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This saddens and frustrates me as a user. I love screenhero and it does its job well. I've used it for all of my remote interactions over the past year or so an

This saddens and frustrates me as a user. I love screenhero and it does its job well. I've used it for all of my remote interactions over the past year or so and was a happy paying customer (through our company). Unfortunately, due to other concerns about paying for Slack[1], we probably will not be able to continue to use it. We'll be a once-happy customer that falls victim to this acquisition. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth :( [1] It is expensive especially at our scale, we already pay for a couple chatroom-type/irc-like services, and the big one: long-lasting offsite chat logs present a difficult hurdle in client negotiations, a headache we just do not need

wallflower 12y ago
Slack has a feature where you can auto-expire chat channel logs. However, I have a feeling that may not good enough for your client's/industry compliance standards? https://slack.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/203457187-Setting-up-a-custom-message-retention-policy https://slack.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/203457187-Settin...
- fidotron 12y ago
  Post Sony Pictures a lot of companies have become super wary of it. I know a good number of high profile companies (including in the HN sense) that won't let you conduct dealings with them via any cloud service. Potential clients/partners really do ask what email service you're using quite early these days, the only universally acceptable answer is self hosted (either Exchange or something else), which strikes me as crazy considering how difficult to do properly that is, but there we are.
  - bmh100 12y ago
    Do you know of a great resource for actually doing that self hosted email, based on your experience?
    - fidotron 12y ago
      I wish I did. Personally I'm very much in the Google ecosystem, and this has been a repeat point of friction. Thus far the approach has been to go on site with a trusted intermediary that has the required infrastructure, but it's not sustainable. Not much scares me technically like the idea of ineptly deploying a mailserver.
    - bitexploder 12y ago
      It isn't that bad. We self host. Dovecot + Postfix. Spam handling can be painful at times. http://sealedabstract.com/code/nsa-proof-your-e-mail-in-2-hours/ http://sealedabstract.com/code/nsa-proof-your-e-mail-in-2-ho... These guys have a cool service to help ensure DKIM and all is working: http://www.port25.com/support/authentication-center/email-verification/ http://www.port25.com/support/authentication-center/email-ve... Mail is a good service to host yourself. With a couple of digital ocean boxes you are golden. Set up your backup MX to just hold mail and deliver it to your primary MX. SMTP is forgiving and you can have many hours of outage of a primary mail server without losing mail. You just have to be willing to do it.
      - bashinator 12y ago
        If it's on DO, then does it legally count as self-hosting? I was under the impression that you needed to physically own your own hardware.
    - michaelmior 12y ago
      I've heard Mail-in-a-Box[0] is decent, although I've never tried it myself. [0] https://mailinabox.email/ https://mailinabox.email/
    - corford 12y ago
      Zarafa is excellent (and works with MS Outlook if you need that). Edit (to elaborate more): it's open source, has a very nice web ui, supports pop/imap/outlook, does activesync and mobile push, uses other standard opensource software (postfix, mysql), is easy to backup, comes with good documentation, is simple enough to get up and running (there are pre-built deb and rpm packages), integrates with LDAP and you can get a paid support contract if you need/want one. Their open source site is here: https://community.zarafa.com/ https://community.zarafa.com/ I'm not affiliated with them - just a happy sysadmin whose managed lots of Zarafa installs in the past.
  - rdl 12y ago
    Was there a specific slack/Sony Pictures connection, or do you just mean the general increase in awareness of third party risks? I actually agree about self-hosted communications even when you use other cloud services; I've been thinking about something in this space a lot recently, and the alternative to BYOD. Not sure if this is just being whining about Sony or an actual market, though, so it might not be a worthwhile product.
    - fidotron 12y ago
      In general. I had run into it prior to SPE, but it's far more common now, even with not particularly tech savvy companies. However, were I to name some of the tech companies that have this requirement there would be a lot of coffee getting into keyboards. BYOD doesn't seem to be an issue as long as you can demonstrate their data isn't leaking to cloud services.
  - mahyarm 12y ago
    Why would the sony pictures hack make self hosted any better?! Their general network was hacked, and an exchange server would of been hacked too.
jsherwani 12y ago
I'm one of the co-founders of Screenhero. I'm really sorry that you won't be able to continue to use Screenhero. This isn't just PR/marketing-speak, as someone who has spent many years of his life working on this product (that I love), it really does pain me to know that someone who also loved what we'd built will no longer be able to use it. However, in the grand scheme of things, I (and our team) feels that this is the best step forward for everyone involved (including Screenhero users). Slack is on its way towards becoming the de facto communication tool used by teams (both big and small), and an integrated Screenhero + Slack product just makes the most sense for the most people. I would love to learn more about why your team can't use Slack, and what we can do to mitigate the issues you've outlined and others that you may not have outlined yet. Please feel free to add me to Screenhero (j at slack-corp.com) and let's have a deeper conversation about this, if you're open to it.
- dharma1 12y ago
  We use slack (distributed team), and I was thinking of starting to use Screenhero. When can we get Screenhero features in Slack? Any beta testers required? :)
  - tptacek 12y ago
    There already is a Screenhero integration for Slack. If you pay for Slack, you can set it up in like 3 minutes, from slack.com/screenhero.
    - fixedd 12y ago
      Tried this, didn't work... no Linux support.
      - tptacek 12y ago
        Did Screenhero ever have Linux support?
        12y ago
danudey 12y ago
The issue I have with Slack is that the one thing I want to pay for is more integrations, but in order to do that I need to shell out $7/mo/user, and doing ten integrations instead of five isn't worth $350/mo. As a result, we just straight up aren't using most of what Slack is great at, and we probably never will. If they offered a paid tier for just extending the number of integrations available, I think it would quickly become far more useful to my team, but none of the rest of the paid features are of any use to any of the teams I'm on at all. I get that I'm probably not the target market, but I would wager that whatever those two extra integrations would cost them to provide us, our team would be able to pay and then some.
- droopyEyelids 12y ago
  This would be the sweetest pricing structure for a billion uses like a friend-group Slack, a slack for your open source project, a slack for gaming clans, a slack for your minecraft server, a slack for small non-profits or small businesses, a slack for families. Right now, the free tier only gets you basically an isolated version of every other free messaging service around. If you could pay $8/month for each additional integration, small slacks would go from being an {inconvenience OR huge bill} to something everyone with technical ability could use to integrate a million different signals with the people they care about. I really, really hope slack lets us pay per integration someday.
aagha 12y ago
What's the benefit of using solutions like Slack when there's free (unlimited users/groups/etc.) solutions like Kato.im?

wallflower 12y ago

Slack has a feature where you can auto-expire chat channel logs. However, I have a feeling that may not good enough for your client's/industry compliance standards? https://slack.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/203457187-Setting-up-a-custom-message-retention-policy https://slack.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/203457187-Settin...

fidotron 12y ago
Post Sony Pictures a lot of companies have become super wary of it. I know a good number of high profile companies (including in the HN sense) that won't let you conduct dealings with them via any cloud service. Potential clients/partners really do ask what email service you're using quite early these days, the only universally acceptable answer is self hosted (either Exchange or something else), which strikes me as crazy considering how difficult to do properly that is, but there we are.
- bmh100 12y ago
  Do you know of a great resource for actually doing that self hosted email, based on your experience?
  - fidotron 12y ago
    I wish I did. Personally I'm very much in the Google ecosystem, and this has been a repeat point of friction. Thus far the approach has been to go on site with a trusted intermediary that has the required infrastructure, but it's not sustainable. Not much scares me technically like the idea of ineptly deploying a mailserver.
  - bitexploder 12y ago
    It isn't that bad. We self host. Dovecot + Postfix. Spam handling can be painful at times. http://sealedabstract.com/code/nsa-proof-your-e-mail-in-2-hours/ http://sealedabstract.com/code/nsa-proof-your-e-mail-in-2-ho... These guys have a cool service to help ensure DKIM and all is working: http://www.port25.com/support/authentication-center/email-verification/ http://www.port25.com/support/authentication-center/email-ve... Mail is a good service to host yourself. With a couple of digital ocean boxes you are golden. Set up your backup MX to just hold mail and deliver it to your primary MX. SMTP is forgiving and you can have many hours of outage of a primary mail server without losing mail. You just have to be willing to do it.
    - bashinator 12y ago
      If it's on DO, then does it legally count as self-hosting? I was under the impression that you needed to physically own your own hardware.
  - michaelmior 12y ago
    I've heard Mail-in-a-Box[0] is decent, although I've never tried it myself. [0] https://mailinabox.email/ https://mailinabox.email/
  - corford 12y ago
    Zarafa is excellent (and works with MS Outlook if you need that). Edit (to elaborate more): it's open source, has a very nice web ui, supports pop/imap/outlook, does activesync and mobile push, uses other standard opensource software (postfix, mysql), is easy to backup, comes with good documentation, is simple enough to get up and running (there are pre-built deb and rpm packages), integrates with LDAP and you can get a paid support contract if you need/want one. Their open source site is here: https://community.zarafa.com/ https://community.zarafa.com/ I'm not affiliated with them - just a happy sysadmin whose managed lots of Zarafa installs in the past.
- rdl 12y ago
  Was there a specific slack/Sony Pictures connection, or do you just mean the general increase in awareness of third party risks? I actually agree about self-hosted communications even when you use other cloud services; I've been thinking about something in this space a lot recently, and the alternative to BYOD. Not sure if this is just being whining about Sony or an actual market, though, so it might not be a worthwhile product.
  - fidotron 12y ago
    In general. I had run into it prior to SPE, but it's far more common now, even with not particularly tech savvy companies. However, were I to name some of the tech companies that have this requirement there would be a lot of coffee getting into keyboards. BYOD doesn't seem to be an issue as long as you can demonstrate their data isn't leaking to cloud services.
- mahyarm 12y ago
  Why would the sony pictures hack make self hosted any better?! Their general network was hacked, and an exchange server would of been hacked too.

jsherwani 12y ago

I'm one of the co-founders of Screenhero. I'm really sorry that you won't be able to continue to use Screenhero. This isn't just PR/marketing-speak, as someone who has spent many years of his life working on this product (that I love), it really does pain me to know that someone who also loved what we'd built will no longer be able to use it. However, in the grand scheme of things, I (and our team) feels that this is the best step forward for everyone involved (including Screenhero users). Slack is on its way towards becoming the de facto communication tool used by teams (both big and small), and an integrated Screenhero + Slack product just makes the most sense for the most people. I would love to learn more about why your team can't use Slack, and what we can do to mitigate the issues you've outlined and others that you may not have outlined yet. Please feel free to add me to Screenhero (j at slack-corp.com) and let's have a deeper conversation about this, if you're open to it.

dharma1 12y ago
We use slack (distributed team), and I was thinking of starting to use Screenhero. When can we get Screenhero features in Slack? Any beta testers required? :)
- tptacek 12y ago
  There already is a Screenhero integration for Slack. If you pay for Slack, you can set it up in like 3 minutes, from slack.com/screenhero.
  - fixedd 12y ago
    Tried this, didn't work... no Linux support.
    - tptacek 12y ago
      Did Screenhero ever have Linux support?
      - 12y ago

danudey 12y ago

The issue I have with Slack is that the one thing I want to pay for is more integrations, but in order to do that I need to shell out $7/mo/user, and doing ten integrations instead of five isn't worth $350/mo. As a result, we just straight up aren't using most of what Slack is great at, and we probably never will. If they offered a paid tier for just extending the number of integrations available, I think it would quickly become far more useful to my team, but none of the rest of the paid features are of any use to any of the teams I'm on at all. I get that I'm probably not the target market, but I would wager that whatever those two extra integrations would cost them to provide us, our team would be able to pay and then some.

droopyEyelids 12y ago
This would be the sweetest pricing structure for a billion uses like a friend-group Slack, a slack for your open source project, a slack for gaming clans, a slack for your minecraft server, a slack for small non-profits or small businesses, a slack for families. Right now, the free tier only gets you basically an isolated version of every other free messaging service around. If you could pay $8/month for each additional integration, small slacks would go from being an {inconvenience OR huge bill} to something everyone with technical ability could use to integrate a million different signals with the people they care about. I really, really hope slack lets us pay per integration someday.

aagha 12y ago

What's the benefit of using solutions like Slack when there's free (unlimited users/groups/etc.) solutions like Kato.im?