Hello everyone, so our next speaker is yours, put me, and he's going to put them.
Can you hear me?
Then I will just get started.
All right, there we go, all right, so, well, you saw the title of my talk, so I'm just
going to dive into that, there's a button to press, is that the alarm, oh, it's a timer, that's
awesome, all right, so you know what I want to discuss, what I want to talk about, but
you want to, sorry, yes, no, no slides, all that's, that's all it's blue, right, so
that's what it's supposed to be, really, look, I'm going to hit the button and then something
appears, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, magic, magic, all right, so I want to talk about
collaboration tools, and I think there are broadly, four of them, so there's obviously chatting and
there are calls, video calls, there's file handling and the fourth is office document editing,
so those are the collaboration tools that, you know, if you're a office worker, I mean how many
of you spend most of your time behind the chair, behind the computer, in an office or working from home,
everybody, right, yeah, that's modern reality, so yeah, that's what you do basically, and so
you know, these things have been developing, obviously over the last years, again we're at
first them, so a lot of people are pretty much involved in this timeline developing stuff, etc.
So you know, there was a time that this was cool and new, that's a while ago, and that's how we
will chat, and then people were of course using one of one chat with this, I'm not going to say the
name, come on, what is it? I secure, exactly, yeah, yeah, and you also had Skype coming at some point,
that's of course for the video calls, well, first without, and then, well, files were on an
NFS chair, and you know, you would share with your colleagues making a directory available in this
kind of stuff, I mean sharing as a big word, but if you're on the internal company network,
this works, of course, great, and then, well, we were using Microsoft Office, I mean calling it
collaborative is a big word, but you have shared drive, you can work on the document, hopefully
don't get conflict, it kind of works, or you email it, hey, that's that, and then the 2000s came,
and you know, what's up came and made like one of one chatting much more interesting, and so
I should give you one, the way of the data, and of course for like group chatting, we got
slack, that first was IRC compatible, and of course when it became better for them to not be,
they were no longer IRC compatible, because that's the way of big tech, and, well, soon,
I'm just picking out a few brands here, but obviously tons of other companies make stuff,
for the video calls, that was really big during COVID, of course, for the files,
well, Dropbox, they really changed, you know, how you collaborate on files, how you think
them, share them, you know, instead of like a company determined hierarchy on Windows,
network drive or something, you suddenly could just share directly with people, so that also got
into the business world, and, you know, to the despair of many assessment administrators, probably,
and of course, then Google, I mean, others that have before them, they just bought it,
let's not think these big tech companies are actually innovative, they just buy it,
started to bring Google Docs, which meant Microsoft had to come with an answer as well, of course.
So, open source needed answers to these things, because otherwise, all your data is into the cloud,
you have zero control, and that's not the world we want to live in, I think, that's something I don't
need to convince anyone of in this room. So, we have tools like Matrix, Jet, and Metramouse,
for the group chat, we have JetC, for the video calls, or to like big blue button,
on cloud, my boss and friend, Frank Carley, check, started on cloud in 2010, to build
the replacement for Dropbox, and, you know, gives people a way to share files, securely, safely,
collaborate on my comics, also running around here, it falls down,
um, yeah, brought the broth is into the browser, so you could also edit your documents.
And I mean, that's all good stuff, and important. But then COVID happened,
and suddenly lots of people and organizations had to work remote, and having all these separate tools
gets messy, you know, you shut the file during a JetC call, but it's no longer available after
the call, so Jet is no persistent, you might have emailed something, and it's on the Dropbox,
and like all these different tools, they were integrating a little bit, but you got a bit of a,
you know, there are gaps, there are lots of gaps in between. And of course, our
America friends build a tool that did all of this really, really smooth, and really nicely integrated.
And then they gave it away for free, to lots of places, and then people started using it, and then,
of course, after the little while it was no longer free, or your documents were in it, I mean,
it's the usual game that's played, and then you were stuck with these guys. So, you know,
at next level out, of course, you might have wondered where that now goes, we have been working
on many of these pieces over the years, and well, we wanted to make sure there was an open source
answer to Microsoft Teams, and you know, I would argue that's like Fatalk, because it can do
all these things as well. So, as I said, this strategy of integrating everything, bundling it,
giving it away for very little money initially, right, because Teams are free, if you have to
Microsoft 365 anyway, that's really the typical big tech playbook. Now you upload all your data,
and then, well, you have to ultimate vendor lock-in, because you can't really export at least a
metadata. The files you can get out, but all the metadata that the discussion you had about
file, and who changed it when and where all the versions, this is all done, if you want to migrate
away. So, you need it, and yeah, can my argument is, we really need an open source alternative
to this, something that brings all these things together, and as easy to use, can argue how easy
to use Teams is, but in a similar interface, but of course, I'd respect users privacy and
guess government in particular digital sovereignty. Yeah, I can't follow. So, that's Nick Fatalk.
I mean, unlike Microsoft Teams, of course, completely on-premise, people often ask us,
like, how do you host? No, we don't, we just make software, we absolutely do not do any hosting.
Other companies do, you can get a host at Nick Fatalk, but we don't give that to you,
because we don't want your data too much stress. So, yeah, keep it in your own data center.
And, well, I want to talk a bit about why talk is the right answer to Teams here.
So, in the end, it's all about the future of work, right? And so, work, that's hybrid, that's on the
go, that's working everywhere. And, you know, meetings are online. Do you have them out for a
video call, or maybe even in weird, three-dimensional environments these days? Well, to each their own.
And so, we try to build, next, I'll talk to address basically all these different things.
So, the needs of a modern bigger organization. And, at home, you can run next loud,
but most people use it for calendar contacts, sharing pictures. But in the business, of course,
you need a way for employees to work together efficiently and, well,
integrated also with other applications and tools as well. But, again, completely private cloud,
on-premise in your own data center, behind your firewall of VPN even if you want. We have customers who,
basically just lock it off from the internet, they run at completely air gap, and we still,
they can have video calls, they can have chat, they can have document editing sessions together with
other people, the whole suite is available without an internet connection. So, I think that's really
important. Now, next I'll talk is basically designed for three main use cases. And the first
that team chat, so this is the slack, the matter most, to help a team of people collaborate during the day,
sending hundreds of chat messages into tons of chat rooms. We all do this, right?
So, if you have a quick look at next loud talk, I have the feeling that this might be the wrong video.
Oh, okay, yeah, that's the next loud chat room, and you can put in all kinds of content.
That's integration I'm talking about, yeah. This is an office document. In the chat room,
you share it in the chat room, you just edit it right away there. You don't need to download the
file and edit it, and we upload it, you don't need to leave the browser tab, you just go and edit it.
So, that's the kind of integration that we've built for a team working together, calendars,
compound planning boards, you put it all in the chat, you can work there in one place,
at the same office documents and other things, and well, you can see my terrible attempt at
throwing a sketch. All right, so we even integrated a assistant with AI, of course,
this runs on premises again, but, you know, AI is very hot, and, well, with Copilot coming,
you need an alternative for this as well. So, we built our next loud assistant with basically offers
similar features. You can, for example, have it summarized the chat room for you,
so if you come back from a location and you have a chat room that gives you a headache,
with 300 unread messages, there's a button that's summarized, and then AI makes a summary,
and, you know, luckily with summaries, AI is down high, hallucinate that much. So, this is pretty
helpful, but there's a ton more right with creation of text and all this stuff.
Yeah, I already mentioned, I think the summaries, the other stuff, so, well, there's a summary feature
exactly, this quite nice can save you a lot of time and headaches. All right, so, the second
major thing that next I'll talk to us is video meetings. So, this is, I think, again, the obvious
stuff right, you want to have a meeting with then 5, 3, 20 people at the office, you can record a call,
you can do a screen share. Yeah, we also put in a couple of features to help you maintain your
sanity. There's a warning at one hour call that you shouldn't have calls that are longer than
an hour probably. Feature I really like is that it tracks the speaking time of each other participants.
I tend to talk too much, this, well, you might have noticed. And having, you know, a timer or a
counter that says, like, Luke of this 30 minute meeting, you've been talking for 20, maybe,
that other people speak for a bit is for me quite helpful. And other people that are
very rounded might help you speak up a little bit more. We have a nice white board for the
virtual laser pointer and all the stuff built in. So, it's a complete team meeting platform, as
well. And then the third main use case, and again, this is Zoom, for example, is used a lot for webinars
and really big meetings. So, our education training, these kind of things, and this is, of course,
a feature we have as well. So, you can invite people to play in. Not yet. Maybe it's
such playing now. Yeah, you can invite people to film number or by email. And, you know, you can also
import a spreadsheet with like 500 participants for a meeting or a webinar. You can then, you know,
manage permissions and make people moderator, you know, give them a ride to share screen,
all these kind of things. Yeah, you can ask input with polls. Nice thing is that you can
these days save polls as a draft and then export them to a file and load them in for a new webinar,
et cetera. So, again, if you do a lot of webinars and such, you will have, yeah, a good time with
this basically. Breakout rooms, it's not a one of these things. So, if you have like, you know,
a training and you have a group of 20 people, you want to split them up in three or four groups.
You can then either moderate or assign people to each of the groups or you can let the system
split them up randomly and then after the meeting, they come back into the main room, this kind of
stuff is all there as well. So, yeah, it's really a great platform for education, collaboration,
et cetera, but with all the other features integrated as well. We have mobile clients,
Android, iOS, they generally support all the functionality of talk. I actually did discover recently
that on my iPhone, I can do a screen share from mobile phone during a call. It's a bit surprised
by that, but that's cool. There's a desktop client, I think, I've shown it already in a few videos,
which is really nice. And, well, I'm going to go back to the AI for a minute. I think,
yeah, I've mentioned it already, right? We have a bunch of AI features with generating images,
all the fairly basic stuff. So, for example, if you have call, you can record it after the call,
you've got a transcript of the recording, and you've got a summary of the meeting as well,
with the connection to the room. So, these kind of AI features we build in. And so, none of
this sends data to the cloud if you don't want to. So, as an admin, you can say, hey, I have an
own-prem LLAM that I want to use. I have an own-prem whisper that I want to use. So, in our
app store, you can choose between different apps. You can then, as an admin, for each of the functions,
say, okay, I want to use this LLAM, I want to use that LLAM. Yeah, this one does the summaries,
in the middle client, these kind of things are all built in. And we use the rating system to show
you how safe it is or how privacy you're respecting it is. So, every one of the AI integrations we
have has a rating on a scale of red to green. We check whether the code is open source of the,
yeah, of the to run the LLAM or to train the LLAM, whether the model itself is open source,
as in the values are available, which means you can download it, run it on your own server,
or in the data center that you trust. And, last but not least, we'd like the training data
to be open as well. So, somebody can go in and retrain the model, maybe make it more efficient,
or remove bias, etc. And, if the model has all these three properties, it'll be green.
If it has two of them, it'll be yellow, and I'm pretty sure you can figure out the rest from there.
So, that's how we deal with the AI side of things. Another feature I quickly want to talk about
is Federation. So, if, you know, you and all your friends are running their own next while talking
instance, you want to talk together. You can simply invite people from another instance.
It doesn't matter that they're on a different server, they're just not a user. And, for
users, they're completely seamless. You can have a video call with people from five different
servers. You can chat in a room with people from different servers. So, it feels like a single,
you know, platform where people can work together. And, I have to stop. Well, I was at the summary,
we have a replacement for Microsoft Teams. Go use it.
All right. Any questions?
Yes. That's questions, time? Yeah. All right. All right. One of the big questions I have is
Microsoft Teams is one of those corporations that, you know, a lot of businesses use it because
it's convenient. And there's also a lot of licenses that they give to, for example, educational
organizations that make it right now to run. How would you convince a company that doesn't
really care all that much about data privacy and open source of where to actually go and transition
to that new system? I don't, honestly. If you don't care about privacy or digital sovereignty,
it's very hard to explain to you what the benefit of it is. Luckily, there are people, companies,
but also governments, right? Like, if there, I mean, there's a city in an Netherlands, they are
experimenting with next cloud. I think that's great. But it's not the job of a random city in
an Netherlands to make sure that when a certain, uh, often associated with the color orange,
president decides to shut down Europe's IT infrastructure, uh, it's not the job of a random city in
an Netherlands to protect an Netherlands from that. That's something the federal government needs to do.
Of course, but I think that you, um, have a program like next cloud. That's, it has many things
that are better than Microsoft Teams, of course. But if the costs are so much higher to run it
yourself or get someone to host it, then maybe need to look there at the total cost of ownership,
right? Yeah. Because companies are paying extraordinary amounts to Microsoft, it's just that the
additional cost of adding teams is zero because Microsoft bundles it and just raises the price on
everything else. Yes. So the total cost of ownership of running your own infrastructure with
Necla talk is depending on the company size, competitive, or even much cheaper, especially at
scale. And if you're a big company, you pay a lot more money per employee to Microsoft than a small
company as one of the tricks that big tech users to keep small competitors out of the market.
It's, you know, at scale, it's very expensive and we are way cheaper, not intentionally. I mean,
the open source shouldn't be cheaper. That's not the reason to use it. You should use it.
If you care about digital sovereignty, you want to maintain running when somebody gets angry
at your country for doing something they don't like. That's why we should do it, not for the money.
I think. All right. Thank you.
I don't think we have time for more questions. Do we have Alexey here already?
Sorry, you cannot take more questions. Maybe behind the room.
You can talk to us. Thank you. Thank you.