It had text chat from the word go, AFAIK. In this way, it was more like a glorified version of IRC, only with voice chat functions built right into it.
Another interesting comparison to IRC is in that rather than being in just a few rooms on an IRC server, you're in all of the rooms at once the moment you're given access. (Did I mention? Discord has some pretty robust features that keep people from just crashing in on your server - such as relegating new guys to a single channel until they can be vetted and granted access to other channels.)
You can also set restrictions to specific channels based on "Roles" that are assigned to users on the server. This is very much like old skool Windows 95 era user profiles where you could get extremely granular with user permissions.
I don't see us making much use of voice chat, but the file sharing and regular chat features... yeah, definitely.
Another interesting comparison to IRC is in that rather than being in just a few rooms on an IRC server, you're in all of the rooms at once the moment you're given access. (Did I mention? Discord has some pretty robust features that keep people from just crashing in on your server - such as relegating new guys to a single channel until they can be vetted and granted access to other channels.)
You can also set restrictions to specific channels based on "Roles" that are assigned to users on the server. This is very much like old skool Windows 95 era user profiles where you could get extremely granular with user permissions.
I don't see us making much use of voice chat, but the file sharing and regular chat features... yeah, definitely.