Last April, at the Helmholtz Head Office, we decided to switch from Slack to the HIFIS Mattermost for our internal chat.
With this switch we want to promote open-source solutions and of course, Helmholtz Cloud services. Mattermost is self-hosted by HZDR in Dresden, GDPR-compliant and also widely used by the Helmholtz Information and Data Science platforms.
We were used to Slack, so we needed time to adjust to Mattermost, especially since its interface is not so user-friendly at first. Slack is also still used by our external partners and contacts, we can’t avoid it entirely. Interoperability is very much a challenge, and we are hoping for future developments going in the right direction.
All in all, it may be a small step for the Head Office but it is a big step for sovereignty. With this move we are illustrating the strategy behind HIFIS: enabling Helmholtz employees to benefit from self-hosted, open source and free services for their daily work.
To Go Further
- Helmholtz Cloud to find the next service to switch to?
- European Alternatives for digital products for a wider picture.