Companies have been remaking the work experience over the past couple of years. This has included adjusting the way they hire, reshaping communication standards to operate well in an at least partially remote atmosphere, and developing a stronger culture overall. These shifts and changes have certainly created obstacles for scaling, but we are proud to announce that 2021 was a fantastic year of growth at Courier!

We were pretty happy to use Skype during the last decade. Skype has managed to become a synonym for instant communication just like Xerox used to be a synonym for photocopying. We’d ask people to meet on Skype, and added our Skype names to the email signature. It’s also been a part of our everyday life at work. Then Slack popped up in 2013 and turned the world of business communication upside down. Was it the first app of a kind? No.

Voting for a new feature in a messaging app? Deciding where to go for lunch? Soliciting friends’ advice on whether to go on that second date?! We all know the pain of group decision-making, especially in busy chat rooms. We’ve seen creative uses of reactions as an informal way to see which option is most popular, but a lot of you have been asking for the ability to run proper polls. So….

Rocket.Chat 4.4.0 brings more improvements and new features for better admin and user experience. Let's see what's new with the latest Rocket.Chat edition. 🚀 Please visit the official release notes for the whole list of improvements and bug fixes.‍

Open source software is making its way into education. Even though using open source software for educational purposes is nothing new, we observe an increased demand for it across higher education institutions. Why now, and why such a surge in interest? Well, there is hardly any industry that didn’t experience an impact made by the pandemic. The conclusion across the board is almost unanimous: the future is digital, and it’s approaching us at a greater speed than ever before.

This tuition-free school uses Slack to develop the next generation of computer programmers.

EdTech has been a crucial part of a digital learning experience for many students and teachers. Now, the market for online learning apps is drastically expanding. The abrupt increase in the number of EdTech users, fueled by the pandemic, has shown that digital education is necessary to equip students with the skills essential for their future. That’s why experts predict that the EdTech market will almost double in size by 2025 - meaning that the total EdTech spend will be $404 Billion.

Data from the Future Forum Pulse reveals alarming discrepancies between who is and isn’t coming into the office.

We never know how many more COVID variants are going to hit the people of this world and how long working from home or a remote location will continue to persist. Come what may, employers should be more inclined towards providing a productive work environment to their workforce to improve their company’s ROI. Additionally, they should look for encrypted messaging apps that offer E2EE and other secure access methods like multi-factor authentication to avoid security breaches on data.