MiCollab is great for a large office to get users working from home and being able to use their home phone or cell phone like the desk phone at the office. This allows our live operators the ability to see if the end-user is on an active call before sending a new call to them. If you have a very small company of fewer than 10 people this might not be worth the investment as cell phones would work just as well.
HipChat is very stable and reliable. I have never had issues with not being able to connect or being able to communicate with others on HipChat.
HipChat integrates quite well with other applications, such as Jira and Stash. This is a main selling point for my team. It provides a convenient feed of actions on a JIRA story or Stash pull request.
HipCat does a good job of allowing 1-1 and group chats. It is simple to start a new conversation and it is easy to hold a group conversation and keep track of who is in the room.
I like how HipChat has away/here/on mobile statuses. This makes it easy to see if a person is available to be contacted.
Mitel MiCollab is great for working remotely. The twinning feature to allow calls directed to my office phone to ring on my cell phone is extremely convenient.
The feature that allows you to set which device you want to ring (desk phone, PC, cell phone) is great as even when I am in the office, I prefer to just use my cell phone.
The customer support for the product is first-rate. They are always present and helpful when needed.
Mobile app is not very responsive on iOS. Sometimes connection to Hipchat servers is taking too long even on good networks.
Both mobile and desktop versions have no alphabetical or recent sorting for groups and chat rooms.
Video and audio calls are pretty useless, they're slow and not always work.
The whole user interface is simple but very outdated - apparently Atlassian didn't focus too much on Hipchat even though they tried in the last 2 years.
The app itself had a pleasant if not generic interface. As a user experience expert and engineer I can say the interface is fairly intuitive if not bland. It does what you expect it to do and it's available on iOS and Android devices. If I recall it was generally pretty light weight in terms of installation size.
HipChat support is good . Responds in timely manner when ever we have raised the request via email , phone and gives us continue update on the request .Though most of the questions are answered by HipChat FAQs , but they can still improve it and add more to the knowledge base .
Support is typically handled by a reseller. Buyers should evaluate the reseller as much as they evaluate Mitel for the product suite. The few times when the reseller was not able to handle the issue directly, Mitel did step up and quickly answer/address the question/issue.
We tried a lot of chat clients before choosing HipChat. The Skype for Business UI on the Mac side was 5 years old and terrible. Mac users hated the app including our CTO. Cisco Jabber was expensive to license and maintain; Skype was open to the public which took time away due to users dealing with spam and could allow viruses and malware. HipChat being a closed product, centrally managed and available to try without an upfront investment was perfect for our environment. All our Agile teams have their own room, chat and can communicate with others quickly and easily.
MiCollab was great as a VOIP solution and general team collaboration solution, but it lacked in some areas, such as the mobile app, complex configuration and set up as well as the lack of user customization. Overall, the system is serviceable, but seemed rather vanilla compared to its competitors
Actually I never shared of HipChat using with more than 25 persons in team simultaneously, but I believe it can be scaled for much largest collaboration teams. At least it works flawlessly for us, with transparent integration with Jira, and I am not see any reasons for some troubles for work at big scale.
HipChat has increased the effiency with which I am able to communicate with my coworkers, particularly those who work out of other offices. Having a light, portable messaging solution has been beneficial for checking in on small things without the need to send emails or schedule phone calls.
I'm not a person in a position to really speak to this question as I'm only a user and not involved in purchasing such services. Overall, though, I believe we switched to this to save money and since we seem to be sticking with it, I have to assume that objective has been achieved.
