My biggest issue with HipChat is the inability to run multiple organizations on the same client. The video and audio "premium" features are really a terrible idea as there's Skype, Google Hangouts, UberConference, and similar for that and they are free and core businesses and Atlassian cannot and should not attempt to compete with those!
HipChat is now free for unlimited users
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Re: HipChat is now free for unlimited users
#22HipChat is probably under fire from Slack. That's why I think they are making this change, because I just made the transition a few weeks ago and Slack has been amazing. Once you go Slack, you never go back.
We were diehard HipChat users at my company, then one day I discovered Slack.com. Within a week it was our dominant messaging platform, not least because we could invite the entire company to use it for free (instead of just the development team).
From a product design standpoint, Slack is streets ahead of the conservative HipChat.
Re: HipChat is now free for unlimited users
#23We moved from HipChat to Slack. HipChat desktop clients on OSX were crashing all the time. Most notably after waking up from a suspend. Slack is much more stable. The transition was pretty smooth.
Re: HipChat is now free for unlimited users
#24Is HipChat really a good thing? Constant distractions all day means I get nothing done, so I'm pretty much against any kind of constant stream of communication when you're trying to think. Call me crazy. On to the service itself: I can't join in on my client's conversation without creating a whole new account with a different email address. Annoying and incredibly short-sighted. I know that the people over at HipChat…
The way we used it. There was a dev+qa channel and a dev+support channel with no one above tech leads in either group and it replaced Skype for a lot of work the devs did with support. Though we ultimately didn't use it beyond the trial period the key value driver for us was that a dev could step into an ongoing issue and get a of context very quickly even if they didn't have HipChat running. This means that as an IC you don't need to have the client running when you are "trying to think". That, along with the lack of management types in the communication flow meant that it was minimally distracting and mostly used as intended.
You can do pretty much the same thing with IRC, but getting HipChat set up on peoples PCs and phones is dead simple which is nice when you are dealing with remote QA and support teams.
Re: HipChat is now free for unlimited users
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would you mind linking to the competing service you mention, or perhaps a review of it? I've been advocating for Hipchat but haven't seen Slack yet.
https://slack.com/ We switched from HipChat recently, so far it's working fine. The only thing we miss are cross team notifications, but apparently they are working on it (can't find the link at the moment).
Does it integrate with 3rd party chat clients like Adium or are you forced to have their tab/client open too?
Re: HipChat is now free for unlimited users
#26Is HipChat really a good thing? Constant distractions all day means I get nothing done, so I'm pretty much against any kind of constant stream of communication when you're trying to think. Call me crazy. On to the service itself: I can't join in on my client's conversation without creating a whole new account with a different email address. Annoying and incredibly short-sighted. I know that the people over at HipChat…
We use hipchat because previously the constant distraction was somebody walking up to your desk to ask a question. I can disable notifications and somebody can wait for me to respond via hipchat.
There are still desk-walking drive-byers, though far fewer.
Re: HipChat is now free for unlimited users
#27Reminder: https://blog.hipchat.com/2014/04/25/hey-were-changing-our-te... and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7649524
So what? If your company ever used Openfire/Spark or any sorts of private IM services they're able to view private messages. Some of you act like this is some mind blowing travesty. You should expect the possibility of your company monitoring their services and communications.
Re: HipChat is now free for unlimited users
#28I don't get the point of HipChat. It's a closed, proprietary Jabber server, with closed-source clients, intentionally no OTR support but the explicit ability to spy one-on-one conversations instead.
And people used to pay for that?
Re: HipChat is now free for unlimited users
#29I know it sounds ridiculous but for me the one thing HipChat's got over Slack is the ability to have custom emoticons https://blog.hipchat.com/2012/05/21/custom-emoticons-everywh.... Admittedly we use it mainly for banter and fun but its a sticky feature currently keeping me migrating over to Slack...
Re: HipChat is now free for unlimited users
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://slack.com/ We switched from HipChat recently, so far it's working fine. The only thing we miss are cross team notifications, but apparently they are working on it (can't find the link at the moment).
Does it integrate with 3rd party chat clients like Adium or are you forced to have their tab/client open too?
You can connect to it using an IRC client, but you lose the ability to view history or make edits to posts