| Recently I was talking to a co-worker about this and I said I prefer IRC over Slack and HipChat. You can certainly build robots on IRC and make fancy automation. You can also use IRCloud if you prefer someone hosting it for you. I came from a company where IRC is literally the primary communication channel for both business and technical staff (the word starts with the letter M). When we did townhall we all jumped on IRC and we asked questions from there. We use other software for conferencing and video calls. We are okay with that. Here at my current company we have a big challenge. We use Skype for inter-team communication, Webex for grooming and remote conferencing. We also looked at Lync (aka the stupid lame ass 'Skype for Business'). While Skype allows you to keep history (I can go back to 2 years ago!! how amazing) and create groups, but I have to know everyone first. This is where IRC-like channel is really powerful. Everyone can join some lobby and then we branch off into individual team channels. With Skype I can't. Oh good luck finding the group you forgot to favorite 3 months ago. Also, I can't build nice robot in Skype and make pretty command to automate our infrastructure! There used to be restriction with how many people we are group video chat before we have to get into paid plan (not sure still apply or not). With everyone at different location and with different operating system, colleagues would have problem accessing or using Skype / Webex, espeically our Linux users, and they have to boot up a Windows VM. What a nightmare chore. What if we have a tool that can do * text chat * video chat * voice chat * integrate with Jira / ticket system * mention people and actually MENTION people * create a large lobby * integration with active directory(?) * have a decent API for automation * cross-platform * safe and secure * integration with other third-party services/tools that we have signed up (Box? Dropbox?S3?) * record things? * history wouldn't that be awesome? I am excited about trying out Hipchat and Slack. The problem is, Hipchat is the only one out of IRCCloud and Slack offering on-premise installation (we do have onsite Atlassian). The downside is we'd managing additional infrastructure, esp if I want to use the video & voice feature. Oh. If I have to choose I prefer Hipchat or the Campfire style (they are pretty similar in terms of style). Slack - a lot of people like it, but the UI is just so awkward and clumsy and crowded. I don't like it. I don't know. It hasn't changed since launch. |