We use Hipchat and it’s completely awful. Web version silently logs out every few days, after that I stop to receive messages and can’t notice that it’s logged out until switching to its tab. Desktop client (based on Electron and having huge size) stopped receiving messages after sleep mode in older versions. In newer versions it uses http polling to receive messages (not long polling, just regular periodic requests, like in 90s web chats). When pasting blocks of code, it replaces multiple spaces with non-breaking spaces, so if you copy it back, you’ll get invisible surprise.
Still better than Skype, though, and is cheaper than Slack.
But I fear that if it will be replaced with Slack, our team will use chat more (instead of Github and Basecamp comments), and chat notifications make me nervous.
Welcome to my hell… Slack is an awful channel to coordinate teams.
Things get lost in a hundred unrelated conversations. People assume everyone knows once they’ve dumped their minds into a chat.
It degrades communication quality. The pace of a chat conversation is short-term memory based. On a medium/long written form, you can consider previous context. Review your explanations.
My team (roughly ~40 people) transitioned from Slack to Teams a bit over a year ago. It’s gone well and speaking in terms of productivity, it’s been an improvement. There are a lot of cool integration features with Teams but they’re more oriented to the Microsoft ecosystem whereas Slack was more open. We do everything w/ Microsoft here (Azure, VSTS, .NET, Office 365, etc)so it worked out well.
Slack has more ‘fun’ features like custom emojis - we had to give up all the funny faces of team members in the transition.
If your company isn’t in the Micorosft ecosystem I don’t think I would recommend it.
It’s reliable and has plenty of good features, especially on the management side, but the UX is not excellent. Some people even claim to hate it, but I haven’t figured out how serious those feelings are.
They have been improving it in a nice pace in 2018. It feels to me that the Teams team in Microsoft is culturally similar to the Visual Code Studio folks – i.e. part of the new Microsoft.
Like dsschnau says, you can probably find better solutions if you’re not in the Office365 bearhug already. But they won’t be massively better (unless you want the burden of hosting yourself, in which case there are plenty of choices). If you are paying for office365 (not to mention Azure/VSTS/TFS) already, getting another chat solution in addition to Teams would be just stupid.
IME the Teams interface is extremely buggy (flashes of white, elements jumping around the screen, pretty severe lag/unresponsiveness) but I haven’t used it in 8 months.
I heard bad things from early adopters, but not not heard much recently. A quick play and the UI seems OK, but issues like you have described above tend to more noticeable after a bit of use.
Might I suggest https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack. At $WORK, we have a bunch of folks using it for Slack integration and it’s been a pretty good UX.
I nearly posted this as an ‘ask’: Slack is not good for $WORK’s use case because it does not have an on-premise option. What on-premise alternatives are people using/would you recommend?
We’ve used mattermost for a few years now, it’s pretty easy to setup and maintain, you basically just replace the go binary every 30 days with the new version. We just recently moved to the integrated version with Gitlab, and now Gitlab handles it for us, even easier now, since Gitlab is just a system package you upgrade.
A lot of people have said Mattermost, might be a good drop-in replacement. According to the orange site they’re considering dropping a “welcome from Hipchat” introductory offer, which is probably a smart move.
We use Hipchat and it’s completely awful. Web version silently logs out every few days, after that I stop to receive messages and can’t notice that it’s logged out until switching to its tab. Desktop client (based on Electron and having huge size) stopped receiving messages after sleep mode in older versions. In newer versions it uses http polling to receive messages (not long polling, just regular periodic requests, like in 90s web chats). When pasting blocks of code, it replaces multiple spaces with non-breaking spaces, so if you copy it back, you’ll get invisible surprise.
Still better than Skype, though, and is cheaper than Slack.
But I fear that if it will be replaced with Slack, our team will use chat more (instead of Github and Basecamp comments), and chat notifications make me nervous.
Welcome to my hell… Slack is an awful channel to coordinate teams.
Things get lost in a hundred unrelated conversations. People assume everyone knows once they’ve dumped their minds into a chat.
It degrades communication quality. The pace of a chat conversation is short-term memory based. On a medium/long written form, you can consider previous context. Review your explanations.
Don’t really like it. :/
Does anyone have any experience with Microsoft Teams? We are looking at it as a potential replacement.
My team (roughly ~40 people) transitioned from Slack to Teams a bit over a year ago. It’s gone well and speaking in terms of productivity, it’s been an improvement. There are a lot of cool integration features with Teams but they’re more oriented to the Microsoft ecosystem whereas Slack was more open. We do everything w/ Microsoft here (Azure, VSTS, .NET, Office 365, etc)so it worked out well.
Slack has more ‘fun’ features like custom emojis - we had to give up all the funny faces of team members in the transition.
If your company isn’t in the Micorosft ecosystem I don’t think I would recommend it.
It’s reliable and has plenty of good features, especially on the management side, but the UX is not excellent. Some people even claim to hate it, but I haven’t figured out how serious those feelings are.
They have been improving it in a nice pace in 2018. It feels to me that the Teams team in Microsoft is culturally similar to the Visual Code Studio folks – i.e. part of the new Microsoft.
Like dsschnau says, you can probably find better solutions if you’re not in the Office365 bearhug already. But they won’t be massively better (unless you want the burden of hosting yourself, in which case there are plenty of choices). If you are paying for office365 (not to mention Azure/VSTS/TFS) already, getting another chat solution in addition to Teams would be just stupid.
IME the Teams interface is extremely buggy (flashes of white, elements jumping around the screen, pretty severe lag/unresponsiveness) but I haven’t used it in 8 months.
I heard bad things from early adopters, but not not heard much recently. A quick play and the UI seems OK, but issues like you have described above tend to more noticeable after a bit of use.
The HipChat MacOS client is only using 40MB of RAM. I don’t want Slack’s resource usage. 👎
Might I suggest https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack. At $WORK, we have a bunch of folks using it for Slack integration and it’s been a pretty good UX.
And Nothing Of Value Was Lost!
I nearly posted this as an ‘ask’: Slack is not good for $WORK’s use case because it does not have an on-premise option. What on-premise alternatives are people using/would you recommend?
I’ve used Mattermost before, which AFAIK has an on-prem version - just as a user, not setup or admin so I can’t speak to that end.
I’ve heard rumblings about Zulip being a decent option too. I haven’t used it myself though.
Same, actually. It does look very interesting, I’d be highly interested in whether anyone has any experience with it?
Zulip looks pretty solid, thanks for mentioning it. We may give it a try…
We’ve used mattermost for a few years now, it’s pretty easy to setup and maintain, you basically just replace the go binary every 30 days with the new version. We just recently moved to the integrated version with Gitlab, and now Gitlab handles it for us, even easier now, since Gitlab is just a system package you upgrade.
A lot of people have said Mattermost, might be a good drop-in replacement. According to the orange site they’re considering dropping a “welcome from Hipchat” introductory offer, which is probably a smart move.
IIRC mattermost is open core. I’ve heard good things about zulip. Personally, I like matrix, which federates and bridges
Matrix is fairly nice to use. I had some issues hosting it though.