The Commission introduced Element Pro over the summer as a “sovereign back-up to Teams”. The platform is intended to provide a fallback for Commission communications if U.S.-based Teams becomes unavailable.
Three officials have questioned why the Commission needs the new system:
“I don’t understand the added value here,” one official wrote on an internal staff message board.
Another described the tool as “absolute shit.”
A third official said that, judging matters on how well Element Pro works compared to Teams, the U.S. would “instantly win the war” if it ever decided to switch off its technology.
Element CEO Matthew Hodgson:
“Obviously there are going to be some teething issues,” he said, adding there will always be “cognitive dissonance” when switching to a new app, if only because the “buttons” are in a different place. He noted that the United Nations and NATO also use Element Pro.
I use Element to access our Matrix server, some bugs are frustrating, sometimes editing a message means nuking its formatting, but I would never call it "absolute shit". And I love that I don't have to use Microsoft Teams.
Wait this has nothing to do with the matrix client... Does it?
wait, you’re right! Element Pro is based on Element X, an Element (classic) rewrite afaik.
Actually I'm not as right as we thought 😂 I thought it was just a coincidence they called it Element and it was a new app built from scratch, but it seems the UK-based company is indeed the same one that created the matrix protocol and Element Pro uses it.
I'm a bit surprised but maybe I shouldn't be. Element (the company) seems it's a bit like the Blockstream of the matrix protocol
If you're a shit magnet, you'll get a lot of shit.
I also don't think Element is that shitty. But Pro has all the corpo spyware stuff, so maybe that is why it is so poor?
I tried to force my company onto Element several years ago and also later to using Nextcloud Talk, both failed in favor of WhatsApp.
Both Element and Nextcloud are decent and have various nice features, but both lost to WhatsApp for the same reason: Messaging becomes the grand example of "metcalf's network law" (network value increases exponentially not linearly).
Everyone is right in hating Teams / Zoom (both of these entities ARE RECORDING YOUR PRIVATE MEETINGS! THEY ARE LISTENING TO EVERYTHING YOU SAY!!), yet the friction of trying to forcefully pull people onto small privately hosted platforms is almost impossible. It can "work" fine for your organization, unfortunately you need to communicate regularly with people outside your organization and thats where the breakdown happens.....