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.
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Statuspage
Score 8.2 out of 10
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Atlassian Statuspage provides status updates for shared cloud resources to users, eliminating duplicate support tickets and displaying uptime status.
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).
StatusPage is well suited for notifications on services and products. If you need to have a passive way to notify users, internal staff, or executives on the status of SaaS services, StatusPage is a low barrier way to do this with minimal setup and maintenance. StatusPage is not well suited for scenarios in which you want info kept private. If StatusPage is updated, the subscribers to those alerts will be notified so you just want to make sure you're addressing the right audience with updates.
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.
Support is very responsive although we haven't had to contact them in a time of emergency, all of our support inquiries were answered in a timely manner and usually resolved with their first response. Support responsiveness played a big role in our decision since if we need help during downtime, we can't really afford to wait.
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 would say StatusPage on its own is a great service. StatusPage for Hipchat can only be used with that specific chat client. But on its own StatusPage can be integrated with many tools, like Slack, email notifications, text notifications, etc. I don't know of a tool that compares with StatusPage. You could essentially host your own status site with Greed Yellow or Red statuses, but you would be missing out on the robustness of a tool that keeps historical data, uptime, and segregates services based on components.
