These days we tend to work as a team through GIT or similar tools, but assuming two engineers work together on a project it would be nice to chat and see what the other is doing real-time. This feature is a bit in the future, but I like to think and plan ahead on issues I know would be a significant booster.
And yes – we do have chat options on separate tools and options to share screens on Teams or similar, but I want to look into the benefits of integrating them into the tool for the purpose of increasing productivity.
One issue is that it sometimes is nice to have closed discussions with other users, other times you enjoy chatting in a subject group – or maybe you just missed a few days at work and want to see what the others have been up to – reading up on public discussions. Also – sometimes you need to ask questions that someone picks up in a different timeline. None of this is rocket science today, but again – I want to experiment with the added value of having it in the tool.
I will leave this subject for now as I firstly need the stand-alone BSA functional. But, the idea is not that difficult to implement using a decent database as a repository server.
And Yes – I understand that some developers like privacy and be able to avoid that managers or others oversee to much, so I will support a privacy/off-line mode regardless. But, having chats and multiuser support in the tools is also about socializing with others. Often you are not involved in a project and would like an insight or maybe jump into someone elses work and copy parts of it to save some hours. BSA needs to be fun to work with!