Chat is where the careful thinking gets pasted, so it matters what 'your workspace' means. A private chat organisation per customer, signed into with your existing identity, with channels that have topics and retention you set. Including what it is not.
Chat is the tool where the "sovereign" question gets uncomfortable. People are careful about email, and then they paste the thing they were careful about into a chat window, because chat feels like talking rather than filing. Your actual operational history, the decisions and the arguments and the customer names, ends up in the tool nobody audited.
So it matters where it lives, and it matters what "our workspace" means when the provider says it.
When your workspace is created, we stand up a chat organisation that belongs only to you, at your own address. It is not a shared installation where customers are separated by a permissions setting. It is your organisation, with your members, your channels, and your history.
The difference shows up in the boring places. Your user directory contains your colleagues and nobody else. Your search covers your history and nothing else. There is no configuration mistake anyone could make, here or at our end, that puts another company's people in your member list, because they are not in the same organisation to begin with.
When you eventually leave, that organisation is deleted as a unit. Not a row marked inactive in a table that also holds other customers.
This is the part that saves real time.
Your chat does not have its own accounts. People sign in with the same email.eu identity they use for everything else, and the organisation is restricted to your email domain, so the first time a colleague signs in, they are simply in. No invitation to send, no seat to assign, no account to create.
The reverse matters more. When someone leaves the company and you disable them in one place, they lose chat along with everything else, at the same moment, because there was only ever one account. There is no forgotten chat login sitting behind a separate password, which is the exact failure that leaves ex-employees reading a company's internal conversations months later.
The chat tool we run is Zulip, and its distinguishing idea is worth understanding before you dismiss it as another chat app.
In most team chat, a channel is a stream of messages and threads are an afterthought that some people use and some do not. Zulip makes every message belong to a named topic inside a channel. So a channel is not a firehose, it is a set of small labelled conversations, and each one reads like a short email thread with a subject.
The practical effect: you can be away for a day and catch up by topic, reading the two conversations that concern you and skipping the eleven that do not. Instead of scrolling back through an undifferentiated wall trying to work out where one discussion ended and another began.
It also means the history is genuinely searchable a year later, because things have names. Chat that cannot be searched usefully is a log, not a record.
Retention is yours to set. How long messages are kept is your policy, not ours. If your industry says eighteen months, set eighteen months. If you want to keep everything forever, keep everything forever.
Your branding, not ours. Your logo, in your organisation. Chat is not a place your team should be reminded daily of which vendor their employer chose.
Where it runs is not a question. It runs on our own machines in the EU, on infrastructure we control, with no US suppliers anywhere in the chain. There is no analytics vendor watching your team's activity and no third-party processor in the path.
Two honest boundaries.
It is not end-to-end encrypted. Messages are stored on the server, readable by the server, the same as every mainstream team chat including the one you use now. What we can offer is that the server is ours rather than a US company's, the data stays in the EU, and there are no third parties. If you need conversations that a server operator mathematically cannot read, chat is the wrong medium and you should say so out loud to your team.
And it is not trying to be a social feed. There are no reaction leaderboards, no engagement mechanics, nothing designed to pull people back in. The measure of a good work chat is that people close it, and that is the design we chose deliberately.
Chat is included on every plan, like the rest of the pillars. It signs in with the same account as your mail, your drive, your wiki and your meetings, because a workspace that makes you assemble it yourself is not a workspace.
If you are moving a team off an existing chat tool and want to talk through what comes across and what does not before you commit, ask us.