HipChat

HipChat is an internal communication instant messaging app that is free to use for unlimited team sizes and syncs up with Atlassian's other software as a service including Jira, Bamboo and Confluence. The Pro plan is two dollars per user, per month and includes one to one video conferencing, screen sharing, great history retention and unlimited storage. Though the free plan still has five gigabytes of free cloud storage and a history of twenty five thousand messages which is pretty huge in my opinion. So there is a lot of value offered here for free and I appreciate it. There are outstanding integrations available including MailChimp, Google Drive, Crashlytics, Facebook, Freshbooks, Zendesk, Github, Google Hangouts, GoToMeeting Free, HelpScout, Gliphy, Trello, Wunderlist and many more just to give you an idea. The extensibility of this free software is reason enough to use it as a core portal for most business operations. With instant messaging across your team and departments at the core which is good idea. The user interface is very intuitive to learn and start using. I felt comfortable navigating the account from the moment I logged into HipChat. There is good use of the space while most everything can be done in a simple click or two. Setup for your account is minimal as well it takes as long as it does to type the email addresses to invite others to join. And perhaps a few minutes to learn the software and get going.

While there isn't much of a learning curve at all I would suggest spending a day or two with the software prior to deploying it to your whole team simply to ensure your own workflow is efficient so you can suggest a few points to have your team keep focused on the task at hand while learning, and to create your roles and permission adequately as well. HipChat is great at everything it does it seems and the integrations are very useful. Though I believe Atlassian should integrate more sales and marketing based third party SAAS to enable a 360 customer lifecycle view across sales, marketing, development and support teams from HipChat.

I think HipChat offers great value and it's good to see it considering I find the pricing models for Jira, Confluence and Bamboo to be quite aggressive and a bit on pricey side especially for larger teams. But to give this value at the core to enable communication makes up for some of the greater cost elsewhere, I suppose. Confluence for example is very useful software, but you find these features and functionality included already built into almost every other IT based help desk support solution that I have tried recently which is at least half a dozen of Atlassian's competition. Including a couple which have a 360 view and real time communication across departments possible along with a collaborative knowledge feature like Confluence, inventory features, social selling features and others. They may not be free but at least it is all included in one monthly subscription instead of one for Jira, Confluence, Bamboo, HipChat Pro at least. Atlassian software is very good nonetheless and HipChat can be used whether you have all or none of their other subscriptions so that is awesome. And I appreciate they are offering this much value to non-subscribers because it truly is helpful especially if you need a instant messaging solution that is free which you can integrate your Zendesk, HelpScout, MailChimp and other software which increase the priority of your customer and user experience. As well as facilitate greater productivity and efficiency among your team which this software can do. Yet I prefer Slack and Basecamp for smaller project management for their integrations and ease of use which just suit my workflow more intuitively.