Google Chat, formerly Hangouts Chat, is a collaboration tool competing with Slack, designed to make it easy for teams to be able to get their work done in one place. From direct messages to group conversations, Chat helps teams collaborate, and with dedicated, virtual rooms to house projects over time — plus threaded conversations — Chat helps users track progress and follow up tasks. Chat currently supports 28 languages and each room can support up to 8,000 members.
N/A
Samepage
Score 8.1 out of 10
N/A
Samepage is a collaboration solution focused on file management and communication. Its extensive list of third-party integrations include part of the Adobe Creative Cloud Suite, Google Maps and Drive, and Microsoft Office.
Well suited for businesses of all sizes. HOWEVER, I would say keep the chat groups limited at the departmental level, ensure that your moderator or the individual responsible for the group keeps it on topic, and have your IT team monitor it from time to time. Google Chat gets used so much in our organization that we have rules and regs in our Employee Handbook regarding its proper use (and when used PROPERLY, it can be very effective).
Samepage is well suited to situations: - when there is a need for ongoing collaboration between people - when these people lack tech skills - when there is a need for sharing and showing different kinds of media Samepage is less appropriate in situations (since there are better tools for those particular uses): - requiring more robust communication tools - when the objective is to execute a specific, finite task - when it is necessary a precise control of version history
The updates, support, general reviews on Google Chat are great everywhere. The development of the features is ongoing and this adds a great value to Google as a big company in the market. Other applications are limiting communication while Google Chat is allowing communication to grow. It is very easy to use it and teach others how to use Google Chat.
It's not perfect. There are occasional glitches, drop-outs, and it takes a bit to get everything loaded and working. But it is significantly better than Zoom or GoToMeeting when you're in instructional settings. I know my teacher friends here like it and the administrators and parents seem to be satisfied too.
I have not needed to contact the support folks for Google Hangouts Chat, so I can't speak to this with any accuracy. The online instructions are fairly clearly written, so it is fairly intuitive to start with. I did not feel the need to use the support people anyway.
Samepage support is incredibly active and responsive! They work with you from the outset to make sure you are set up for success and understand all the features
Prior to Google Hangouts, our company used Spark. Spark was not integrated into our email, therefore it couldn't be easily accessed in the same browser. With Spark we also couldn't search our emails for keywords in a conversation, searching had to be done manually. The one feature I enjoyed about Spark was a request to get a user's attention: If I had an urgent question and I wanted to ensure the recipient saw my message/question, I would request their attention and the message screen would pop up on their screen.
I have used many project management and collaboration tools and everyone has its kicks and fall backs. But for the kind of collaboration we require with our external parties right now, we really enjoy collaborating on Samepage. With Sharepoint, we were always running into access issues with our external vendors and it was a hassle to adjust those user settings. However since we started with Samepage, both our team members and external party vendor have been happily collaborating.
