Teams is a security nightmare, and Sharepoint as well. Access permissions are nearly impossible to grasp for normal users. The feature that all files dropped are shared instantly by everyone through sharepoint is a huge security risk. People in general have no understanding that they are sharing files with everyone that can join a Teams channel, meaning that confidential and sensitive information frequently gets added to Teams chats in "public" channels. Managing the correct permissions on thousands of Teams channels is hard to impossible, even with extra tools. Channel owners often adopt a "allow anyone who knocks" policy when they get permissions requests, because they are busy and do not really understand what they are doing. Sharing files needs to be more cordoned off for security reasons. Not harder or more difficult, just less integrated and not inheriting permissions.

What if there was a free, open source alternative for Teams? I don’t mean Matrix or Mastodon. I mean something you could run on-prem and it would have chats, meetings, attach files etc. Do you know anything like this?

Why don't you mean Matrix? This is precisely what Element is, built on Matrix: https://element.io

Is it a good replacement for Teams?

Well, I think so, but i'm probably biased given it's my company. Empirically we dogfood it successfully as a Teams/Slack replacement (and a WhatsApp/Signal replacement) while building it, and lots of others use it for that use case too: https://element.io/customers.

The biggest problems have been that the 'classic' mobile apps are stale, and are currently being replaced with Element X: https://element.io/blog/element-x-experience-the-future-of-e... - which far surpasses the Teams mobile clients in terms of UX & performance. Also, the E2EE reliability and UX on the old apps was also not great, but that's also fixed (at last) by Element X.

Will it allow my calendar to automatically attach Matrix/Element video calls to every appointment invite? Will it chime when such appointment is about to start?

This is the kind of stuff that corporate customers care about. They want systems that integrate well.

There seems to be addon for Matrix to do that. https://github.com/nordeck/matrix-meetings

> This is the kind of stuff that corporate customers care about. They want systems that integrate well.

Great. I just want a system that allows me to view a PDF file that my teacher sent me without having to click through a dozen menus and wait several minutes.

Yes. That's what you get from a well-integrated system. At work, I can open PDFs and Excel sheets and Powerpoints directly within Teams with a single click (and, one or two extra clicks to download an off-line copy).

Well if you are not looking for Matrix (although it perfectly fits your description), XMPP is probably the closest.

zulip

https://www.freie-messenger.de/en/systemvergleich -> e.g. XMPP

like Matrix: https://www.freie-messenger.de/en/systemvergleich/team/

Teams made me realize no one cares about security until it's too late.

> Teams made me realize no one cares about security until it's too late.

Crisis driven decision making is one of the most popular management methods in history.

too late being https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/microsoft-st... ?

Apparently not. Is Solar Winds still a thing?

Why would anyone not think that putting a document in a public channel would result in people who can join that channel having access to it? Isn't that the whole point?

Because the correct minimum set of people is those who are in the channel when it was shared to the channel… and most people aren’t thinking of possible future information leaks when sharing documents directly into a channel with specific people the document is intended for…

The mismatch makes sense to programmers and IT types who have internalised the “computers are stupider than we make them look” way of thinking… but most normal non computer professionals are probably just thinking “I am sharing this with these people right now.

That’s a setting your IT teams chose to hide from you, our teams channels allow you to set what files are shared with someone who joins.

I’m still not at all sold. If someone put a file in the Ops Team folder of a shared drive then they’re sharing it with all current and future members of that team. The same is true if you post to #ops-team.

To be brutally honest people need to just stop and apply some basic critical thinking to their actions instead of expecting magic.

How is that any different from sharing a google doc link?

This is 95% of why we use it.

We have <20 employees and managing an extra vendor for a chat application is a non-negligible % of our time.

Our new hires can log with their work account using a shrink-wrapped machine from Best Buy and will have all of their needed applications ready to go & signed-in without going to random vendor sites or file shares.

I'm managed GSuite and Slack in a small company for years. What is taking so much of your time?