographies. We’re all familiar with working from home and, for the most part, the companies we work for have learned to adapt. As a result, cloud-based proprietary code platforms such as Office 365, Dropbox, and Slack have and continue to explode in popularity. Here’s the catch though: By using these platforms, all of your data, communication, and digital lives will be (or already are) at the mercy of big corporations without control, privacy and with a huge vendor lock-in.

16 open-source projects to contribute to in 2022

The world of open-source is stronger than ever. As the world gets more connected, more people are interested in being a part of building amazing new technologies. However, there are many more advantages to open-source software than just that. Specifically, there is probably no better way to learn and grow as a developer than to contribute to open-source projects. But, it’s hard to choose from so many different options!

Zendesk Deep Dive on Messaging

In our first post Relate event, the Community team hosted a deep dive into what’s new with Zendesk Messaging. We sat down with Paul Lalonde and members of the Messaging team, where they highlighted recent product updates such as improved bot building and updates to the mobile app UI and shared a deep understanding of what Messaging has to offer. The team also hosted live Q&A addressing questions submitted by attendees on various areas of the Messaging product!

Looking for a new messenger?

There are many messaging apps out there, but surprisingly little choice. Yet you’ll find most people use messaging apps that only fulfil one (or two if you’re lucky) of those requirements. But why settle for less when you can have it all?! Let’s run through the main problems with most messaging apps, and then take a look at Element.

How We Built Our Documentation On Docusaurus

It requires an ample amount of time, effort, and resources to produce great, user-friendly documentation. Good documentation is fundamental to the way engineers get started with a product and ultimately use it in the long run, which makes it essential to both user retention and growth. Building our documentation at Courier was a task we therefore took very seriously.

How Switching To Remote Work Can Transform Your Income And Life?

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced many people to work remotely, at least temporarily. But even after the pandemic ends, more and more people are likely to continue working from home, at least some of the time. There are many advantages to working remotely, including increased flexibility, fewer distractions, and no commute. But one of the biggest advantages is the potential to increase your income. Here are some of the major ways that working remotely can transform your income and life.

9 Essential Marketing Tools for Small Teams

Competing with bigger companies with larger teams is no easy feat for a small business. Often, founders run a tight ship and only have a few employees to gear towards marketing activities. However, just because you have a small team doesn't mean you can't contend with the big boys. Over the years, many marketing tools have arrived to help small teams operate on the same levels as bigger ones.

11 best communication software and platforms for businesses

Communication software is one of the technologies that have a profound impact on our lives. Now, more than ever, we can stay in touch with friends and family no matter how far apart we are. Moreover, communication and collaboration solutions are an integral part of digital workplaces, and they enable employees to be more flexible than ever. Nowadays, teams can collaborate on projects across countries and time zones.

[Meetup Live] Lessons from Facebook Engineering with Jeff Meyerson

Welcome to the "Hacking the Engineering Process" meetup! You've probably heard him speak while hosting his podcast Software Engineering Daily. He recently wrote a book, Move Fast: How Facebook Builds Software where he shares his many lessons learned during his time there. This meetup will be an open discussion for software engineers and tech enthusiasts to share their thoughts on the leading topic, pose thought-provoking questions for each other, and learn more about how various engineering teams measure developer productivity amongst themselves.

What is a HIPAA Risk Assessment and is it Important?

If your business operates in the healthcare industry, then you need to be up to speed with the ins and outs of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA for short. For your information, some team chat apps are also employed with HIPAA standards to protect the business data. Like many pieces of legislation, this act requires compliance from organizations in a given sector in order to provide benefits to service users and customers.

10 Super Apps That Will Dominate The World In 2022

We are living in a world where everyone has their own pace but when it comes to the digital world we have to abide by its pace, otherwise, we may become obsolete, and ‘super apps’ are the current evolution version. I will not be shocked if people in the future refer to us as the "digital age" rather than referring to the "generation" since Mankind will most likely continue to evolve at a rapid pace.

How Rocket.Chat meets the needs of government agencies across the globe

Governmental agencies and public sector organizations are catching on to the digital transformation trend. Besides the need to upgrade their internal processes and services to citizens, they need to be extremely careful about data privacy and data security. Organizations in this sector look for secure ways to collaborate internally and with external partners. Moreover, they want to efficiently manage incoming citizens’ inquiries and requests.

12 Morning Motivation Tips to Kickstart a Productive Day

While it may be difficult, you shouldn’t ideally hurry into your day or despise mornings. They’re meant to be the highlight of the day. We have the perfect morning motivation ideas for you to empower your early hour routines and transform the mornings of your life. In this blog, you’ll uncover why mornings are so important for not only your day but your entire lifestyle and different ideas on how you can make them more motivated and inspirational.

Scaling Application to User Communication in an Event Driven Architecture

Troy Goode CEO of Courier, an API and UI for product notification infrastructure gives a talk on what one needs to think about when building a system like this, the complexities of it all, and the cost. Courier is the fastest way to design your notifications once and deliver them through push notifications, direct messages like Slack and Facebook Messenger, SMS, and email–with a single Courier API rather than having to integrate each provider API separately.

Collaborate more efficiently with the new Rocket.Chat's Trello App

As a team collaboration solution, we at Rocket.Chat are always looking for ways to make collaboration more efficient. Today, we are happy to announce a new app to the Rocket.Chat Marketplace that will make it even more easy for teams to work together and get more done. Most teams use a project management app to keep up with their day-to-day tasks as well as bigger projects.

Frontline workers and messenger apps; how to solve shadow IT

Around 2.7 billion people are frontline workers - that’s about 80 percent of the world’s working population. It covers a huge range of roles, spanning in-home support, hospitality, agriculture, logistics, construction, emergency services and much more. Being on the frontline means that people are often operating from a mobile device. So it’s easy to understand why 53% of frontline workers end up using unapproved consumer-grade messaging apps at work.

Why governmental organizations choose on-premise solutions

Governments and public sector organizations recognize the increasing need to protect their data. With the increase of cyber-attacks globally and growing demands from their citizens to protect their information, public sector organizations are more frequently moving away from cloud-based software toward on-premise solutions.

Our Enterprise Installer makes deploying Element on-premise easier than ever

Our team has been working hard behind the scenes on a dedicated enterprise installer for on-premise deployments of Element - and now it’s ready for launch! Many of our larger customers (especially those in areas such as public sector, telco, utilities and education) have strict compliance obligations that necessitate them hosting data on-premise. We’re committed to ensuring anyone can deploy Element on-premise securely, swiftly and without compromises.

Introducing the Zulip public access option for open communities

Today, we’re delighted to announce the general availability of Zulip’s public access option. Open-source projects and other open communities can now offer one-click access (no login required!) to part or all of their Zulip chat. For those who are not familiar with it, Zulip is a modern team collaboration tool with unique topic-based threading that is ideal for both live and asynchronous conversations. It is also a vibrant open-source project, developed by a values-focused organization.

Is MS Teams the best Skype for Business alternative? [+ How to choose one ]

On July 31, 2021, Skype for Business was retired. As it was an integral part of the Microsoft Office 365 package, numerous companies around the world were compelled to search for Skype for Business alternatives. Microsoft announced MS Teams and Microsoft Audio Conferencing as replacements to Skype for Business. However, some organizations were less than enthusiastic about the switch due to data security and data privacy concerns.

Ready to build your dream developer team? Here's what you need to know.

Now more than ever businesses run on software. That means that your team — whether you’re a “software company” or not — likely includes software developers. Brand and product experiences are increasingly dependent on software, and delivering delightful, compelling experiences depends on having a talented, engaged technical team.

How to Improve The Internal Communication at Your Business?

A focus on internal communication is important for any organisation if you want it to function effectively. Good internal communication is also integral if you want your employees to consider your company a nice place to spend hours of their day and the work that you do to be worth their blood, sweat and tears. The employees should feel that they can communicate freely with their colleagues as well as the management team of your business.

Build vs Buy: The "to be or not to be" of Tech

Hacking the Engineering Process is a San Francisco-based meetup, which opens discussion for software engineers and tech enthusiasts to share their thoughts on leading topics, pose thought-provoking questions for each other, and learn more about how various engineering teams measure developer productivity amongst themselves.