+86
Planned

Export data

Andreas 8 years ago updated by joeboon 3 years ago 66

I think a feature for exporting all your data would make new users feel more comfortable committing to a product such as this so that they know they will not get completely locked in. It could also be useful if you want to be able to analyses your data for example to see how Ryver is being used.

+1 We're now leaving Ryver, before is too late.

+1 This is needed for compliance. Many organisations need to keep records for long periods of time.

Any word on if/when this is being implemented. The choice for our non-profit was between this and Slack (obviously Ryver is free so that was awesome), but we absolutely need the ability to export data. Not having this is a huge compliance/auditing issue.

+1 while evaluating Ryver now. It would certainly give us peace of mind.

I'm now having an issue with a customer, hopefully the Ryver feed will prove him wrong. Thanks to this working feed, I have hope to be paid for half year of work if a court looks at my case. But if the data of the feed would disapear, I would loose all hope to not to be stolen. Exports can be delayed, limited to once a week or a month to reduce DB loads. Whatever text format is always ok.

+5

Someone just pointed me to this thread. I'm CEO/Founder of Ryver. When we did Slack import over a year ago we almost did the export then as well. But we deemed other things as more important. We saw the export as something that would indeed give people comfort that they could go back if need be. Reading these comments makes me realize we probably underestimated the benefit.


Does the fact that only public channel info could be exported to Slack make this less appealing? For obvious reasons private channel and DM info cannot be imported or exported into Slack or other.


Also, there seems to be 2 use cases talked about here. 1. Export for comfort reasons. 2. Export for compliance purposes. Am I reading that right?


Thanks much for your input.

Both, public and private are required to meet my organisational compliance needs (a research university with projects which manage and process sensitive data - often we have specific ethics committee requirements as well). This is just like organisation email. From a project perspective it is also very useful to archive with the project at it's conclusion.


Why not make it a configuration (none, public, all) option chosen by the account owner, and then for users who sign up, or when the policy changes, inform the them of this by email and a nag banner notification (latter must be acknowledged to get rid of the banner).


Export data should be machine process-able and filterable and (e.g. JSON). I guess you can skip the binary attachments (images) and just put in a reference to the fact it existed, and the metadata associated with the upload.


Thanks!

Also, there seems to be 2 use cases talked about here. 1. Export for comfort reasons. 2. Export for compliance purposes. Am I reading that right?

Almost yes, but I'd like to spot out some points: 1) private on site archiving of old, closed rooms 2) chance to offer customers the room log during project development in a standard format

We've gotten some good feedback here. Thank you! This is a tricky area given the potential security and privacy concerns once data has been exported. Our original thought was that only content from Open Forums would be exportable in the free service, with Compliance Audit Exports coming in a premium service later in 2017.


We are looking at what implications there might be if we also include a Private Team export option in the free service. Perhaps as Richard mentioned, with an option that is turned on by the Admin, and then notice is given to all of the users.

Actually this is quite blocking for me; I'd be delighted to pay for a premium version, but it still lacks. And I have to assure my customers and my organisation to have conversations at their disposal.


I'm glad you are looking into this, because your product is really attractive, but in order to be used on a work place it should grant some bureaucratic requirements :)


Cheers

+1 - for full compliance, HR, legal and ethics. we need full details for conversations not being to have an export format (irrespective of migration) that can be used for data mining / search / analysis is a problem. even if it doesn't go directly into another solution, this is needed for business reasons outside of the primary communications functionality.


+1

+1:

The way I think exports should be: Every user should be able to export any content he has access to.

Why? Because he already has access to this messages, so nothing prevents him/her from screen printing all that information os simply copy-pasting it. Access control should not be an exporting issue, it should be handled way before.

Notes: a configuration option could be added to select who can export in the admin menu, all users, all but guests or only admins, but if given the right to export, that user should be able to export all the messages/images/files he can access normally.


About the format: exporting in JSON seems to be the most logical codification option. Creating a file for every day as Slack does may not be necessary, but there needs to be some kind of fragmentation that prevents huge files. Maybe a certain number of messages per file. Posts should probably be contained in separate files with the same fragmentation criteria. Using users id and generating a users.json at the root level with ONLY the relevant information (name, image-path) of JUST the relevant users may also be a good idea. Images (also avatars) and attachments should also be exported under request (ask the user if he wants images and/or attachments when he is going to export, avatars should always be exported) and the JSON should contain the relative path to the file.


TLDR: after being granted permission, any user could export every message, post, comment, image, file, etc he has access to.


Additional note: if implemented, extending the export feature into a backup feature should be easy, just giving admins the possibility to export the rest of the users information and the global configurarion settings. Obviously this would require an equivalent import system to apply backups.

Thank you for the additional feedback. It's good to hear people recognizing JSON data exports as being fairly standard these days. We're evaluating the various "flavors" of export (single user, whole organization, compliance) in order to hopefully knock off most or all scenarios at once.

+1

Just wanted to express the need and urgency from my (company) side;


First I'll reply to Mr. Pat Sullivan's question;

Both and much more.
We require the export option for both comfort and compliance purposes, however, these two are not the most important for why we need Export functionality in RYVER.

I can completely understand why this feature hasn't been developed or released until now, i'm sure that here many business considerations and much more, however, please do consider the following: 

* Many of us are trying to find the best platform/tool/assistant for our organization. Some require it for a specific need and some are trying to improve collaboration and enhance communication in general.


* Those of us who are working in mid-large organizations might go through hard times when trying to bring in a tool like RYVER into the company. A lot of people are afraid of changes, especially if you are trying to replace current half-baked solutions which you are not happy from.


* These worries which are led by uncertainty are being fueled even further with the following excuse: "We can work on RYVER for a month, two or even three, but what happens if we decide it's not for us? how do we take our content, which we have placed into RYVER, export it, and later decide what to do with it?"


This excuse is currently standing strong, especially when trying to push it in companies which are less experienced with collaboration platforms like RYVER.


Think of us as your sales personnel, selling RYVER in our own company. We need the appropriate tools to sell...


Thanks again for an amazing product.

We all wish to see much more of it.



Best Regards,

Shay D.

+1

Shay,


We agree with your reasons as stated.  The plan for us is as soon as we release the Task Manager this month, work on the enterprise version will start back up.  Much of it is finished and we are adding a few new engineers as I write this. The enterprise version is very important to us as it is the next step in our monetization.  So I can assure you it will get done.  I am hopeful sometime early 4th quarter of this year.  


Thanks for your thoughtful feedback!


Pat

End of 4th quarter now, any updates?  Owning our data is a core requirement for my company's selection of all our business tools.

The latest on this is that we have done the core work for SSO and will be testing it in-house starting this coming week. Then we'll be working on history/audit tracking, followed by export. So we are making progress now on our enterprise-related features, but I know it is moving slower than you would like.

+1 for a full export as a last-resort cold backup. I know that sounds overly cautious, but cloud services have experienced loss/hacking problems before, and it would be comfortable to have our data in our back pocket.

I work for a law enforcement agency. We employ ~600 staff. We have had to ban Whatsapp for official business because it cannot meet compliance/auditing laws. Slack for simple chat is way too expensive. I am looking for a cloud-based chat service that will allow us to export chats from forums, private teams and DMs just like we can do with our corporate email. I know of several other agencies that have this same issue with limited budgets.


In all the other factors Ryver wins out. But without a export functionality its a no go. I'm holding my breath!


Go Ryver...

Hi Darrin - Thanks for checking out Ryver! We don't currently have an export feature exposed. It's something we've planned on doing for a while, as you can tell by the age of this thread, but have ended up putting it off for other features. That being said, now that we are testing our our SAML Single Sign-on support, we're nearing an effort to focus more on the enterprise, and with that will come features such as change tracking and full audit-log export.


For your near-term needs, are you needing that full change history and ability to export all data including any deletions/modifications that have been made? Or would a team/forum-based export option (one at a time) serve your needs?

Hi Jeff,

Thanks for the quick reply.


Near term need - For my organisation I have restricted deletions after a week. Although as I type this I am wondering if that is for every forum & private team or just the ones I can see? Will you please advise.


To date there have not been any requests for disclosure/evidence. But if there were, I would like to be able to export Direct messages and chats in a particular forum/private team between a set of dates. One forum or private team at a time. I would only be interested in the record 'as it is' on the day the report/export is generated. In other words, I would not be interested in any deletions or modifications that may have been made prior to the report being generated. 


I want to be able to use Ryver as our corporate chat tool. There can be no expectation of privacy on the part of staff as they are using a corporate resource just like there corporate email.

+1

With today's announced changes, the "export" function takes on a little more urgency. Will this be released prior to the end of the month?

To clarify my earlier point. I would like to export all tasks and topics but not so interested in chats. It would be a comfortable cold backup in case of loss through our own mistake or if someone gained access to cause damage. 

As someone else noted, this is now URGENT with the new announcement from Ryver. However, I'd argue that urgent isn't even strong enough for this situation now. Without an export function, this could be considered ransom-esque by many existing freemium users.

Joe and Matt,


Curious,,,  If we provided export (which would not be easy (btw) what would you do with the data?  No one I know of imports Ryver data,  

We are a team of developers using Ryver currently. An export of chat/post history for all, or even per channel, as a flat file or group of files (JSON per channel maybe) would allow us to do whatever we want to with the data. That could be parsing it for internal purposes or to import to other systems (e.g., MS Teams or Slack). As developers, we could accomplish the import to another system with our own effort.

We will talk about this in our weekly meeting today.  Size the effort and see how we would prioritize it vs other important features that our mission critical customers have been asking for.  


If it is working well for you, why would you leave Ryver and pay for something else?  Just mad?

Hi Pat. We're not mad. However, we already pay for Office 365, which includes MS Teams. Since we're already paying for that across our company, we are definitely considering moving to MS Teams now.

Similar here... we're already paying for Google Apps, which includes Google Hangouts Chat. We'd prefer Ryver over the Google app, but not enough to justify paying twice.


I have to say, the lack of export functionality for over two years now combined with today's announcement is starting to feel less like an honest oversight and more like a planned attempt at vendor lock-in. It's a really bad look to not provide even the most basic data export (you can't tell me that a simple "by room/team" text dump would be more than trivial to implement) before completely changing your pricing model.

Thx and understood.  Personally I don't like MS Team much but it is at least included in 365.  I have used 365 as well.  I don't really like it much either preferring google doc etc.  Again, we will talk about it today.

Peter,


After building software for 36 years I've learned almost nothing is trivial.  Especially given the things that don't get done while you are doing something else.  We are talking about it and if it is indeed trivial, we will do it.  


Thanks!

Peter,


Let me add, we have to consider what to do with Private stuff in private teams and DM's.  Slack never lets you get to this data unless you can prove you need it for a lawsuit.  Recently a Slack user said that Slack was going to charge him $35,000 to output the private data he needed for a lawsuit.  He would not pay it.  If we give an export, all the people who posted private msg's are going to say WHAT!  That was private shit.  It is not insurmountable but clearly it is not trivial as lots of unintended consequences are in play.  If not, Slack would not do it the way they do.  We can only import Open Channel data when we do our import.  That is the way it should be.  Agree?

Pat,


"What would you do with the data?" - I would like a cold backup in case someone malicious accessed one of our Ryver accounts (or maybe a disgruntled employee?), and deleted everything, or if Ryver was unavailable for a few days. We could get away with referring to text files for a few days. If someone had removed all our Ryver data we would have to write an automated script to pump it back in through the website. Painful but worth it. 


I would not expect private messages to be exported (I can't see them so they aren't really part of our 'assets' stored in Ryver).


By the way, I did not receive the notification about your changed pricing plan, although I can see the pricing page has changed. I've emailed support to ask why I didn't receive a notification. Maybe it should be on your twitter feed as well?


In our case (small company with 4 users) I expect we can could go free, but I was expecting to move to $49/mo for up to 15 users. I guess your pricing change isn't as big a deal as people are making out - they would have had to pay $99/mo anyway for more than 15 users? Seems like you've just removed one price point and made the lowest price point free. 


But I would expect you to have honoured the price for customers already on the $49 upto-15-users tariff. Everyone else stays the same or gets cheaper!


Cheers.

Oh, I missed one price point you have removed - Free team communications for unlimited People. I see. If a customer was using tasks, this isn't a big change. If you were not using tasks (or only 5 people were using tasks) but lots of people were using team communications, this is a big change. Anyway, I'm way off-topic now so I'll shut up. :-)

This request feature since two year ago still not done yet?

Maybe it's a good idea to implement the export functions in small steps.
Do not wait until you can export everything. Then everyone will wait a long time and wait.

But start with the tasks for example.

My personal favorite. due to the delivery of the project status to the clients


Or even better ...
When you change a process or functionality in Ryver, ask the development team to make the export functionality associated with that part of Ryver at the same moment..

An export function would be extremely useful for compiling activity reports

+1

Our need is a bit different. We want to export data, especially of the tasks, so that it may be used in documents or other applications. For example, we use the "tasks" feature to store the requirements and other documentation about the system we are building. We would like to use that as text in the documents for other people to read.

+2

Exports is always an difficult request to solve.
Maybe it's a better Idea to make a report builder.
Where you can create your own reports with only the information, filters and sorting that you want.

If you can export a report to CSV, EXCEL, PDF etc maybe we have the perfect solution

+1

Those kinds of exports will definitely be very useful. Thanks.

+2

+1, very important feature for us as well! We've just started on a paid plan with 25+ people and I regard the possibility of backing up the whole contents of our Ryver group from time to time in a file that could always be opened and searched in an offline version of Ryver or even searched as some kind of structured text file or table as vital. Not yet sure if I motivate all my team members to write down a lot of content and upload data without an option to create a backup on a server under our control. 

+1 - it would be very important, for several reasons, to have a complete backup of our ryver from time to time.

I developed a chrome extension to export the chat history in forums, teams and/or people since I also want to have a backup and view the downloaded HTML for offline viewing. Visit my extension in Chrome Web Store.

Great to see this extension,

thank you for the efforts!

I talked about this with our administrator and the question came up whether using your extension will upload the Ryver conversation data to an external server for processing (which was regarded as a privacy concern) or whether the data conversion happens locally on the user's machine. 

Could you comment on this to alleviate the concerns?

Thank you

Hi Guido, 

After getting the response from the API request, the extension itself parse it to render it in a page. The extension neither upload nor store the conversation data to an external server for data processing.

Let me know if you still have a clarifications.

Thanks!

Thank you, I tried this now and it works very well!

Would be nice to:

- automatize it to convert/safe all available forum/team/people chats from an account

- also grab topics and tasks (although I understand that the syntax behind these elements might be more difficult to convert..)

Hi Guido,

Thanks for the feedback and I'm happy that it's working well on you.

1. Yes, I am also considering to have an option to backup all the chats from an account in one go.

2. As for the topics, the development of a separate extension is on-going. And yes, it is more difficult than the chat downloader.

Pat - Is this feature implemented in Enterprise yet?

With no updates from the Ryver team, im starting to doubt if this feature will ever be out.
More reasons to move out from Ryver?

I have developed a Windows application to export Tasks, Topics, and Chats from Teams and Forums. This compliments the extension from KruuKruu which downloads conversations.

I created it to backup tasks and topics in case anything happens to them. It saves the raw data from the Ryver APIs as json and then converts it to viewable HTML files. All processing happens locally and it doesn't ask for your password.

I'm charging £20 (GBP) for this application, and I'm happy to consider requests for enhancements. For more details or to purchase please visit https://www.utilitysoftware.store/exporterry


Certain data is not exported - I've tried to list as much as I can on the website.


Hope this helps some people until Ryver add this feature.

An updated version of ExporterRy is now available - https://www.utilitysoftware.store/exporterry

  • Option to zip all exported data files
  • Improved progress log and error handling
  • Topics and Chats are now exported in groups of 1,000 to improve processing and viewing speeds

Please let me know if you would like any other enhancements. Would anyone be interested in exporting attachments?

Thanks for the feedback on ExporterRy for Windows. We have now added an option to download all comments made on Topics and Tasks. This can take a little longer to export but it is worth it if you have useful information in the comments.

Alguém criou uma solução no Ryver para baixar gratuitamente as tarefas? Por favor, é nos ajudar com backup e segurança de dados.

Você pode usar o Ryver Api para extrair tarefas gratuitamente. Mas você precisará escrever um programa. ExporterRy exporta Tarefas e Tópicos, mas não é gratuito.

(You can use the Ryver Api to extract tasks for free. But you will need to write a program. ExporterRy exports Tasks and Topics, but it is not free.)

As you probably know, I gave up waiting for Ryver to add this feature and developed an independent windows application that uses the Ryver API.

Version 2 is now available. It fulfils a lot of the requirements mentioned in this topic over the last 4 years.

It exports almost everything from Ryver and could be used for SOX compliance or audit archiving. It only exports the teams you are allowed to view.

A lot of people export their data for peace of mind, or in case of accidental deletion.

You can buy RyExport here:


Notable v2.0 improvements:

  • Attachments, images and entities can now be exported
  • Login with your Ryver username and password (easier than cookies), or use the original cookies method
  • Teams and forums are exported to separate folders for easier searching or sharing
  • Renamed ExporterRy to RyExport to avoid confusion with Backupery and Authory
  • Emojis and smilies are correctly rendered in the html human-viewable data
  • Counters show how many items have been exported

I hope this does what you need. Please let me know if there is something you'd like me to add.

Anyone know if there is a way to copy an existing checklist into another task rather than having to retype it?  I know I can use a template but the task already exsits and has a ton of info in it.  I just want to change a bunch to my "new checklist" and not have to do one by one, line by line

If you would like to export team members private chats, topics, and tasks from Ryver, I just released an independent exporter called "RyMember".

RyMember uses the Ryver API to export the personal data for a single user, including Private chats (1-to-1 DMs) with all other users, Private topics shared with other users, Personal task board and task details.

We are an independent software vendor and are not associated with Ryver. 


For more details please see UtilitySoftware.Store

Thank you for the second best updated version. Exporting information has become much easier. I managed to make my work much easier for my employees.

I also really like the new ability to import data directly from the site page and update the necessary information after editing. The work has become much easier and faster.

SPAM ALERT - I believe the last two posts from "MitchellJose" are spam. I don't recognise that name as a user of any of my export tools. The link to "page" has nothing to do with Ryver - I suggest you do not click it. Also I am not aware of any product which imports data into Ryver, at the moment.