Now that we're all forced to work from home, one of the biggest challenges is effective communication. Some of you might have heard about Slack, a popular proprietary collaboration/chat solution for group communication. At ISG, we have worked on a D-PHYS-hosted alternative for quite some time, and have now redoubled all efforts to get it out to you as soon as possible. Today we're launching our Matrix homeserver and Element chat client to all D-PHYS employees and students. In contrast to Slack, which is a proprietary communication silo that holds your chat history hostage, Matrix is an open source project that publishes the Matrix open standard for secure, decentralized, real-time communication (chat, VoIP, AR/VR, IoT). All parts of your communication (chats, uploaded documents etc) will be hosted at D-PHYS allowing data self-sovereignty (making it compatible with ETH regulations).

If you're interested to use this service to communicate and collaborate in your group or with us, please see this readme page.

Please note that we're starting with a basic set of functionality (group and direct chats, image upload). Internally we've already tested features like video calling and custom bots which will be rolled out incrementally in the coming weeks.

Informatikdienste will soon announce the availability of Microsoft Teams, which tries to achieve the same goal but which we neither recommend nor support in D-PHYS.

Today we are pleased to announce the D-PHYS eGroupware collaborative calendar solution http://groupware.phys.ethz.ch. We have put a lot of effort into the task of finding a groupware package that works with as many different clients as possible and offers the widest range of features. So if a synchronized calendar service could be interesting for you, give it a shot. Please also consult our readme detailing the different sync solutions.

If you're still using our much older https://webcal.phys.ethz.ch/, please move on to eGroupware as soon as possible. This service will eventually be discontinued.