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

Overall Satisfaction with HipChat

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use it within our department to improve communication, escalate issues, and track employees' current status. It addressed a need to have a unified platform instead of relying on various internet chat utilities. Also it has cut down on the amount of texting/calling that is needed and the associated mess of keeping current phone numbers in everyone's contact lists.

Pros and Cons

Pros

All your work conversations happen in one place, giving you the ability to engage multiple people at once and also keep a record of important communications.
We used Yammer before, but found that people were not as engaged. The HipChat interface by comparison is less cluttered and tightly focused on enabling communications.

Cons

When I'm away, I don't like to receive individual emails for each message that I missed. I would like to see that consolidated somehow.
If you have a large number of rooms or a long list of open conversations with other people, it's too easy to miss incoming messages that extend below the current screen height.

Alternatives Considered

Microsoft Yammer

Hipchat is focused on enabling communications. Yammer was a bit too distracting, almost like Facebook.

Likelihood to Recommend

It is best for impromptu and informal communications between team members. If you need to stay in touch with your colleagues several times throughout the day, then I highly recommend it. It works pretty well for our IT team. It can be a good solution to consolidate from texting or other phone based communications, especially if employees are hesitant to share personal phone numbers. HipChat gets everyone in the team connected. Nobody is left out, and that is probably the best feature.

HipChat (discontinued) Feature Ratings

Comments

Please log in to join the conversation

Get your team to open up and start chatting with HipChat