
CERN Ends Trial of Facebook Workplace - sohkamyung
https://home.cern/news/news/computing/cern-ends-trial-facebook-workplace
======
danpalmer
The thing I personally found difficulty about Workplace is that it uses the
same dark patterns as Facebook to increase engagement. For a business tool
this is a bad thing.

A tool that requires none of my time to get benefit out of is a better tool
than one that requires some of my time. Workplace drained time with patterns
like unnecessary notifications, email notifications without the actual content
in and prompts to engage in activity on the platform in ways that weren’t
productive.

Business tools should save time, not drain time. I think Workplace either has
this wrong, or is designed for workplaces where people don’t have enough to do
and spend their days on Facebook anyway.

~~~
TremendousJudge
It's also a bad thing for a "civilian tool"

~~~
toper-centage
Of course, but much harder to quantify in terms of productivity and money lost
unless you time-track all your life to know how much money your off time is
worth.

~~~
danpalmer
Not to mention the tricky link to what one might call the "entertainment
value" of Facebook.

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montyhallpy
My company too has bought into this Facebook Workplace hype. The feedback from
users is mixed. Some people like it. Most find it clumsy and cluttered. The
notification system is totally useless and spammy. Almost every little update
by anyone in your org is a notification. I see 100+ notifications everytime I
log in. I don't know what value it brings or what problem it solves that is
not already solved by email / distribution lists / IM.

~~~
sangeeth96
What was your company using before Workplace?

~~~
KozmoNau7
No the OP, but my employer has also adopted Workplace. Before that we used our
own internal website for section-level and company-wide updates, with
commenting and a small discussion board where dicussions not directly related
to updates were had.

I'm sick and tired of Facebook, and now I'm forced to endure it at work,
unless I want to miss out on important updates.

------
pdpi
If I read it right and they had around 1k users after 3 years of trialling
Workplace, I think it’s less a case of “ending the trial” as it is “pulling
the cord on life support”.

The article distinctly makes it sound as if they only trialled because they
were offered a generous free usage period, without a clear desire to actually
integrate it into their daily routine.

The timeline suggests that they were onboarded in the early days of Workplace,
and I would blame FB’s nascent enterprise sales team for being too immature to
recognise what was a losing battle from the get go.

~~~
keanzu
They fail to mention how many potential users there were and whether this was
high or low take up.

"The acronym CERN is also used to refer to the laboratory, which in 2016 had
2,500 scientific, technical, and administrative staff members, and hosted
about 12,000 users."

Is it 1000 out of 2500 or 1000 out of 14500 or am I using an invalid source
and the actual staff count is completely different?

~~~
pdpi
FB’s target was almost certainly the whole enchilada, so it’s penetration of
1000 out of 14500.

Even if you call it 1000 out of 2500, that’s 40% adoption over three years,
for a tool that wants to be the centrepiece of your collaboration
architecture.

~~~
Cederfjard
Even worse, the current top comment (clarified further by one of its children)
is saying that they only had 150 active users per week.

------
donalhunt
> Losing control of our data was unacceptable

This is the biggest risk to companies as they evolve their use of products and
manage costs.

We found to our dismay that Dropbox do something similar if you decide to
migrate off their platform (accounts get downgraded to the free plan and the
company loses all control over the data in the account).

Companies are not doing enough to highlight these gaps / gotchas when the
decision to utilise the platform are made.

(only a little bitter having had to deal with the fallout of these decisions)

------
coder1001
Interesting!

"Reactions were not always positive. Many people preferred not to use a tool
from a company that they did not trust in terms of data privacy."

So the issue is just trust or the tool is not as useful? How would the results
differ had someone else offered them a similar tool?

~~~
keanzu
> Reactions were not always positive.

Universally true: Reactions are never always positive for anything. A non-
statement which will also be true of whatever replaces Workplace.

> Many people preferred not to use a tool from a company that they did not
> trust in terms of data privacy.

Many other people used the tool for 3 years during the free trial; how is this
advisable if there are genuine data privacy issues? Seems negligent on CERN's
part.

The decision point came at the transition from free to paid, not due to a
change in trustworthiness of Facebook.

------
sangeeth96
I'm unsure why any company would prefer Workplace over Slack/Teams etc. They
have far more features and basically not scathed in privacy troubles as FB is
in right now.

~~~
blowski
Workplace is more like an intranet, whereas Slack is more like email (in terms
of how it’s used). That said, my experience was that the Facebook layout makes
people treat it like Facebook - sharing and liking good news stories, but all
the serious stuff is done elsewhere.

~~~
flurdy
More like Yammer. Now owned by Microsoft. Which I found useful as an intranet
long life discussion forum. But rubbish when treated like a chat app.

------
skinnyasianboi
Great move to go with open source solutions like Mattermost and Discourse.

~~~
bipson
This has tradition at CERN. I wonder why they even considered Facebook's
offering, but I guess they do not dismiss proprietary solutions as well.
Whatever works?

Often enough they end up writing their own tools, if nothing fitting is
available, and this might end up in the public domain (since AFAIK everything
at CERN is basically paid for by the public, i.e. various member states, EU
etc.).

~~~
ahartmetz
CERN IT administration is sometimes pretty idiotic. When I was still in
physics, they replaced the well-loved homegrown Hypernews system with
Microsoft something, a move welcomed by no one.

~~~
Aeolun
For once I would like a company I work for to move to a clearly better
product...

So far they seem to be searching for the worst of all worlds.

------
rjzzleep
I thought lack of control in the free offering of mattermost is one of the
things people complain about the most.

It seems riot/matrix and rocket.chat seem quite popular. I liked the e2e in
riot but it seemed a bit cumbersome. Rocket.chat was quite popular at CCC so I
guess it's probably decent as well.

~~~
Arathorn
We just merged a rewrite of riot/web’s e2e UX to develop branch - it is
hopefully going from cumbersome to balletic :)

------
filmgirlcw
They only had 150 active users (despite 1000 signups), so choosing not to pay
for the offering makes sense.

I have the utmost respect for CERN as an institution — I want to make that
clear. What I don’t love, however, is this trend that seems to be using a PR
offensive of “price shaming” whenever contract or license terms change. I
understand CERN is publicly funded and that it doesn’t have an unlimited
budget. But I’m not sure how necessary the passive-aggressive jab at the
three-year free trial now becoming paid is to the fact that CERN is dropping a
tool only 150 people actively used.

The critiques of the product (and I’ve never used Workplace and hope I never
have to) seen to be totally inconsequential, because CERN seemed to be happy
doing the IT work to keep it running/integrated as long as it was free.

It’s fine to drop support for a communication tool — especially one that
doesn’t have a lot of adoption. But there seems to be an insinuation that
Facebook should continue to give CERN access for free, and that I just don’t
like.

~~~
arethuza
Given what was invented at CERN you think Facebook would have the decency to
give them a free license!

~~~
Cthulhu_
That's basically stating that influencers should get free stuff; CERN is a
company that handles hundreds of millions, and I don't believe they're too
poor to pay for services.

~~~
JorgeGT
Services that are possible because that "company" chose to put the WWW in the
public domain:
[https://cds.cern.ch/record/1164399#](https://cds.cern.ch/record/1164399#)

Can you imagine, if CERN had patented HTML, HTTP, the Web server and the Web
browser?

~~~
pushpop
Without wanting to sound dismissive to the massive contribution Tim Berners-
Lee, and CERN as a whole, has made to IT; we’d probably have ended up with the
same user experience we have today but with Gopher as the base tech. Or maybe
something else entirely different from markup perspective, such as something
RTF or s-expressions...?

Great technological advancements are rarely the work of one genius in
isolation. Usually it requires the imagination of a great many people to be
captured. By which point the world is already ready for such an invention so
it becomes more of an evolutionary breakthrough rather than a one idea that
couldn’t be recreated.

~~~
JorgeGT
I agree, but if you patent certain processes, concepts, etc. early on, you can
get filthy rich as everyone has to license your technology.

~~~
pushpop
In theory, yes. But there are a few caveats to that:

1\. CERN wouldn’t have been able to patent anything too generalised because
there was prior art (Gopher)

2\. Thus if the patent was too expensive developers would have just used a
similar technology (bare in mind it took quite a few years before the web to
evolve from a toy, then something that companies “needed” but it wasn’t
contributing massively to their bottom line, to what it is today where a great
many businesses sole market is web based).

3\. Even if it had somehow became part of industry standard or CERN had
achieved a vague patent that prevented similar implementations from
coexisting, Europe has this thing called (if I remember the acronym correctly)
FRAND patents where patents which are required as part of a standard have to
be fairly licensed.

None of this means CERN couldn’t have potentially made a lot from HTML & HTTP.
But I also think part of the reason it was the success it was, was because it
was a royalty free open specification.

~~~
JorgeGT
Yep, I agree that any or all of those would apply (note that regarding F/RAND,
a holder can refuse, and then the standard must exclude their IP) but at the
same time we have seen over and over that corporations (and the nation-states
that back them up) can get in really aggressive patent wars if they see fit,
even over the concept of black, glossy rectangular cuboids...

------
ian-bateman
Maybe they should consider following Mozilla and just self-host their own
instance of Riot.

A $5-$50/mo Linode + a tiny bit of ops overhead has to be less expensive than
anything anyone else is charging (whether Facebook, Slack, Teams, etc.). Plus,
then they at least have complete ownership / control of their data, which for
an organization like CERN seems a little important...

~~~
matoro
It says they already run their own internal Mattermost intance which does the
same thing. Having run both MM and Riot for real users I can say that MM is
the far more professional and well-designed of the two.

~~~
xf86alsa
How long ago did you try Riot? It's changed a _lot_ in the past year, and with
their encryption changes coming in the next few weeks it should be even nicer.

------
someonehere
Fun fact. This tool was being developed internally at FB about ten years ago.
They really couldn’t figure it out back then and it sounds like they can’t
figure it out today. Internally before it was Workplace it was a decent tool
that integrated with the public facing site. Unsure of how Workplace works
today.

~~~
tudelo
It works really well inside of FB -- good way to collaborate, teams have their
own groups and then there are cross team groups etc. There can be a little too
much information, but there are not many complaints in general about the
productivity it brings. Not sure how well it works in other companies.

~~~
toast0
I guess it must work well for some people inside FB. For me, it was just
another high noise, low signal thing to try to remember to check: email,
workplace, workplace messenger, irc, wierd automated smses with links I
couldn't load and I couldn't quite figure out but at least stopped after I
quit, whatsapp messages (where i worked), sometimes phone calls and people
coming to my desk. Plus diff reviews and task tickets, which theoretically
sent notifications through whatever, but since it's so full of garbage, you
just have to check.

Of course, you can't actually rely on workspace notifications either, if you
really want to know if another team did something, you need to skim through
all their posts. Of course, if you asked someone directly, they would send you
to their group feed, like an outsider would be able to skim it with ease.

I may still be unpacking a bit

------
goatinaboat
Corporate internal social networks are a concept that just doesn’t work
because of the hierarchy involved. This is obvious to anyone who isn’t in the
HR department.

------
fkfaduc
It's great to see CERN make more and more steps towards free software! Public
money - public code

------
PunchTornado
> CERN was then given a choice of either paying to continue with the initially
> free set-up or downgrading to a free version that would remove
> administrative rights and CERN single sign-on access and send all data to
> Facebook

another example of paying with the data.

------
saiya-jin
Well no surprise there. FB is consistently on the dark side of the moral
spectrum, at least kudos for being consistent. Scientists have privacy
concerns and seemingly higher moral expectations, so paying for a tool like
that with public money would not look good from any possible angle.

Do I understand correctly that they changed their pricing model to paid during
trial, or have all control over data revoked? In a place like CERN that would
probably be even security breach, even though its international project, US
3-letter agencies (and for-profit corporations) shouldn't have internal access
like that.

------
whatsmyusername
Wow, what a cursed product. I can’t think of a single other company I would
trust less with our business communications than Facebook.

Edit: Maybe pastebin? Though pastebin will honor takedown requests.

------
a012
My company chose Workplace as a formal and only official channel for internal
communication, including announcements from executives to all employees. It
makes you have to actively on workplace to get information, knowing what's
happening around. I think it's a wrong way to use, but it's already set by top
c level.

------
TomMarius
My previous company has used and pushed workplace. It was never useful in
anyway to anyone in my engineering teams.

------
riffic
Perhaps CERN can spin up its own Mastodon instance?
[https://toot.thoughtworks.com](https://toot.thoughtworks.com) is an example
of an organizational adoption of a Fediverse node.

~~~
elkos
As far as I know they do

------
np_tedious
> Reactions were not always positive.

It would be cool to hear what these reactions were. How did it suit their
workflow, compare to alternatives, etc

Right now all this article says is that they had data privacy concerns (valid)
and that the free trial ran out.

------
Priem19
I'm surprised CERN has tried it in the first place. I mean, if CERN can
produce things like ProtonMail, it can definitely conjure up massively
superior alternatives to facecrook.

~~~
ThiefMaster-
CERN did not produce ProtonMail. A few people who previously worked at CERN
did.

------
martijn_himself
I don't know Workplace but how is this newsworthy and of interest to anyone
outside of CERN? The article sounds quite spiteful, and why, if _' Many people
preferred not to use a tool from a company that they did not trust in terms of
data privacy'_ would you use it in the first place? Also, how can you blame a
commercial company for charging for a tool?

~~~
alamortsubite
> why ... would you use it in the first place?

People's trust in FB has eroded greatly over the last three years. That may be
all there is to it.

In addition, however, the post clearly says it was a trial. The people who
pushed for it were not necessarily the ones who had to eat the dog food.

------
johnchristopher
So, what happens to all the data that is poured into Workplace ? No mattermost
import, I suppose ?

~~~
taccie
Maybe we can address their concerns with our platform Open Social
(getopensocial.com) as they use Drupal for most of their platforms already. I
think we can get some data our of Workkplace trough
[https://developers.facebook.com/docs/workplace/reference/gra...](https://developers.facebook.com/docs/workplace/reference/graph-
api) \- would be an interesting case for a migration tool..!

------
osioke
Well, some instances at CERN are enjoying Discourse, so I guess the move was
inevitable?

------
tibbydudeza
Facebook and my workplace ... no thanks ... fortunately we canned that one.

------
HenryBemis
I don't see this as price shaming. I see a HUGE "we don't trust these folks to
begin with...". Facebook is cancer for humanity. It gives 1 and takes 50. And
then dilligently finds ways to use that 50 to hurt you, for their profit. I
wouldn't trust any sensitive information with them. And especially CERN? These
guys have info and tech to end life. Some random admin with god-mode that will
get bribed by Saudis/<insert other criminals/dictatorships> wouldn't hesitate
providing them with any data.

For some organizations, the value of their data/information is worth much more
than the £€$5k/10k/50k that their collaboration tools cost. CERN is one of
them. I prefer to pay £€$10 per year more taxes so they don't use scum like
Facebook.

(angry words yes, but hey.. they tried hard to earn them feelings - perhaps if
they evern become less scum-my, maybe people will trust them more)

~~~
harunurhan
> And especially CERN? These guys have info and tech to end life

I work at CERN, no we do not.

~~~
mmmuhd
I am just thinking why can't CERN make their own worplace equivalent platform
for their people considering the fact that they help create the internet
itself.

~~~
wolfgke
CERN did not create the internet. Tim Berners-Lee created the _world wide
web_.

Also keep in mind that there actually existed many predecessors of hypertext
systems (EDIT: see
[https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Timeline_of_hyper...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Timeline_of_hypertext_technology&oldid=923040888)
); just for some reason (let's say because the world wide web was in the right
spot at the right time), the world wide web became hugely popular.

------
Maro
I worked on Workplace at Facebook. It's super-cheap at $1-3 per MAU. If they
like it, why not pay for it. OTOH if I were FB I'd give it to CERN for free.

~~~
swarnie_
I'm forced to use Workplace in my company and i absolutely hate it. After 15
years of employers trying to keep employees off social media they're now
trying to shove it back in again.

While joined to around 100 groups in my global organisation the wall/feed
thing becomes a very poor way to deliver technical information. Its
intermingled with personal messages or a reminder about Jason from accounts
upcoming birthday drinks.

Everyday i'm reminded why i left Facebook in 2012 and never looked back.

~~~
gmueckl
This sounds like a terribly mismanaged Workplace instance to me. Why should
anyone be joined to 100 groups? That's a red flag right there. And if you
can't move personal stuff off of Workplace, create separate groups for that
that can be muted or left etc. This noisy personal stuff can easily exist in
public groups that can be looked into by anyone if something comes up.

~~~
redis_mlc
"You're holding it wrong."

