Using the right tools, working remotely comes with numerous benefits. It gives employees independence, enables the company to hire talent worldwide, saves time and money with transportation, reduces ecological footprint and can boost team productivity. In order to prevent the spread of COVID-19, the majority of organizations are asking their stakeholders to keep digital relations.

Suddenly, your whole operation had to move into a remote scenario. As a manager or business owner, you may feel completely lost and unprepared to deal with it. When globally scaled issues like COVID-19 happen, we realize the importance of keeping a business going through challenging times. However, staying productive online requires defining the right tools. Check below the main ones (even internally used by our team at Rocket.Chat) to help your team stay collaborative and efficient.

Let’s check some criteria to help you choose the right solution! For sure the first main impact will be in pricing since Slack is more expensive than HipChat. For the video conference feature, for example, the former could roughly charge $8 per user on a monthly basis plan (includes this feature) while Hipchat´s users would be charged $2 By contrast, this solution costs our Rocket.Chat clients $3 per person per month.The great news?

GDPR, LGPD, CCPA, … Ever heard of these acronyms? Starting in 2018 in Europe with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), many other countries have passed laws to protect your privacy and your personal data. The LGPD in Brazil or the CCPA in California are among those laws and will come into force in 2020.

You may have noticed a lot of recent changes with the mobile apps. Rocket.Chat has been maintaining two native versions of the mobile app, one for Android and one for iOS. This has proved to be quite problematic and we had to split our resources which is inefficient. We therefore made the decision to build a new app based on a common framework. After months of deliberation, testing, and lots of community help, we have finally decided to move to the proven React Native framework.

Rocket.Chat has always tried to be smart when sending mobile notifications. We don’t want to disturb you with useless notifications, but we understand this is confusing to our users. Users expect notifications and think there are bugs when none are actually being sent. We have created a diagram to show the current conditions that cause Rocket.Chat to send a notification.

We are happy to announce our participation in Season of Docs 2019! This is the inauguration year for the exciting new program. Season of Docs is Google’s annual program that fosters collaboration between open source projects and technical writers. Season of Docs is a unique program that pairs technical writers with open source mentors to introduce the technical writer to an open source community and provide guidance while the writer works on a real world open source project.