Item: HipChat (discontinued)
Rating: 8
Author: Rae Allen

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Hipchat is not organisation wide but is heavily used in both the editorial content areas and the strategy implementation areas of our division. It is also heavily used by a number of development teams working on our products. In particular our editorial content and strategy teams are scattered across Australia with users in regional areas such as Broome WA, Bendigo NSW and Lismore VIC. When staff are located thousands of kilometres apart a real time targeted chat system is important.

Pros and Cons

standups: I have installed the standup hipbot and as we have staff in a handful of locations across 3 timezones we can run virtual standups by having members of the team log a "Yesterday I did ... "/"Today I'm doing ..." The bot allows me to pull these reports out of the noise very simply.
availability: When you have a dispersed team working on a project the ability to see they are available and get immediate answers to questions is important.
contact with other teams: While other teams work on our products its useful to be able to watch what they are doing by lurking in their HipChat room. I always say Good Morning and them knowing I'm there means they can ask for clarification on requests quite simply even though they may be working 1000 or 2000kms away.

I would love to see a bot wizard developed - for example I'd like to find the time to build an "on this day" bot which replied to the first person to chat each day, but I lack the time to study the system.