How to replace Slack and other departed services?

Atlassian Services

Jira. Task tracking, working time logging.

confluence. Storage of project documentation, maintaining a knowledge base.

Bitbucket. Mirroring, code base storage.

Status. The Australian company Atlassian has announced that it will suspend the sale of all new products in Russia.

The company also says that they will specifically revoke licenses from some government agencies and corporations. At the same time, the company promises to continue fulfilling its obligations to small businesses in the Russian Federation.

Solution. For now, we are looking at GitLab services as a replacement for Atlassian services. We regularly upload backups to a Russian cloud service.

gitlab. Development and storage of the code base

Status. On March 4, representatives of the platform, in response to the demand to block Russian users, said that the contribution of each participant is important to them, and they will not block users from the Russian Federation.

Solution. Even if the situation changes, our company should not suffer. GitLab is deployed on our servers based on the Russian cloud.

Figma. Development and prototyping of interfaces

Status. Cases of deactivation of corporate accounts are already known, while this has not yet affected private accounts.

Solution. Not found yet. Now we have prepared a script that allows you to back up most of our layouts in batches. The script still ignores three large projects, but manually unloading three projects is easier than eighty. The service does not have the friendliest API, and so far this is the best we could do.

Slack. Corporate messenger

Status. The company notified that all customers from the Russian Federation were transferred to a free tariff. This means that the number of stored messages will be limited to 10,000, and it will not be possible to add new users from the Russian Federation to the corporate account.

Solution. We will try to get by with the free version of the service, having previously created a supply of empty accounts for future employees. At the same time, we asked all colleagues to unload important artifacts from chats and not use Slack as storage. Last year we considered analogues of Slack, and now Rocket.chat and Mattermost open source solutions are deployed on our servers.

bitdefender. Corporate antivirus

Status. On March 11, the Romanian company said it was suspending sales and marketing of products in Russia. However, we are negotiating with representatives of the company. At their request, we filled out a questionnaire: on the basis of its data, they will decide on the further support of our account.

Solution. We hope for a positive decision from Bitdefender and continue to use Kaspersky products.

zoom. Videoconferencing

Status. Zoom has banned sales of the paid version in Russia.

Solution. In addition to Zoom, we use MS Teams for projects, as well as Google Meet – it is included in our corporate tariff for Google Workspace. If we have to abandon Zoom, Meet and Teams, we will switch to domestic Yandex.Telebridge and VideoMost.

Microsoft Services

Status. The American corporation Microsoft has decided to suspend its activities in Russia.

Solution. Throughout the history of the company, we regularly paid for Microsoft Office, but now we are forced to minimize its use. Our supplier assures us that we will be able to renew the license.

However, we most likely will not do this – given the current cost, MS products will become unprofitable for us. So far, we are using analogs from Google and are looking at open source solutions.

Google Services

Status. If Google is blocked in Russia, we all face more serious problems than the search for analogues of any of the tools listed above. 70% of smartphones in Russia can turn into bricks, payment by bank cards, mail, applications and online banking will stop working.

Solution. It is impossible to prepare a coherent plan for such a case. We can only hope that it doesn’t come to that. In the event that a corporate Gmail account is blocked, we have prepared a script for migrating to Timeweb with forwarding emails to personal accounts.

Rest

We also use a lot of Russian services in our work. Accordingly, our processes tied to Bitrix24, 1C, Diadoc, Mango Office and Huntflow were not affected. The server architecture on Yandex.Cloud and Timeweb is also relatively safe.

From several services that were not of significant value, we simply refused. These included Apiary, Dribbble, and Dropbox.

Until recently, we were also preparing to introduce a service for building mental maps Miro in the company. Now the preparation process is on pause, as Miro limits his work in Russia.