Enterprise Digital Workspace – Instant Messaging Pilot Summary Report

August 6, 2019

Background

Employees across the Government of Canada (GC) are increasingly adopting instant messaging tools to conduct business, including but not limited to BBM Enterprise, Slack, WhatsApp, GCmessage and Microsoft Teams. The high user adoption of these platforms reflects ease of use and increasingly broader functional offerings from service providers.

In April 2018, the Digital Collaboration Division of the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat (since folded into the Digital Enablement Division) initiated an instant messaging pilot to determine whether an open-source enterprise-wide instant messaging solution could:

• be offered to GC organizations at a modest cost (in maintenance and licensing fees);
• conform to GC policies; and,
• allow public servants to communicate with each other and relevant GC or external stakeholders on any device.

The instant messaging pilot was branded GCmessage, operated on a self-hosted version of the open-source Rocket.Chat application and ran from April 2018 to April 2019, followed by an evaluation period.

As an open-source project, the development of GCmessage occurred in the open on GitHub.

What We Learned

Overall, Rocket.Chat was good value for money, had high user adoption and was a popular means of enabling internal and external collaboration according to the testimony provided in the GCmessage #feedback channel. Users indicated that Rocket.Chat was an effective tool for organizations to conduct business, particularly for collaboration amongst users within, across and external to the GC. At the same time, there are a number of considerations that require further investigation to determine the viability of an open-source instant messaging solution for the enterprise.

Key takeaways can be summarized as follows:

• Setup: technical setup and configuration of the self-hosted version of Rocket.Chat was straightforward, taking approximately one day for one developer FTE. Self-hosting the solution also allowed the GC to ensure that user data remained in Canada and within its control.
• DevOps: Docker and Kubernetes container technology supported the effective use of computing resources as well as increased developer productivity, two key considerations when deploying applications across a large number of organizations, each with their own firewall rules and proxy settings.
• Cost: infrastructure, support and maintenance costs to run the pilot were modest, equalling approximately 0.35$ per user/month ($24,000 for 20% of 2 FTEs plus $12,000 for Microsoft Azure cloud infrastructure, totalling approximately $36,000 over 12 months). However, to scale to 8,000 concurrent users (which would support approximately 160,000 total users) using self-hosted architecture, costs would rise to approximately $120,000 annually due to an increase in infrastructure costs.
• Adoption and Use: between April 2018 and April 2019, over 95 GC organizations and over 400 non-GC organizations used GCmessage. At its peak, the service operated with approximately 9,162 users, 650 concurrent users and 2.3 million messages sent.
• Scalability: as currently configured, platform performance could start slowing down as early as January 2020 assuming current rates of adoption. Options to scale to an enterprise level include tiered pricing as well as a possible competitive procurement, issues beyond the scope of this pilot.
• Accessibility: the tested version of the Rocket.Chat application did not fully meet WCAG 2.0 success criteria. The shortcomings are related to subjects such as color contrast, keyboard accessibility, the logical layout, legibility of content and platform navigation without using a mouse (WCAG 2.0 Levels A and AA).
• Interoperability: the platform is conducive to supporting a micro services model. Rocket.Chat demonstrated the ability to interoperate with GCaccount, the authentication service of GCcollab. Other: the platform provided poor browser support for Internet Explorer (IE), as demonstrated by an increase in bugs and usability issues when using Rocket.Chat on the IE browser.

Going Forward

Given the popularity of the instant messaging pilot and broad interest in building effective, low-cost instant messaging tools for public servants, the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat is pleased to announce that it will continue hosting GCmessage until March 31, 2020. In addition to enabling users to continue benefiting from the tool, this extended period of operation will provide continued support for users, developers and interested parties to build on the lessons learned through this pilot, including the potential resolution of outstanding limitations. The open-source code that underpins the instant messaging pilot is available on GitHub.

Thank you for your participation in a successful pilot!