Unfortunately, I suspect Slack use at my company grew largely out of IT's unwillingness to spin up a web-facing IRC solution, and their unwillingness to expose internal services to the web. The latter is very convenient for sales or on-call employees. As a result of that security posture, we instead share tons of company secrets on a 3rd party service. It's kind of a weird local maxima.
Not sure why you're getting voted down. I'm looking for something to replace hip chat at the moment (we replaced slack with hipchat as slack didn't work well for us either), so I'm genuinely curious why a suggestion for riot is unpopular. Anyone care to comment?
What part of slack didn't work out for you? We're using slack at my workplace - and I think it's okish. Not a fan of it being a web app - but not frustrated enough yet to try the irc bridge with weechat (which is on my todo-list. Seems like a sane way forward, the last irc client I used was BitchX, and I don't think I'll likely to trust such an old c codebase with anything if I can help it..).
Now that everyone "knows" what slack is, I wonder if it's time to blow some dust off of Apache (née Google) wave...
The Slack IRC bridge works pretty well, IMO. I use it with irssi. The only negative I can think of is it joins you to every Slack channel you're in every time you reconnect. (Including #general, which you can't permanently leave.)
(I guess the other caveat is: it's a 3rd party hosted application; an internet outage or service outage could take it down, and it's potentially vulnerable to massive information leak in a way that your company isn't.)
Try the wee-slack plugin[https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack], it uses the Slack API and I have been using it on my Android phone(using Termux) and my Linux laptop, works great :)
Unfortunately, I suspect Slack use at my company grew largely out of IT's unwillingness to spin up a web-facing IRC solution, and their unwillingness to expose internal services to the web. The latter is very convenient for sales or on-call employees. As a result of that security posture, we instead share tons of company secrets on a 3rd party service. It's kind of a weird local maxima.