Communicate with a real-time chat with your team members
January 24, 2018
Communicate with a real-time chat with your team members
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with HipChat
We use HipChat to communicate with virtual teams, across the whole organization. It gives virtual teams a sense of belonging to the same team, and allows people to communicate in real time, addressing problems more interactively, and sometimes faster than a mail thread sent to all people from the same team could do.
- HipChat keeps the history of a chat within a room, allowing anyone with the right permission to join the room at any time, and to search the chat history months after.
- HipChat has support for animated gifs, which allows the people to communicate with animated gifs and memes.
- People who are not in the chat at the time they are mentioned receive an e-mail, so that they know they need to catch up later on.
- HipChat is integrated with other Atlassian products like Confluence and JIRA. Updates to pages in Confluence or card in JIRA can trigger real-time notifications in a HipChat room.
- The notification system could be improved. You have the choice to receive notifications at every message (could be overwhelming), only when you are mentioned, or never. When you choose to never receive notifications, it'd be nice to see a unread count in the app dock.
- Sometimes people get disconnected or close the app and forget to re-open it. This may sometimes end up with chats losing some people, without anyone realizing it before some time. It'd be nice if there was a system to remind people to re-open their app if they do not show after some days.
- It'd be nice to see in real time who is writing in the chat before the message is sent.
- IBM Sametime and Jabber
While Sametime or Jabber multi people chat requires that someone who's in the chat invite you, HipChat has this nice system of a room where anyone with the right permission can join at any time. Also, the history of a Sametime or Jabber chat tends to be lost in the participants' computers after some time, while HipChat's history is kept on the HipChat server and can be found a long time after.