Seamless Group Communication with HipChat

As someone that has worked remotely for years, in both open source teams and medium to large corporations, I know that effective communication can make or break the success of a project.  Communicating between services, between other teams, between time zones, and between sharing tools is a really, really difficult thing to do.  And even when you do make it work, how efficient can it be when you're jumping around from one communication tool to another?

Personal and group chat, file / cloud uploading services, video  and audio chat -- those are some core communication techniques which are usually spread to an app or website for each.  And does each work on mobile devices as well as desktop?  I recently had the opportunity to check out HipChat, a service that aims to merge all of these communications into one easy to use web app, and it's awesome!

Personal and Group Chat

Personal and group messaging, which I've always used IRC for, is my preferred style of communication.  It's immediate, it's mostly informal, and I can always look through my chat logs if I forget something or need to retrieve a link.  The interface for both personal and group chat is slick:

Group Chat

Personal Chat

HipChat's chat utility provides every functionality that the dozens of other chat utilities provide like simple mentions and linkification, but also provides more interactive and rich functionality like image thumbnails, tweet previews, and YouTube video thumbnails and previews.  That type of detail and and utility is time-saving and nice to have "inline" with the rest of chat.

And as you'd expect, chat looks glorious on mobile as well!

I really like that HipChat mobile app maximizes space but still looks elegant.  You can even attach files which is awesome when you want to show debug and demonstrate a mobile site issue if you're a developer like me!  Plus you don't need to switch between communication apps when uploading.

Audio and Video Chat

Text chat is good for everyday communication but big decisions, detailed planning, and spirited debate should really be done with audio chat at the least and video chat when available (to reinforce that you're speaking to a human, not just a voice or text handle).  HipChat offers both audio and video chat, again seamlessly within the same app, and again works great on mobile:

HipChat audio and video quality takes full advantage of the host device's capabilities so you know that if it can be clear, it will be.  Much like the messaging feature of HipChat, you can host both individual and group calls.

Integrations

But what about the outside services that you can't do without?  Sometimes you're working with teams who are tied into other services but HipChat has an answer for that:  integrations.  Integrations are HipChat's effort to provide incremental functionality integration with other services.  Some of the popular services with integrations include:

• BitBucket
• Capistrano
• Desk.com
• GitHub
• Heroku
• Jenkins
• MailChimp
• Pingdom
• Redmine
• Travis CI
• WordPress

HipChat's integration actions are based on each service's purpose and usefulness to immediate chat-related function.  Check out the integrations page to get the complete overview of supported services!

The integrations were nice for me because it's good to know when a teammate has submitted a pull request, Jenkins and Travis CI have completed their run, and so on.  A major boost in overall team awareness.

Free!

Best of all is that HipChat is free at its basic tier, so you and your teammates can get try the service and then upgrade to a more empowered tier if you want the premium features.  The free features are more than enough to get you a solid taste of what HipChat is about, so if you'd like to try another communication hub, I recommend you try it!

I have to say I was quite impressed with HipChat.  So many services promise to be everything to everyone but HipChat ticks almost all of the boxes (HipChat doesn't provide email service, for example).  In my current and previous roles, there are separate recommended apps for video chat, audio chat, and text chat...and it can be a bit of a nightmare juggling between them.  Well done to the team at HipChat, I look forward to seeing the service grow!

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