Item: HipChat (discontinued)
Rating: 8
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with HipChat

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

My entire company works virtually from across the globe and we use HipChat as our primary means of internal communication both inter- and intra-departmentally.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Chat rooms - It's quick and easy to create a chat room in HipChat, which makes ad hoc conversations among a group of peers simple and convenient.
Direct messaging - When you have a quick question for a colleague, just find them in the directory and send them a quick message.
Statuses and notifications - You can easily set your current status when you're away from the desk or screensharing, and the types of notifications you receive change to account for this.

Cons

Scheduled messages - While there is an integration that provides a (somewhat clunky) means of scheduling messages, I would like to see this baked into HipChat and thought out a little better
Due to changes in the latest major version, it's hard to tell who is actually in a private room at any given time. Users who have been in the room in the past and are online but not presently in the room still show in the room's list as though they were currently in the room.
The functionality for sending attachments sometimes doesn't work.

Prior to HipChat, my company largely relied on Google Chat (now Google Hangouts). At the time, there were no chat rooms, and it wasn't easy to find and keep track of (or centrally manage) all users within the company.

Likelihood to Recommend

There are certainly some scenarios where email is more appropriate, especially when it's important to keep a record of the communication. While HipChat has decent search functionality, it's not particularly easy to locate conversations, particularly older ones. HipChat is better suited for everyday communication that would otherwise happen in person in an office environment.

HipChat (discontinued) Feature Ratings

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