I built Booklet to solve the problem of too many chat messages at work.
Booklet updates classic internet forums and email groups to have a modern UI and high polish. It organizes communications into threads, and summarizes activities into a neat email newsletter - so members can stay updated without having to stay logged in. The async format promotes deeper discussions, while also increasing engagement by making conversations easy to follow.
My goal is to make communications more asynchronous - so that I can get back to work, instead of slacking all day. Most early communities have been hobby groups, but my goal is to mature Booklet into a tool that sits alongside Slack in companies.
Try it out, and let me know what you think!
Your implementation is probably not based on Ruby - which makes it more interesting - but it's not open source. In terms of features, they don't seem to compare at all as this is really early stage.
The idea behind the project is good, and I think this is the future. I successfully pushed the company I work for to use internally a Discourse instance to overcome the same issues you faced - and it works. We now have an "internal StackOverflow" and an engaging community. It's not a new concept (see Google's YAQS), but it's a (IMHO) working one that many more companies should adopt as it really increases knowledge sharing and productivity!
Best of luck with your project, I think you're on the right path but you should definitely start comparing this to Discourse and define why should anyone get this - and why must it be SaaS (some big companies are against SaaS for their stuff).