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Reimagining virtual team collaboration

Grace Taylor on March 03, 2020

Do you ever wish that collaborating with your team when working remotely, would feel more natural? A 4,300-person survey from Digital Ocean shows t...
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Olivier Jacques

Very cool. I’ll definitely check it out.
We have been big time MS Teams users, but I see how this could come in addition to standard PRs and Teams discussions.

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Olivier Jacques

Quick feedback - clicking "invite participants" generates an email, which is incorrect:
prod.liveshare.vsengsaas.visualstu...

"%3F" must be "?"
prod.liveshare.vsengsaas.visualstu...

(Looks like a very old issue in LShare: github.com/MicrosoftDocs/live-shar...)

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Grace Taylor

Thanks for this, Olivier! I have forwarded this to the relevant stakeholders to look into.

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Grace Taylor

That sounds great, Olivier! We are looking into further integration with existing tools. What tool is your team using for PRs?

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Olivier Jacques

It's GitHub, but GitHub Enterprise, self hosted.

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Grace Taylor • Edited

Gotcha. We are looking into integration with Github!

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Brandin Chiu • Edited

Relatively off-topic, but Jetbrains is building a similar system for integrating with their products called Space. (jetbrains.com/space/)

I'd be curious if there are any trademark implications here for either team.

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Grace Taylor • Edited

That's a good question! We released Spaces as a prototype for the virtual team room, prior to Jetbrains releasing Space. Because companies don't trademark a name that is already in use, it's possible that Jetbrains had trademarked a longer name in addition to just Spaces. So, at this time, the two product names do not affect each other.

Edit: Changed wording in a sentence to clarify meaning.

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Brandin Chiu

It actually is totally possible to trademark a name already in use. Trademarks are applied against names in business domains.

There's nothing preventing a business from trademarking "Google" as their brand name, they would just almost certainly be defeated in court when challenged.

Trademark protection is based on the validity of the claim (whether the business domains are similar enough to be confusing), and prior use. But prior use only really applies to other trademarks when we're talking about business domains (there are nuances, but in general this apples).

For example, if I trademark the name ACME, but ACME is already in use but not trademarked, and no one notices or issues a challenge for a little while, when the original author goes to trademark and I challenge, I will have a significantly better position to defend the trademark, even if I've technically used the name for less time. It really depends on how the trademark is used and advertised.

I don't know how relevant that is here, but I still think it would be an important thing to keep in mind if Jetbrains decides to release a "Space" plugin for Vs Code in addition to intellij.

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Grace Taylor

Thanks for the input! We will look into trademarking issues in the future if they arise.

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ppezaris

Hey Grace, love the ideas. We've been working on similar tools at CodeStream for about two years now, and have a really awesome new set of capabilities launching in a couple of weeks. I'd love to schedule a demo if you have some spare time. Ping me at pez@codestream.com if you are interested.

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Grace Taylor

Great! I will send you a message. Thanks!

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Jason C. McDonald

Sweet! Looking forward to using this with my team.

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Mohammad Fazel

Sounds briliant!

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Grace Taylor

Thank you, Mohammad!

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Ben Halpern

Very interesting

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Grace Taylor

Thanks, Ben!

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૮༼⚆︿⚆༽つ

Any plan to integrate it with Vim or GNU Emacs?

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Grace Taylor

As this is a prototype, we are still in the process of defining a roadmap for the extension, based on developer feedback. At the moment, we don't have plans to integrate with Vim or GNU Emacs, but that could change in the future!