You may have noticed the Element website has had a bit of a refresh today. We’ve made it a little easier for people to navigate according to how they want to use Element - there are now personal, community and enterprise tabs in the top navigation bar. Simultaneously we’ve distinguished Element Matrix Services (EMS) a little more, to make it clear that EMS offers hosted Matrix infrastructure directly to developers so they can build on Matrix.
EMS, Element’s Matrix hosting platform, has launched a fully managed Signal Bridging service (based on Matrix community contributor Tulir's open source mautrix-signal bridge) to help enterprises address all sorts of issues around the use of Signal in the workplace. The fully managed Signal Bridging service allows EMS customers to.
Over the past few months, thousands of people have been using the Spaces beta to better organise conversations. To recap, Spaces rethink grouping rooms and people, fundamentally improving Element & Matrix to better group conversations instead of viewing all rooms all of the time. They come in three main flavours: Today, we’re incredibly excited to announce that Spaces are officially out of beta!
WhatsApp usage within the workplace is bad for all sorts of reasons, yet we all know it’s endemic. The solution is to introduce an enterprise-grade alternative, like Element. But weaning people off their WhatsApp habit is hard; for many frontline workers and contractors it’s become the default, and it’s often an off-the-record comms shortcut for senior management.
Hi all, We’re incredibly excited to release major new versions of Element across all three platforms, introducing Voice Messages at last as a first class citizen! Element Web/Desktop 1.8, Element iOS 1.5 and Element Android 1.2 are here today (today-ish, depending on time zones and platforms), fulfilling all your voice messaging fantasies. Grab it whilst it's hot!
The world has truly woken up to the age of decentralised communication. The US congress is releasing the ACCESS Act bill to enforce interoperability and data portability between platforms; the EU is pushing forwards with the Digital Markets Act for the same - and the German national healthcare system has published its plan to standardise 150,000 healthcare organisations on Matrix.
Skype for Business is pining for the fjords... On-premise communications might be your priority, but it clearly isn’t Microsoft’s. Skype for Business Server 2022 is the last throw of a loaded dice that always lands on Microsoft Teams. That’s Microsoft’s intended migration path for you. If you need to keep your communications on-premise, just about the only reason to migrate to Skype for Business Server 2022 is that it isn’t cloud-based Microsoft Teams.
Element Matrix Services lets you pick up the Slack between Teams... Element Matrix Services now offers fully managed bridges for both Microsoft Teams and Slack, so Element (or any other Matrix-based app) can integrate with either service. Connect Element to both, and you can integrate Slack and Microsoft Teams via Matrix.
When communicating in groups, collaborating at work, or talking in online communities it's common to want to talk about a range of topics with the same set of people. We want to improve Element to make it easier to do that. Most people either painstakingly create multiple rooms and send invites to each one individually, or they brave our old and unloved Communities feature and hit its many limitations.
The original open web was born out of academia. It was designed so that scientists at universities and research institutes around the world could share knowledge between each other in a consistent way using an open standard. Today, the digital landscape has changed. It is largely dominated by centralised commercially-driven tech giants. They have changed the nature of the open web by developing their own proprietary systems, retaining power and data.
