HipChat [EOL] Reviews

General Things (GT) (the company I work for) recently began using HipChat, a group chat service designed especially for business. Before the office became hooked on HipChat, Gmail and Gchat were the primary sources of communication.Chris Hein (of make_sandwich fame) was the driving force behind the team’s switch, as he wanted a more efficient way to keep the entire office in constant contact. He looked into Skype chat rooms and Campfire before his roommate suggested HipChat.

What we like:

HipChat is perfect for the GT team for a few reasons. One was its flexible price plan; at $2/mo per person, HipChat comes in at a much cheaper total cost than similar services.

Chris also knew that since HipChat runs in Adium and comes with a ton of plug-ins, it would appeal to the team.

However, it was clearly HipChat’s abundant supply of Emojis and especially the ability to create custom ones that sold Chris and the GT team on HipChat.

What we don’t like:

Like any chat service, it’s very easy to get distracted while using it. It can be incredibly tough to resist the siren song of a good cat image or a hilarious animated gif.

The GT team has found that the best way around this is to merely log off. Those who are offline can be summoned back via a quick mention of their @handle in the room (Offline or idle users mentioned this way get an email notification.)

Final Thoughts:

The GT team has really taken to HipChat. Having specific rooms for each project and a general conversation room makes it really easy to keep everyone in the the loop. If you’re looking for an affordable and easy way to keep your office in constant communication, then check out HipChat.

Do it for the Emojis.

As we’ve been getting started with development at our new company I have taken the opportunity to re-evaluate developer tools and workflow. At Hyperpublic I had the chance to try a lot of the tools that emerged as part of “make everything a cloud service” trend that was sweeping the late 2008-2010 era. I have stuck with many of the old stalwarts – Github (source code hosting), Pivotal Tracker (feature and bug tracking), Dropbox (files haring) – however one welcome new addition to the workflow is HipChat.

HipChat is a private group chat client developed by Atlassian, the company who brought us Jira (ticket tracking) and Confluence (information collaboration). It runs natively as an Adobe Air application, and there’s a browser based UI for search and history should you need to access a piece of information on the go. It supports multiple rooms for group chat, one on one private chat, file and link sharing, and has a useful API for integrating with other services in the workflow.

A nice benefit of integrating our other services with HipChat is the activity stream that is produced which helps everybody observe progress. When code is pushed to Github, a new pull request is issued, new comments are left, new stories are created, Chef finishes running, integration tests fail….everybody is kept up to date on progress in a way that isn’t obtrusive and doesn’t clog the inbox. I’ve noticed an increase in engagement with code reviews and an increased commitment to our intended workflow – both huge benefits. If you’re looking for a team alternative to Campfire, IRC, or even iChat I’d recommend checking out HipChat.

* Hat tip to our team member Jamie for bringing HipChat to the team.