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Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

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Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#361
post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are two camps: the we-should-just-use-irc camp, and the we-need-every-feature camp. I'm firmly in the "email should be used for substantive discussions" camp, but ever since we got the bandwidth and CPU necessary for the internet to not be a primarily text-based medium, the illiterates took over and that was the end of that.

Email has a lot of problems, but the dealbreaker for my company is that it isn't secure.

If you want secure emails use GPG. Unlike slack, GPG is both open-source and offers government-level security. I don't think slack is more secure than GPG.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#362

This both sucks and is great. Sucks for me. Hopefully will be great for Mattermost and Matrix. For HIPAA compliant shops Slack is a non-starter. Mattermost will hopefully get a lot of corporate $ now. I wish Matrix's dendrite[0] golang replacement homeserver was finished and in better shape. I'd much prefer to go the Riot/Matrix route, but it doesn't feel ready for prime time yet. HipChat Server was SPOF but could be…

Hey, can you elaborate a touch on the lack of HIPAA compliance with Slack? Some folks on my team seem to think it's compliant - and I'm not finding true hard answers either way (ignoring the BAA side of things)

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#363
Has Slack fixed the problem with bots spamming people yet? I used to be a member of a lot of channels for various projects but then a wave of bots started hitting all of them spamming various scams or trying to impersonate accounts so I had to leave because I couldn't have my inbox flooded with nonsense and the signal-to-noise ratio was too high.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two camps: the we-should-just-use-irc camp, and the we-need-every-feature camp. You fall in to the former, and I would bet that a lot of people here fall in to the former. However, many people fall in to the latter, and Slack handily beats the competition there. There is also an element of having nice and polished features baked in that appeals to many people. Want it on your phone? There's an app. Want to…

> There are two camps: the we-should-just-use-irc camp, and the we-need-every-feature camp. I'm firmly in the "email should be used for substantive discussions" camp, but ever since we got the bandwidth and CPU necessary for the internet to not be a primarily text-based medium, the illiterates took over and that was the end of that.

> the illiterates took over and that was the end of that.

That's pretty arrogant. Perhaps people have different communication styles than you. Not better, not worse... just different.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#365
What bothered us the most with HipChat was their lax security model. Any file uploads in HipChat would be uploaded to an S3 bucket and opts for security via obscurity [1] as opposed to proper authentication.

This forced us to send sensitive material via email as opposed to directly via HipChat.

[1] https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Hipchat-questions/Securit...

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems he is in a different camp, specifically the one where you aren't on a chat application all day

You're in the mute-everything-non-critical class, which is a good practice regardless of the client. If they really need you, they'll ring/call/DM. Otherwise, you can check it whenever you're ready.

I think you're confusing communication throughput with latency.

I also don't like using chat at work. It's not because I want less interaction, it's because I want less interruption. Email has a norm of asynchrony where I can respond to email when I reach a good point in my current task. With chat, the other party is presumed to be sitting staring at the screen waiting for my reply, so I have to drop what I'm doing to respond.

I don't think the latter is good for my overall productivity.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#367
post #26

I've never really gotten into any of Atlasssian's products. It seems like they make tools for managers with bolt on functionality for engineers (which may be why I never caught onto their products). I hope this is good news for Slack, but as a software engineer today, Atlasssian's products are not the first ones I would recommend in any category.

I run the Atlassian stack for my company, so here's some thoughts on this: - Jira is pretty bog-standard these days, huge installed base. It's a bit weird to administer, and not as powerful in many ways as I'd like (especially compared to a more flexible system like ServiceNow). However, it's entrenched and a lot of people like it. - Confluence is a top tier wiki. I actually find it very nice to work with, both from…

While we're sharing opinions, my take on these.

- Jira is tolerable. Many of the more essential features are only available as plugins and many of them feel like ugly bolt-on hacks (looking at you, Insight) to the point that Atlassian won't even investigate your problems unless you replicate them without plugins. But my largest complaint about the system is how dreadfully corporate and boring it feels to me in a very abstract sense. Jira is the least fun I can have with computer.

- Confluence's search is abysmal; fgrep would do a better job. The markup language could use improvement but it's not that awful.

- No comment on Bamboo and Bitbucket. I'm not a developer.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#368
post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Email has a lot of problems, but the dealbreaker for my company is that it isn't secure.

If you want secure emails use GPG. Unlike slack, GPG is both open-source and offers government-level security. I don't think slack is more secure than GPG.

And how does that work for your average person using outlook / google for email?

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#370
post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When is this overhype for Slack going to stop? I challenge you to consider whether your perspective applies to the 99% of people who use Slack that are not developers writing software. For those people, email is often not a place where well-argued discussions happen. It's usually a place where chat-like communication happens, slowly, and in an ill-fitting interface. For non-developers, let's take a operations assoc…

From my experience, in most office jobs, email is primarily used for serious and well-argued discussions concerning projects, business goals, technical details, etc. Software developers really don't use email any differently from IT support, accountants, HR managers, or salespeople. Non-developers generally reserve chit-chat for chat software, just like developers do. Not sure what it is about HN assuming software de…

I agree that the "software dev" distinction here is not relevant.

However, it's definitely true that email is typically used both for "serious and well-argued discussions" and for chatty threads along the lines of

  Thanks.

  BTW How are we looking for this month's revenue target?
  
  >No idea, maybe the data load didn't run last night,
  >I'll look into it.
  >
  >>This report looks broken, the opportunity I closed
  >>yesterday isn't in there, what's up?
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