We were originally a Groupwise shop before changing to Zimbra in 2008. Zimbra, from an end-user standpoint, pricing, system administration, and management is a far better system.
We use Google Apps for our students. We did not find it to be suitable for faculty and staff due to …
Zimbra is great for an email system for a medium or large organization with appropriate IT staffing. The system is easy to use for end-users, and has a fantastic web interface. Unfortunately, it is overly complex, when considering staffing requirements and price, when compared with Office 365 or Google Apps for smaller organizations. For other education customers, it is hard to compete with Microsoft and Google providing their services for "Free" now though
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.
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The whole user interface is simple but very outdated - apparently Atlassian didn't focus too much on Hipchat even though they tried in the last 2 years.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 password change is not activated when you access by IMAP, Pop3 or Exchange sync. You have to know that the password change is required and you must go to the website to do so.
The management of mail rules should have more checking options.
There should be more applications compatible with Zimbra, the ones that appear in the Zimlets.
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 .
Overall, we were satisfied with the implementation. We perhaps should have spent more time consulting with Zimbra or others regarding best practices but as we got to know the system better we were able to make changes relatively easily after the fact.
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.
We selected Zimbra because it has a lower cost in the market, offers more development features for its open source, has a very easy to use interface and adjusts to the needs of the company.
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.
Since all of our ROI studies and strategies are performed at the corporate level, I'm really not sure what positive or negative impacts Zimbra has had on our overall business objectives. I can say that at least one positive impact it has on my business objectives, in the medical record department, is the ability to be as paperless as possible.
