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Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

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Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#512
post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you share an image inline? Can you rapidly search the history? Can you customize alerts? Does it work reliably on mobile? You're debugging something and you want to share a screenshot, inline, how does that work on IRC? Can you start audio or video calls with room participants? Slack is great. I don't need to waste time writing bots because all of the tools I use already have simple integrations: GitHub, Box, Dro…

> Can you share an image inline? You can always paste a link to an image hosting service and launch the viewer as a separate application. I don't really see why viewing the image in the same application as the rest of the text is seen as an advantage. If it's inline, it would eventually disappear from the screen as more messages are posted. > Can you rapidly search the history? I can use grep on the locally stored lo…

There are clients that support automatic inlining of linked media. see irc-cloud which even does the hosting for you.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#513

When is this overhype for Slack going to stop? It is a chat application with a slightly improved UI like it existed 30 years ago. This is a step in corporate IT that I really cannot fully understand. It seems that every company//startup has to use slack nowadays to pretend to be cool again. Everytime I have a serious conversation about the productivity gains or losses of Slack though, it is pretty clear to me that it…

Well, it's not like it's a technological marvel or anything (I mean, the amount of ram it uses is kinda insane), and chat apps are like the "hello world" of network programming, BUT! From what I've seen the social effects of it are huge. There's just a lot of nice subtleties that they nailed, and it's so invisible that there just doesn't feel like there's a need to find an alternative. It just kinda works and you don't have to think about it.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Have you considered that just might be your own psychological burden though? I mean, plenty of people I know respond to slack messages a few hours after the fact, and I myself don't feel super guilty for turning it off for a few hours, and nobody seems to care.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about it is horrible? My team loves it.

I have a few reasons to list: 1) It constantly minimizes for seemingly no reason (at least once a week). 2) The "Teams" and "Chat" menus are separate. They're in the same window in Slack, and that just makes sense. 2.1) The "Teams" menu won't list more than 4 channels per Team by default. If you want to open a channel there you have to open the menu or favorite everything. I know this can be fixed by good sanitation…

This list contains the majority of my and my teams' complaints about Teams. For us, the big issue is that historical data is near impossible to dredge out of Teams because of the aforementioned scrolling issue. Search is universal and cannot be limited to a single user, and also is fairly literal, meaning you can't really search for something that So-an-So posted awhile back about X, unless you know the exact content of X.

Bookmarking exists, but you can't link to public bookmarked chats.

5 is a surprisingly frustrating one for us as the exact way it occurs is simple: Someone messages you, then right away attaches a ticket number, for example, which appears on the second line. The context menu will obscure this number completely, and only if there is enough whitespace on the line to double click to "Select All" can you select it.

Teams gives incredibly limited access to the calendar, insomuch that you can only go a few days back and forth, not a week for example, and you can't block out your time via Teams (i.e., add just an appointment time for yourself, since you need to add someone else to the meeting)

The mobile client seems to be absolutely the only application that decides there is a low internet condition, despite every other application on my phone fetching content happily and freely (Outlook on Android likes to do this too and refuse to fetch message content, frequently requiring a force quit of the Application to recover from and the Application becomes completely unresponsive)

Back to the Desktop app, it's also quite slow just in general, moving between Team Chats is very sluggish whereas other chat programs handle this in a snappy and graceful manner. File uploads are very awkward, and the fact that dragging and dropping a picture from a browser uploads it as Sharepoint content instead of as just inline (like other messaging clients) do is just a bit asinine. To have to first drag it to the desktop, then attach the file is just another annoyance.

All in all, for me it's just comparing what Teams offers to what something like Telegram offers, and it's night and day between the two. Most of the time in our org, as soon as you're past the acquaintance stage with someone after discussing an issue on Teams, you ask to be allowed to talk with them on Telegram instead.

For the actual chatting part of a chat program, it's really bad. For internal video/calls, it's not too bad (though our experience trying to use the Web-version to make a video call was an exercise in Microsoft frustration, as we found out that we basically had to use Edge if we wanted to use the Web Version to do it, and even then it didn't work). Nevermind that a Safari Version has been promised from months at this point without any delivery.

To me Teams feels like Microsoft saw that there was revenue in locking clients into their chat eco-system, but didn't have a product ready, so they decided to release Teams and just get everyone onboard. My cynical take is that soon they realized they didn't have to compete if they bundled Teams with their Office packages and called it a Slack Competitor; suddenly, the decision was pay for something like Slack, or a "Slack Competitor" you already bought.

I will give Teams this thought, their bot integration is very nice. I think Telegram does it a bit better, but we do make very good use of the chat bots for basic automated updating and information distribution.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#516
post #509

Huge problem for on-prem Hipchat customers. Plenty of customers out there not willing to put all their internal communications on the other side of their firewall, and now have to migrate. Slack doesn't have an on-prem option. Microsoft Teams doesn't have an on-prem option. What are enterprises supposed to use, RocketChat? Matrix? With no clear migration path? Really poor move on Atlassian's part. It would be one thi…

Mattermost CEO here. We're thinking of offering a special package for HipChat customers who want to stay on-prem using Mattermost. It's perhaps a mix of services, migration/import assistance and possibly a discount to our commercial version. Would such a package be interesting? For anyone who'd like to discuss outside of HN, please feel free to mail us at info at mattermost.com

[deleted]

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or they could just leave it as is or rebrand it as Slack enterprise until they build a new version based on Slack.

the UI/UX is so different I'd be very surprised if they managed that

See SKYPE for Business. replace('Lync', 'Skype') probably...

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#518
post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those aren't slack problems, those are people problems. I can just as easily point to email threads that are incoherent and hard to follow. I can also point to meetings with no agenda that waste everyones time but give the appearance of 'managing' or team building. When used properly (not lazily), Slack is a great place to organize communication between teams. At worst its Skype with a way better UI...what's wrong wi…

Most people are too arrogant to communicate asynchronously successfully. People think that chat is like being on a telephone or in person and that they can demand one's full, exclusive attention. That is some serious arrogance bordering on narcissism when done in personal conversations. At work, it could me more tolerable, but the downside is that no work gets done. Managers need to start to understand this. If you k…

It’s also possible to mute chats, disable notifications and revisit them periodically.

You get to decide if you want to communicate asynchronously.

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#519
post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We moved from Slack to Mattermost, and Mattermost is garbage. Messages are delivered late (by hours), if ever. You don't get notifications correctly. It takes seconds (more than 10 sometimes) to load a page. Sometimes the page goes blank. Much of our office has reverted to email and phone calls for many things that would have worked fine with Slack.

Hi @jawilson2, Mattermost team here. Sorry to hear you're having issues, it sounds like websockets haven't been fully installed on your Mattermost instance. a) When you hit "Refresh" on your browser, do new messages appear? b) Do you ever get blue bar message reading "Please check connection, Mattermost unreachable. If issue persists, ask administrator to check WebSocket port."? If so for either of these, here's a so…

Is it okay to rely solely on websockets these days? I was always impressed by pusher.com's commitment to a variety of fallback protocols (and there are three blog posts about it, see https://blog.pusher.com/how-we-built-pusher20-part-1/)

Re: Slack Is Buying HipChat from Atlassian

#520

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.

> Otherwise, you can check it whenever you're ready.

It's the "check it" that's a mess in a high-volume environment.

E-mail threads that can be seen to branch, and in a pinch I can skip irrelevant branches once I've determined their vector.

But each Slack channel is a continuous stream of text with a tiny scroll slider. There's no possibility of skipping a couple of pages of messages unless one just seaeches for direct mentions, at which point why bother? If it's important they'll just ring / call / e-mail..

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