Atlassian launches Stride, its Slack competitor | Hacker News Reader

Atlassian launches Stride, its Slack competitor

techcrunch.com

440 pointsdavidjgraph404 comments

Now we have Slack, Discord, Gitter, Microsoft Teams, and Atlassian Stride.

I'm not sure when chat rooms became a business tool. Personally, I find myself distracted more than anything from all the notifications these apps cause, I get less done.

I have to be sure to quit every chat app and put my phone in "do not disturb" to disconnect and focus, and then I get coworkers mad that I'm not online.

At least with email I could take a while to reply without anyone blinking an eye.

A common discussion I have with other developers.

For a developer I'd say I'm a little more people minded than average, and a lot more big picture success oriented. And in both regards your personal productivity doesn't really matter.

The biggest problem in software development is actually not per-coder-performance but that the right things get solved, and that the solution are actually good and quickly finished. Think about how much time you wasted using a colleagues API that simply wasn't designed well, at least for your usecase.

So, if more information means you are working on the right things, and that you understand your users better, and therefore make your tools more intiutive and usable, a hit to your performance, even 50%, is not a problem.

The funny thing is from a big picture perspective sometimes it would be good if some developers would just reduce their code output, without providing anything else, because it would help keep all other developers in the loop.

This is well said... although I think its unlikely to be a popular opinion with people at a personal level, but I hope the people who find themselves disagreeing take a moment to reflect on it.

While I think it's fair to say these sorts of applications do disrupt people and reduce their productivity, I'm certain that they help focus team efforts in a way that meetings just don't.

You can't split off 3 members of the team and have an important technical discussion during a meeting (or if you can, your project manager / meeting organizer isn't doing their job). You can't come back later and see exactly what it is you said that you'd do after a meeting. You can't tell a bot to create a bunch of tickets or what the current status of a system is.

If you find that your chat apps are not providing you with any value, maybe you're using them for stupid purposes like sharing funny pictures & this mornings cool tech blog post, or you're subscribed to the support channel, or your team is treating them like a social hang out space.

It's not that its a bad tool; its that you're using it wrong.

I don't think funny pictures are a stupid purpose. They cheer me up and expose a different side of my coworkers, increasing morale and team cohesion. Of course they happen to be the right kind of funny pictures/links. :)

It doesn't help that emoji and giphy are listed as prime features in this new offering.

You're right that the applications can be used productively. I find that my work Slack is a lot less focused on being productive than the dev channels that I follow in Discord for open source projects.

The other big issue is the discussion of asynchronous versus realtime communication: https://blog.doist.com/why-were-betting-against-real-time-te...

I do find that in some Discord servers we accidentally exclude people living in different time zones, which is not as much the case with an async medium like Google Groups or other mailing lists.

That's still small picture thinking. Dropping efficiency by 50% is the equivalent of spending 4+ hours in a meeting every day.

If your team needs that kind of overhead then something massive is broken and a chat room is not going to fix it.

As a general rule, on large teams informal communication is vastly less efficient than formal communication. A major goal should be avoiding having the same conversation repeatedly.

As a product manager for one of the big tech companies in the bay area, I agree.

Most problems that we solve on a daily basis aren't cutting edge, they are complicated business logic or customer facing UI that needs to be tested more than anything else.

Communicating requirements and vision at this point become more important than having your "rockstar" engineers outshine everyone else.

That said, one thing I've learned is that you can't please developers.

The same people on this forum that are deriding "personal communication" in favor of more formal communication are the same ones that complain about project managers and "unnecessary" status updates and communication.

I typically just do whatever the team wants, makes no difference to me whether they like to figure out everything in conversation or desire more formal status updates etc.

At the end of the day if I see the team gelling and working at a good clip, I don't mess with them and try to stay out of their way.

You are correct but so often we are measured on individual productivity. And you get what you measure. So team members will want to work distraction-free to max their KPIs.

Your insights good, it needs to be needed by managers and staff that the team is working as a team.

Chat breaks the flow, flow is necessary for cohesive elegant solutions. If we develop under a state of distraction, we end up making bulldozer-code.

Furthermore, chat is not high quality communication. It is mostly junk comms. If we wanted to encourage communication that moved the organization forward, we would have a structured medium that would automatically populate a knowledgebase.

Chat is not that medium. Chat is shat.

I agree with you completely on your main point, but you must admit that a person needs some time to concentrate in order to produce code. Even just 2 hours a day.

Unfortunately, a lot of companies are starting to measure "time working" via "time on Slack." My company is one of them, but it works out for us because my team exists in multiple time zones (making the interruptible hours of the day fewer).

This is not a problem that's specific to Slack. I guess if you're working in an open floor plan, you would have the same problem - or perhaps many people would be more shy to bother someone in person than online. Slack (and apparently this new tool too) doesn't help though. It seems to support an ever increasing array of notification options. You can set your status to "do not disturb," but people can and will still ping you when they feel like it.

I think there's more of a balance between collaborative & big-picture work, and heads-down focus, than you let on.

Sure, teams need to be working on the right things, in the right way, and need team leaders who can focus on the overall product itself, as well as the overall technical direction. But sometimes (often?) you just need people to avoid and ignore distractions and get their work done.

This doesn't just apply to developers; I hear from many non-technical staff where I work that things like Slack sometimes cause more interruption then they're worth, and need to sign out to get their job done. There is definitely such a thing as information overload, and there is definitely such a thing as interruption/notification overload.

You're right, but most communication to solve big issues for me do not come from chat apps, but that's also affected by the fact that the company I work for doesn't have remote workers.

> sometimes it would be good if some developers would just reduce their code output, without providing anything else, because it would help keep all other developers in the loop

Oh yes!

I once worked with someone that was so prolific that I had no chance to keep up-to-date with their changes and get my own work done.

very insightful. thank you.

Well said!

Working remotely, these tools are critical for communication (even focused communication, with periods of disconnection) as well as building some semblance of culture. In an office, you may not need it as much but it's definitely useful, especially with APIs and other commands integrated.

As for notifications - that comes down to personal preferences and team norms. Disconnecting / setting do not disturb (which I notice is an explicit mode in this app) is important. People should know when to get a hold of you, how best to escalate, etc so you can do your best work.

Yes. For those who have worked remote before these tools, it's like night and day experience.

I'm basically the opposite. I cannot stand email for day-to-day work discussion, because there is effectively no way to distinguish messages by priority or time-sensitivity. Email sits in the horrible middle road between synchronous (like a phone call) or asynchronous (like a physical mailed letter). I think email works well (and seems to be designed) for the latter use case, but at work there may be an expectation of prompt responses.

For me, Slack and similar work really well for small companies or teams (20 or less). I haven't experienced work chat in a larger company or team, so I could see it getting messy.

As for people getting mad at you for going offline to buckle down and get work done, that seems like a business culture issue that isn't going to be any better at the same company if they got rid of work chat.

Yeah I was another Slack-complainer until I joined an organisation without any sort of business-chat system. That's when my amnesia cleared up and I remembered just what a slog email is without a Slack-like. I remembered that email is used as chat when there's no proper chat system, that it's an unsearchable unstructured endless soup of important stuff, cat videos, unnecessary reply-all mashing, mysterious banishment to the spam folder, and wheat-to-chaff (greetings, unnecessary opening pleasantries, huge sigs) ratios that make enterprise-Java look lean. I'm in a constant state of anxiety over my inbox because I never know if I'm mistakenly ignoring or overlooking something important. In various ways, Slack ameliorated all these things for a downside that is in retrospect completely acceptable.

Wait you think email is LESS searchable than Slack?

Wait, why is email unsearchable?

> effectively no way to distinguish messages by priority or time-sensitivity

How do you do that with Slack?

Slack messages that notify you (mentions and DMs) should be for time-sensitive things. Obviously that can still be abused, but I think the social expectations are much clearer than when a team uses email for everything.

Channel -> [gear icon] -> mute

Alternatively:

Channel -> [gear icon] -> Notification Preferences -> Just mentions

And before Slack there was Skype, Lync/Office Communicator, IRC, AIM, XMPP, Hangouts, and email. It's not like having a lot of chat platforms is a new thing.

> I'm not sure when chat rooms became a business tool.

As soon as somebody figured out they could use something other than email lists to send messages to people in a business setting.

If people get mad at you for not being available, then it has nothing to do with which, if any, chat apps you use. It's a disagreement in expectations.

Add Sametime to that list, ugh.

Why won't anyone else use ICQ for business with me

Look me up, 575061. =)

There was this one thing called hipchat.. by Atlassian right?

They acquired it. I'm wondering if Stride came directly from that or was built separately.

This is literally in the first paragraph:

"Atlassian, the company behind popular tools like Jira, Trello and Bitbucket, has also long offered a team communications service in the form of HipChat. Over the last few years, Slack has had an outsize influence on this space, though, and the Atlassian team decided to go back to the drawing board and see what its take on a Slack-like team workplace communication service would look like. The result is Stride, which is launching today."

It says "back to the drawing board".

> Now we have Slack, Discord, Gitter, Microsoft Teams, and Atlassian Stride.

I'm looking forward to Matrix eating all of their lunches. There absolutely no reason to have competing standards in this space. A horrible duplication of effort.

I like the decentralized aspect of Matrix. But when I go to the home page, I'm greeted with this copy:

Matrix needs you! We are facing a funding crisis.

UPDATE: The situation has changed and our need is more urgent even than before.

This doesn't send a very positive signal to larger companies considering this platform.

And when their selling point is about "open communication" being a human right. A bit over the top. Then all this crypto currency nonsense. If I showed this page to a manager at a company, they'd immediately be turned off by that. Why not just drop a stripe checkout form onto the page with "Donate?"

I tried Matrix. For me it clearly lost on usability.

Matrix is a protocol. You can implement it with any client you want with any usability profile you want it to have. Unless you mean the protocol itself is flawed?

We're working on that :)

> I'm looking forward to Matrix eating all of their lunches. There absolutely no reason to have competing standards in this space. A horrible duplication of effort.

That's exactly what any other protocol evangelist would say, be it IRC, XMPP...

A horrible duplication of effort vs waste of time getting competing organisations to agree on standards.

Can't resist referring to the relevant xkcd here:

https://xkcd.com/927/

In all fairness, only one of the (here) spoken applications are actually open, and able to even remotely be referred to as a competing standard.

That comic would be more applicable if we were all debating XMPP vs Matrix.

Chat is a business tool because they are a middle ground between email which a delay is expected and a phone call which is immediate and disruptive. Chat is supposed to be for quick questions, group discussions, alerts, etc.

Turn off notifications for chit chat and have your client only notify when someone says your name in the chat room.

Most protocols/clients have a 'DND' status you can use (coworkers respecting that is another matter). Most clients allow you to tailor the notifications in a way that works for you - ie the 'URGENT' channel notifies you but 'Off topic' channel doesn't. Messages from Bill don't alert you but messages from the boss and Juliet do.

I wish people used IRC instead of all of these proprietary tools. I don't love the Slack client, xchat is much better.

It is possible to connect to Slack with an IRC client:

https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/201727913-Connect-t...

I wish the IRC meme would die in the enterprise world. It's an evolutionary dead end that ignores the last 20 years or so of improvements and expectations for a messaging system.

* Service packages are poor replacements for fine-grained permission controls and registration.

* Always-connected clients are poor replacements for message history and push notifications.

* DCC is a a poor replacement for video chat, screen sharing, or file sharing.

* /whois and /away are poor replacements for user status tracking.

IRC had nearly 30 years to evolve and has not. It's time to move on.

Agreed, there is little that Slack gives me IRC doesn't, a good client and I'm set.

relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1782/

> I'm not sure when chat rooms became a business tool.

IRC has been around for decades and is often used for the same purposes that I now use Slack for with various open source communities. Before slack, it was IRC for many years.

Cisco Spark too.

Yes, I echo your concerns about having some "reply" time. Particularly since so many of my co-workers are all too eager to install these on their phones and use them outside of the work-place (i.e. always available to some degree). I absolutely refuse to install the apps, that's my line in the sand!

I'm on call a lot, otherwise I'd be right with you.

You might be interested in Topicbox, which we (FastMail) have built for precisely this reason. We use Slack for our real-time comms, but we still used mailing lists for more thoughtful discussion and documenting decisions, so we made mailing lists unsucky:

https://www.topicbox.com/

It's still in soft-launch at the moment while we finish off a couple of key features that we identified in beta.

Slack, Discord, Gitter, Microsoft Teams, and Atlassian Stride aren't just "chat rooms". They are essentially hosts for programmatic bots.

Imagine a newly hired developer posts a question on Stride about some feature-request/bug for a product. A chatbot smartly intercepts this question, posts a response linking to the precise jira ticket that addresses this feature request, when it was closed & who worked on it last. This exists. Imagine the savings in cost & time.

New developer posts a question - hey how should I implement this feature in xyz language ? Bot intercepts, posts a response connecting to the API docs of xyz, or better yet, posts a code snippet from stack overflow implementing the algo in xyz. Imagine how much $$$ that saves in onboarding & training costs. This exists too.

Maybe the Atlassian Stride chatbot will have more meangingful jira webhooks that the Slack chatbot won't.

This is really a next-gen NLP+AI play. Nobody cares about the actual chat per-se - Chat is just a QA platform, and superior QA bots indistinguishable from human are one of the primary goals of AI.

Totally agree with you. We're integrating our ticketing system into chat apps (e.g. Slack) with a similar workflow as you described. http://askspoke.com/

Personally, I find myself distracted more than anything from all the notifications these apps cause, I get less done.

Then set your notifications and coworker's expectations appropriately. Chat tools can't fix bad culture.

I do not consider Discord to belong in that space. it is aimed at gamers and not productivity at work

in that sense it is more like steam and xfire.

other than that I completely agree, but it still beats people coming over to your desk every few minutes and asking questions for which you need to stop your music and drop everything immediatly.

Many companies and open source communities have migrated from Slack to Discord. How is it different, aside from marketing and playful copy?

I mute every channel I am in except for the private channel of my team.

I mute everything except for direct notifications in Slack. I advise team members this and if they want my immediate attention that have to tag me.

I get coworkers mad that I'm not online.

That is a team management problem, not a tools problem.

Mattermost, Rocketchat, ... ?

Of those I only use Slack, so I can't speak for the rest of them, but isn't the whole point that you can silence channels that you're not interested in at that moment? Otherwise you might as well use AOL Instant Messenger.

It is the absence of that feature that causes me to ignore e-mail.

I'm only familiar with Slack from that list but I'm assuming other IM apps work in a similar fashion in terms of being able to fine-tune the level of notifications you're getting.

Also, I'd take Slack convo over someone coming over to my desk to pull me into a whiteboarding session.

matrix.org/riot.im (if you want open source protocol and client. it also has bridges to most others)

I'd like to try Matrix, but I can't get past the Jimmy Wales style begging that greets me on their home page.

Past that, the user experience is great. Easy to get signed up and messaging.

Discord is more in line with TeamSpeak and Mumble; being that it's targeting gamers.

We use Discord for all communications at my company, including now our video chats. We are fully remote and Discord is so much better than Hangouts it's not even funny.

I've also transferred all my skype and hangouts contact lists into Discord. It's a lovely tool, lock in be damned.

You're correct that there's a lot more overlap with the gamer space, but that's not limiting them right now or in the future. They'd be wise to court other communication needs.

Anecdotally, I really enjoy the Reactiflux discord server/group: https://www.reactiflux.com/

I think the point is not chat rooms business, it's everyone's deep down burning desire to replace emails with something but homo sapiens working in corporate haven't figured this out yet, not because there are not sophisticated tools but because they are not flexible!

http://venturehacks.com/articles/no-email-at-angellist

Well stride kind of handles that with focus mode. I think most people are aware that sometimes you need to disconnect to focus.

I actually have a computer that's just my "work" machine. By work, I only have the tools on it for my deep, focused worth, whether it's writing, or coding, experimenting, etc... All my messaging is on a different machine. (This setup isn't for everyone.)

Curious do you work in-office, or remotely?

Being on a remote team, without slack we'd be a lot more disjointed without having chat.

We have some business folk who insist to chat through email, and it always ends in a very convoluted chain with 15 people in...and it's horrible....

On Slack it's always a huge chain and 15 people on it, and it's not broken down by conversation. And it demands immediate attention to boot.

There is a 'Focus' mode; built into the app, which provides a summary after you come out of it.

Seems like a neat feature - if it became the norm across app apps, it may solve the concentration problem.

Also Jabber. From Cisco, it integrates nicely with your Cisco phone. i.e. you can play voice messages, make calls.

Otherwise it's probably less featureful than the ones you mention.

They're a a foot in the door to chat ops, which leads to customer buying the best integrated tools with said chat app: the same companies that make the ops tools.

Don't forget about Mattermost. I work in fin-tech and we've been evaluating Mattermost because of on-Prem.

Rocket.chat is also on-prem as well.

And you're leaving off Flock.com (Slack clone) and Google Hangouts (whenever that emerges in its new form).

Flock? That product built by the billionaire that wanted to change the world by creating a Slack clone?

There is also google hangouts chat

And Amazon Chime :)

Turn notifications off then.

You forgot Rocket.Chat.

and IRC

I wouldn't describe them as "chat rooms" exactly, because they have direct messaging and audio/video calls, etc. They are generalized communication tools geared towards synchronous communication. Email is async.

Without defending Slack (because I have reservations about it too), your coworkers should stop being mad you're not online, that isn't Slack's fault.

i'd prefer a cubicle when the only visits are of people you like and people who need to work with you.

As the head of a company that uses HipChat... Thank you Atlassian. We have intended to migrate to the (free and better) Mattermost for a long time and just have been waiting for it to hit the top of our priority list. Knowing you are abandoning the terrible HipChat for an entirely new product, with no migration path and 50% more cost, makes this an easier choice.

You have been abandoning us on JIRA and Confluence as well. There are many features that are not available on our self-hosted versions even when fully upgraded. Your licensing and pricing terms get worse year after year even though essentially absolutely nothing useful (to us anyway) ever gets added.

We even use Trello a little here and there... I expect that to go south too.

Well, at least we have GitLab and soon Mattermost, both suitable for much of what we need, for free. Thank you for making our decisions easier.

> Knowing you are abandoning the terrible HipChat for an entirely new product, with no migration path

AFAIK, they offer migration from Hipchat to Stride https://confluence.atlassian.com/stride-documentation/upgrad...

> We'll move all of your teammates, rooms, files, custom emoticons, and message history over to Stride for you so your team won't miss a beat.

Sounds like they might be using HipChat self-hosted, not in their "Cloud" solution.

The question is why one would trust Atlassian to make decent software this time when hipchat is such a POS.

On a former team we were forced to use hipchat and their android client just nuked my battery. It was like night and day; remove the app and my battery lasts 24-30h; with it hipchat installed it would last 10 hours. This was a stock Nexus device btw.

I don't keep the client running all the time, but i do get notifications when I'm mentioned by name; haven't noticed any egregious problems.

I don't think Hipchat is a POS - it gets the job done - but it is lacking some features that I would consider to be fairly basic. (Why can't I edit messages except with the s// syntax? Why can't I do basic text formatting?)

I do agree with you on the lack of faith, though. Jira's text formatting is even worse than Hipchat's.

I am very satisfied with the Confluence cloud web text editor, but the Jira cloud editor is TERRIBLE. I wish they would bring the Confluence functionality to Jira.

My solution to this is to not use my phone for this stuff.

I only log into the site from a desktop browser. No point reading messages when I'm AFK anyway.

Which Jira and Confluence features aren't available for fully upgraded self-hosted instances?

Not to beat a dead horse about it, but Atlassian made improvements to the Kanban functionality, especially regarding the backlog (a backlog manager), and didn't make it available to our on-premise locally-installed stuff.

Additionally, they jacked up the prices on the Service Desk software users and changed who can do what at what prices.

All in all, I wouldn't choose Atlassian for any new installations/companies. I would definitely look elsewhere. And, I've been using their products since before FishEye was an Atlassian product (and they destroyed that product too).

Ouch (and self-hosted atlassian products were pricy to begin with). Are there any good alternatives to Jira and Confluence out there (that are self-hosted/on-prem)?

I'm of the opinion that there are no good ticketing systems. I've seen a fair few of them (but haven't looked in the last year or two) and I realised that the problem is this: the amount of information you need to store to make a ticketing system really useful is more than people are comfortable putting in. Lightweight ticketing systems are great for small things, but suck for serious work. Heavyweight ticketing systems are a grind to use. Assigning metadata is tedious, remembering workflows is tedious, but if you want more power, you have to do those tasks, regardless of the particular software in use.

Seconding this. It always seemed to me that you lose features by going to the cloud hosted version.

It seems the migration path is straightforward

> All of your rooms, teammates, files, custom emoticons and message history from HipChat Cloud will be in Stride waiting for you, just as you left it.

https://confluence.atlassian.com/stride-documentation/upgrad...

But I hear you on Atlassian seeming like they're abandoning things. I'm still waiting for them to fix Bitbucket's online editor which breaks when you try to edit files with different character encoding https://bitbucket.org/site/master/issues/13450/file-characte...

What are good options for replacing Confluence? I looked at available open source wiki's maybe 1 or 2 years ago and there seems to be nothing that was as easy to use for non-technical people (which would include having WYSIWYG style editing).

Are there any good options now?

A wiki that allows referencing to a ticketing system - the way you can tie confluence docs to jira - is, imo, one of the unique tie-ins I've not seen replicated in any other system.

Check list of items in confluence? Click and ... bam - tickets where you can track discussion, media, code, etc. Link back to the definition doc, and the doc has a status view of the ticket(s).

I've wondered if they've got some patent on this which has prevented other folks from replicating it. Or... is everyone else so focused on "disparate tools that talk to each other" that this tie in has never made it on anyone's radar?

If this was in redmine (for example) - having the wiki be aware of the ticket system - that would be great.

Afaik in GitLab Wiki you can mention issues to link to them (same as in merge requests and elsewhere). Is that what you had in mind or is the integration in Confluence deeper?

The JIRA <-> Stash integration is also nice. Create a bug in JIRA and reference a release tag (which integrates with Stash), create a branch to fix it right from the ticket, ticket shows when that branch gets a PR and is eventually merged. It's possible to e.g. close the ticket when the bug fix gets merged too.

It does work in redmine[1] and that for years and the same as in github and Jira, using the #XXXX notation.

[1]: http://www.redmine.org/projects/redmine/wiki/RedmineTextForm...

That does not let me create something from the wiki, only reference issues that already exist.

EDIT:

Specifically, allowing people who are primarily text driven to be reading a doc/wiki page, right click a sentence or phrase, then create an issue right from that screen, without leaving, and have them linked back and forth, is... seemingly obvious, yet I've not seen it done elsewhere. Someone else pointed out gitlab - I've not tried it there yet.

Phabricator has the wiki, code review, and ticketing systems tightly integrated. It's a clean, fast, and free alternative to JIRA.

https://www.phacility.com

I'm a long time JIRA user who started using Phabricator last year for a side project (that has now become my main project).

I didn't really have a major problem with JIRA, but we self hosted them on AWS, and the resource requirements of JIRA, Confluence, Fisheye etc. meant that we had to set up separate instances to stop them crashing all the time.

Phabricator gives us the same functionality as all the Atlassian tools I mentioned above, but on one virtual Digital Ocean $10/mo server. It is much more reliable, and has a better, much more integrated UI.

Faster too - MUCH faster. I can really tell when I go back to JIRA to log a bug and have to wait 5 to 10 seconds for a form to build itself and load.

The FogBugz project management system has pretty good integration between its case system and its wikis.

It's interesting. Confluence's "user friendly" editing and interlinking is a weakness for those who wish to have a clean hierarchy and well-defined document layout.

Before our company started using Confluence, our team ran a Dokuwiki server. FOSS, can hook into AD, many plugins and extensions available. Worth looking at... yes, it does have Markdown based editing, though it has a rich editor to assist.

EDIT: Apparently they have a WYSIWYG plugin. Haven't tested it.

I mean the problem is that doesn't always go down well in an interdisciplinary environment.

Generally Markup works well for coders, but if they're non-coders it can sometimes be a challenge to get people using it I've found.

Confluence is pretty good. It's better than MediaWiki, the Wikis built into GitLab (or GitHub if that's your thing), etc.

I dislike that it doesn't support MarkDown as a native language, but it does have a solid WYSIWYG.

I'd say Confluence is the best of their products and the one that I'd be most likely to use again in the future.

I've also used their CI solution at another company and I found that one easier to use than most of the other open source ones, although I haven't tried some of the newer ones in the last few years or GitLab's CI integration.

Confluence used to support a markup language, but they discontinued it for maintainability reasons, as they were also supporting WYSIWYG.

It probably matters highly on the use-case, but for us (documentation): Dropbox Paper.

Linking between documents is super easy (as opposed to similar "low tech" solutions like Google Docs, Markdown files, etc), and features are sufficient for our use. Due to its simplicity, I find it one of the most exciting products recently. (Not affiliated whatsoever)

MediaWiki now has a decent WYSIWYG editor (you can demo it on wikipedia), but IMO, it's still way too unfriendly for people that don't know their way around markup language. Confluence has a nice balance of ease when you need it and flexibility when you don't.

Shame, sounds like it's the only option. It would be nice to see some competition in this area and wiki's are a great collaboration tool in interdisciplinary environments.

A dialed in README.md in every repo is all I want.

It can link me all over Wikipedia style as needed, but I want the manual to come with my $ git clone and not have to fart around in some other document repo.

HipChat is fine. Try using Cisco Spark.

Not being available on-prem continues to show how poorly Atlassian treats its enterprise customers.

* No feature parity

* No pre-built packages or support for configuration / infrastructure management - everything must be packaged completely from scratch, without recommended package specifications or Dockerfiles etc. to build off of. Nope - "here's a tar.gz. Have fun!"

* No proper enterprise support and no access to source code. We have a couple feature requests which are deep, burning desires which we'd love to either throw money or developers at but we can't because we have no relationship with Atlassian and we have no idea if Atlassian will ever address them because they don't publish product roadmaps.

* Essential enterprise products like Crowd and Bamboo get short shrift and make it clear that communication inside Atlassian is lacking.

Example: Bitbucket Data Center shipped with support to enforce GPG-signed commits. But because Crowd won't manage user GPG public keys, administrators can't revoke user keys without disabling access to Bitbucket entirely (so, GPG keys never get revoked), and Bamboo administrators can't enforce that project builds only use Bitbucket repositories with GPG-enforcement enabled, so for enterprises which actually need to enforce audit trails (for compliance, for building trust with deeply conservative customers...), the feature is worthless.

Another example: Bamboo supports elastic build agents... but only on AWS. No support for vSphere, OpenStack, or heck any other public clouds like GCE or Azure. No Dockerized build agents for build jobs which don't themselves need Docker.

Another example: Crowd is utterly lacking of any kind of investment. Sun Directory Server Enterprise Edition? Supported. OpenID Connect? 2FA? RSA SecurID? Yubikeys? lolnope. It finally got active-active clustering this year, though, so maybe that's a good sign?

It's too bad their suite is in a class of its own because for all its faults, it's in a class of its own. Everything else sucks, one way or another.

Agreed - we offer on-premise (and drive significant revenue from it) at Userify for people who prefer their SSH key management in-house.

To be fair to Atlassian, they basically invented on-prem with SaaS-style pricing (and did us all a great service), and their biggest competitor here (Slack) isn't available on-prem either. Some of these features that you list in Crowd are ironically very similar to missing features in our products, but we're actively working on them -- while not losing focus on being the fastest and easiest key manager to stand up.

Running a software business can be challenging -- especially with a myriad of customer environments and feature requests. My feeling is that Atlassian got really big really fast and may have lost sight of their key differentiator -- which, to me, at the time, was pricing and simplicity. It looks like this new product might have brought back their flair on both counts.

For what it's worth, I'd love to try and push Userify at my workplace, but without a trial version to install on-prem, I have nothing to try and persuade people of the value of Userify. Such a trial version should be relatively easy to push out the door - just disable Active Directory / LDAP integration in the trial version.

Also, telling on-prem customers to run

curl -# https://usrfy.io/upgrade.sh enterprise |sudo -sE

to manually upgrade.... for a security product... completely DOA.

Awesome, thanks! We definitely offer trial versions to install on-prem with a built-in permanent 10-server license (via a one-liner), and we provide 30 (and sometimes 60) day free trials for however many servers you need for anyone who asks. Converting to production is just a matter of pasting a new key. We could probably make this a bit more clear on our website though (it's buried in our docs section[1])

That is a good point and that doc page is really incomplete. Upgrades are completely automatic in Userify, and without diving too deep into the `curl https | sh` debate :), security conscious are always well advised to do the regular curl > file.sh anyway, even with CA cert checks. Just a good idea.

1. https://userify.com/docs/enterprise/installation/

> without diving too deep into the `curl https | sh` debate :)

So now that it's clear to me that it is possible to do an on-prem install, I decided to look at your curl->sh install script.

You guys are basically justifying the fears of our security folks. After grabbing sudo from the user, without asking permission, you pkill NTPD (!), add pool.ntp.org (never mind that we may run our own NTP servers, specifically to remove Internet-based dependencies to lower risk...) and start NTPD again, invoke an install-pip script from a server you don't control (https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py) without attempting to see if maybe there's a local package of pip available, and then install the EPEL repository. Which is, you know, a perfectly fine repository, but there's a reason why the software included in it isn't included with the official Red Hat repositories and so adding the EPEL repository without asking permission to do so can wreak serious havoc on servers with auto-update scripts installed with the intent to only grab security fixes for installed software.

Why can't you guys just open-source some real packaging and respect the sysadmins who you want to be your customers?

> Upgrades are completely automatic in Userify

Most enterprises who are paying sysadmins to manage their server environments do so at least in part because they want their sysadmins to, you know, manage their server environments, like not upgrading services during peak usage (cough, Windows 10, cough).

I'm not saying I won't still try out Userify... I'm saying that, when one of my chief complaints about Atlassian was a lack of packaging support, you came in to champion a product that not only doesn't provide packaging support, but reminds me why packaging support is necessary. If Userify meets our needs, we'll end up needing to package it internally, which means it has to go on our priority list somewhere, and probably not near the top.

Sorry if this sounds harsh... just trying to keep it real.

That sums up my experience with Atlassian products that are self-hosted. They are essentially shooting themselves in the foot, especially with Customers that have to have the service run on site or on a air gapped network.

Isn't hipchat its slack competitor? Where does this leave that project?

Hipchat is already suffering from poor support, its windows client is awful since it went to "version 2".

Check out the Stride FAQ: https://confluence.atlassian.com/stride-documentation/faq-st...

> Starting soon, we will begin to upgrade all HipChat Cloud teams to Stride. HipChat Cloud will continue to work as it does today until your team upgrades to Stride. After upgrading, HipChat Cloud will remain in 'read-only' mode so that you can reference your API configuration in HipChat Cloud and receive integration notifications for those apps that are not yet in Stride.

Can't find any info about a datacenter edition, only the cloud. But if hipchat is going away in cloud, then that is going to mean were not going to see any new features in hipchat datacenter...

There is a page on HipChat Data Center aswell: https://confluence.atlassian.com/stride-documentation/faq-st...

Do you work for, or on behalf of Atlassian?

> then that is going to mean were not going to see any new features in hipchat datacenter...

That's been mostly true for a while anyway. You still can't delete or sanely edit a message in hipchat.

Oddly, this is the ONLY thing I think HipChat has ever done sanely.

I've been using sed expressions for almost three decades to alert my fellow chatters of an error in my previous message.

The first time I did that in HipChat... It edited my previous message. I nearly fell off my chair. It was and is probably my favorite HipChat feature.

s/favorite/favourite/ for my English fellow humans. :)

Honestly my current company moved away from Hipchat datacenter edition to Rocket.chat. As long as they don't kill Jitsi-meet, I think we're good...

I'm suspecting Hipchat will be for Server/Data Center (i.e. self-hosted) and Stride will be their cloud offering.

yes

Will there be feature parity between the two, or will HipChat be left behind?

Sad that this isn't available as an on-premises solution out of the gate. We're stuck using internally-hosted HipChat for compliance reasons and it is absolutely awful. The desktop and web clients have only gotten worse over time. This confirms my worst fears that HipChat is basically abandonware.

If it wasn't so new I would say look at matrix. You can host that yourself and chats are encrypted.

It did get an update sometime last week!! Signed, Another sad on-premise user

So we have all of these chat apps. Choice is never a bad thing, but this has to be somewhat beyond saturation point, no? I don't know about anyone else, but I would rather have my work chat apps resemble social media chat apps less rather than more. Fewer Gif's, fewer emojis — they can be funny and endearing in the right context, but just feel forced and obtuse in a work setting. Also, this is coming from the makers of Confluence and Jira...I'll have to try it and see it in person before forming a true opinion, but not holding out too much hope.

  Fewer Gif's, fewer emojis — they can be 
  funny and endearing in the right context, 
  but just feel forced and obtuse in a work 
  setting.

The difference in context is mostly related to the reality that all the best humor is NSFW, whether it's a GIF, an image macro, or any other meme-related content.

The emotional responses being grasped at by most workplace humor is contaminated by power differential, and practical need for a high signal-to-noise ratio so that shit actually gets done. Snappy banter is frequently an accumulation of unwanted cruft, depending on the performer and the audience.

When HR or an operations manager, or anyone else with serious authority in their hands, try their hand at anything other than Dad humor, unless they're extremely clever, and the joke is deftly crafted (usually not the case), the result is often inadvertently crass, and compounded by the Dunning-Kruger effect augmenting their awareness of how unfunny or otherwise tepid their material really is.

Work somewhere more fun.

It really is a valid point. Humour can easily be overdone.

Microsoft's Guide to Humor https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/education/training-and-event...

For a quick demonstration in degrees of contrast in tone deaf humor, compare Google's 2016 April Fool's prank with any of their other Easter eggs, or early Google Doodles, and you can see where the slightest variation of context pretty much ruins everything...

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/02/technology/april-fools-un...

This is the sort of thing that scares most people into tepid, mediocre Dad humor at work. Sometimes, that's a healthy fear to have, even if finding yourself burdened by such constraints is unfortunate.

FWIW, I use finch (https://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/Using%20Finch) as my client and it's great.

No emojis, no gifs, etc. is awesome. It gets the job done, and gets out of your way. It's not trying to focus your attention on chatting instead of doing your job.

I still really don't like having chat go to an external party, but if I have to, it makes it easier to use.

I don't use any Atlassian products, but I see the appeal of a Slack-like chat app that natively integrates with other Atlassian products - particularly for knowledge management purposes. Businesses can configure/customize Slack to do this, but it's not really intuitive.

In my experience atlassian products dont really integrate with each other any better than they do with third party products. I wouldn't expect a jira/stride workflow to be any better than a jira/slack workflow.

I see the appeal of a Slack-like chat app that natively integrates with other Atlassian products

In which way? I often see this touted as a benefit, and rarely see it work effectively, or productively.

Try out eul:

https://eul.im

It'a native desktop client built for professionals with a focus on performance. It supports Slack, Skype, Gmail, and will soon support Stride as well.

> Fewer Gif's

My team often uses gifs to document and demonstrate workflows in UIs. It's easier to consume than a series of screenshots, albeit harder to maintain.

The comment is referring to meme gifs. Your use case obviously makes a lot of sense.

I was ready to hate on this as just another Slack clone, but its unique features (actions and decisions) sound pretty great. Those combined with the Focus Mode sound like what Slack needs to have, to be honest.

I am putting my hope into Slack cloning this feature similar to how facebook cloned g+ circles or snapchat. Hopefully it will be usable and not like they added "Threads".

Slack is just another IRC clone anyway... :-)

And cellphones are just a clone of Marconi's radio.

Actions appears to be the only new thing; Decisions looks just like pinning a specific message in Slack based on the screenshots.

My only question is, which Slack alternative does not use half my CPUs and suck down my battery just to run ideally in the background?

This was the response I got from Slack 9 months ago when I asked them about this. I get 30% cpu burn if i close the slack window with a animated gif in it

--------

Hi Sean,

Thanks for getting in touch with your feedback. This is something which I actually raised with our engineering team the other day and it's something we have discussed in depth. For now, we don't actually have any way of knowing when the app is minimized from the webapp portion of your app. Because of this, the gifs do not stop running when the app is minimized. We are considering our options here though and looking into what we could do in the future to improve this behavior.

If there is anything else that I can help you with in the meantime, please do let me know.

Best regards,

That's weird, because Electron's BrowserWindow class emits a few events which should make this possible: 'minimize', 'hide', etc...

https://electron.atom.io/docs/api/browser-window/#event-hide

It’s not slack but electron.

We’ve been floating the idea of developing a native client for slack (we have experience in this field, having developed a Windows client for iMessage) but haven’t decided if it would be worth our while.

VS Code is also Electron and it uses way less CPU and battery life for a significantly more complex task.

Across the board false. Slack is working to reduce the footprint. Listen to the Software Engineering Daily [0] podcast about it (performance conversation begins around 38:45)

[0] https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2017/08/11/typescript-a...

Try out eul:

https://eul.im

It'a native desktop client for Skype, Slack, and many others. It's only 4 MB, it has minimal CPU usage, and can handle hundreds of thousands of messages without lag.

What is the tech behind these clients? At 4-8mb it clearly isn't Electron. Are you writing native apps for three platforms?

Yes, it's native. It's written in Go.

Most IRC clients

Can you recommend an IRC client that works for non-technical folks that also works with api and webhooks capabilities?

That seems to be a project waiting to be written. It's clear that IRC can be good enough but slack wins because of the smooth on-boarding for non-technical people.

I guess noone has built it because for techies, IRC is good enough, and there isn't a clear path to monetizing it?

irccloud.com - always on. never lose history.

what webhooks/api would you like?

I'm to the point now where I just leave the Slack web client open as a tab in Chrome. It works well for me and I still get notifications when I need them.

The best part is I can use the back button to go to previously viewed rooms/messages.

correction: idly in the background.

Twist, by the makers of Todoist, is another take on work chat.

https://twistapp.com/

I really like the idea of twist and it seems to work better in the trial we did. But it had some shortcomings

1. No linux client 2. UI/UX is not as polished as slack 3. Can't paste images from clipboard 4. Doesn't support webhooks which means that service integrations are almost nonexistent

No on-perm option either.

On the other hand, their Mac client is native.

I tested it out recently and it repeatedly said my messages couldn't be sent to the server. I'm not sure I'd trust it.

> There also is emoji and Giphy support, of course.

But why? It seems that Stride is trying to be the more productive version of Slack, and I think action items and decision notes have potential, but if I keep getting :partyparrot: instead of information related to my job, I'm going to keep basically ignoring my communications app.

> Giphy support

I will come down hard on anyone in a room that just starts hunting for a magically relevant giphy gif by spamming the room. Fuck Giphy and their irrelevant search results, but fuck even harder people who love to dilute the signal-to-noise ratio.

I'm unsure if that's a system problem or if [team member] can ruin any medium.

I don't mind planning poker cards having the coffee mug, or the occasional friday afternoon song playing out the speakers, etc, as long as there is a social contract where everyone respects moderation.

Definitely agree that people cause issues in communication.

Tools can encourage good behaviour and discourage bad behavior though.

I've found that GIFs end up being a bit too far down the "pop culture" spectrum to be worth having in Slack, for example. Net negative for comfortable communication when not everyone is on the same meme spectrum

there are jobs out there where you can also have fun, also in chat. Just saying...

Afaik there are enough chats that cater for that. I understand emojis, but gif support is not necessary for a business chat app. At least not in all of them.

Gif integration is key to team productivity.

How the hell did we go from realizing massive enterprise software was a bad deal to suddenly embracing it all over again? Not that stuff like Oracle and Salesforce ever went away, but I seriously don't understand why small companies buy into the Faustian bargain of "yes please vendor, I'd love to be in a position where I'm tied to your company forever, that sounds great".

For something as ephemeral as instant message, there's no real lock-in to speak of. The migration path is:

1) Grant your users access to the new tool

2) There is no 2.

Pain only comes when you're storing organizational knowledge in an instant message tool.

The older I get, the more I realize that things don't ever really change. We keep making the same mistakes over and over and over. You think that we, as a science and engineering focused field would be less prone to this but no, we're still short-sighted meat-bags like everyone else.

Because it's easy to get going with it, and the pricing scales per user.

I mean, what's the alternative? Roll your own software?

Like Slack, it has per user pricing. This means it's difficult for large open source projects to use it if they have any interest in keeping a permanent log, or even keeping a message history that goes back more than a few days.

Feature-wise, the "Actions and Decisions" tools sound pretty interesting. Definitely a pain point with Slack. We've been using Slack for a lot of our planning for the Longhorn PHP conference (https://www.longhornphp.com), and it's honestly not been great. Conversations & decisions about particular topics get buried; if someone wasn't present for a conversation, it's likely they'll never see it. I know Slack isn't a project management tool - we've been using a mix of Google Docs and Trello for that. But even as a communications tool it feels fragile and incomplete.

Open source projects can request free licenses from Atlassian. Here's the form: https://www.atlassian.com/software/views/open-source-license...

Presumably, they'll add Stride to that form eventually.

In regards to OSS, with Discord adding screen sharing and video chat this month, I don't see why anyone would try their product.

yes, we will eventually.

Looks really sharp to me. I like what I see from the workflow, especially when it comes to getting caught back up on things after being away for vacation or snooze.

I'll be interested to see how the Remote Desktop Control premium feature works too. That seems geared towards collaboration/pairing.

#1 question though...will they have a Linux client that they actually care about. The Hipchat linux client was largely an afterthought that hung regularly. It was better to just use Rambox and keep the web version open.

A bit off topic but I have been working on a native Mac slack app on and off for the past couple of years. Truly native, no web views except for the Slack oauth login.

Would ppl be interested in beta-testing it? Would ppl here be interested in paying for something like that?

Here are some links to screenshots so you know its not just vaporware :)

https://twitter.com/harisamin/status/727634194814373889

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ChkTccjVAAAZ0Kt.png

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ChkTcbMUkAIYolx.png

Seems cool. If it can use 1/10th of the memory/CPU footprint of the current Slack Atom based client (as your screenshots seem to indicate), then all the better.

Good luck with your project!

It's good to see thoughtful competition in this space - Slack is mostly a joy to use, but we really need healthy competition. In the absence of widely-used open standards, the consequences of putting ever-increasing our institutional memories into proprietary, centrally controlled systems may depend upon how much competitive pressure the providers feel.

Chat applications for work are insanely sticky, though? You can offer 5 great new features and a $500/month lower price-tag and I'm probably not going to want to lose my searchable chat history and have everyone unable to communicate for a week while we switch.

Yep. Since there are no interoperability standard, any new entrant into the market is now going to have to spend a lot of resources on developing a process to reliably migrate accounts and history out of Slack, Yammer etc.

I have no faith in anything atlassian builds anymore. They've constantly burned enterprise customers. HipChat was a horrible product for its entire life. Jira is so slow I cannot fathom why anyone chooses it except that there are no competitors. The only advantage they have across their suite is that their products are pretty cheap.

Hard to take it seriously when Hipchat came first and languished for so long. Even basic stuff like Emoji was a fail (their list included (arrington) and (derp)).

Why launch a new Slack clone when you already have something so closely matching the architecture of Slack? I assume "technical debt" but that's rarely a good reason to start from scratch.

> Why launch a new Slack clone when you already have something so closely matching the architecture of Slack?

A new possibility to build a brand and reputation? From what I can gather HipChat has a pretty "meh" reputation.

And a justified reputation at that, but between Hipchat, and Jira's frankly atrocious text formatting, I'm more afraid of Stride than looking forward to it. Hipchat may be crummy, but at least it's a familiar crummy that I've learned to work around.

Couldn't that be an opportunity though? Are you more likely to notice 'the new thing' from Atlassian, or when someone says "Woah, have you seen how much they've improved HipChat?"

Slack, HipChat, Mattermost, Skype, IRC, iMessage, WhatsApp, Signal, Wire, etc, etc.

Am I the only one that can't keep track of what service (or app) I need to use to communicate with which person, team or organization?

I'll stick with e-mail until these services finally agree to federate.

https://xkcd.com/1810/

I'm curious as to what will happen to HipChat. Having 2 competing chat products under one roof isn't ideal, I'd assume one will get the axe at some point.

There is a direct migration path from HipChat Cloud to Stride: https://confluence.atlassian.com/stride-documentation/faq-st...

Yow, that was unexpected. Relevant words:

Do you plan to sunset HipChat Cloud?

For now, HipChat Cloud will continue to be supported, but eventually we will encourage all HipChat Cloud customers to upgrade to Stride.

It's the Google model.

Wait, what happened to HipChat? I get that it's not as sexy as Slack, but honestly they're all basically just IRC with images and some other integrations. Why start a whole new project (which presumably isn't XMPP under the hood).

From memory, Slack started out as a HipChat competitor. Not to mention, what is the on-premises story going to be (which was a major selling point of HipChat).

They are continuing to support HipChat Datacenter edition...for what it's worth.

I wonder if this has anything to do with the security incident earlier this year [1]. My company terminated all HipChat subscriptions after the incident. A rebranding (understood that this is more than that) may allow some companies to revisit the product.

[1] Linking the cached version since the hipchat blog now points to Stride: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:c6dtRh...

Now a new tool with which you can fill the remaining % of your day which isnt in some "social" sphere already. Im glad there is competition for Slack, just as glad that this is coming from a ISV of developer tools so maybe it will be something that is slanted in favor of things that developers, product managers(me) and delivery teams need such as answers get tagged and go to knowledge base, can send check in/out commands for bots to use, etc without having to make the bot ourselves.

On the usage of chat Im lucky that 2500 of my colleagues are not in the same timezone, and the ones that are, are already too busy to spend time talking about it. So i dont have a constant torrent of activity to respond to. Internally we use Yammer, and like email, it allows me to attend to it and get involved at the time and duration of my choosing. Bottom line how such systems get used is a matter of your preferred work style, corporate culture, and market needs.

And you have commend Atlassian for coming up with a name that is indicative (to me anyway) of impact the product should have. "Stride" suggest big steps, not baby steps. Its walking with purpose, cadence, and at speed. Their other product "hipster" suggests completely the obvious i.e. react viscerally ('quantitative gut feel'), follow trends ('follow the crowd not your own intelligence'), bleeding edge, oh....and you may need to grow a beard and use a satchel and rider a fixie in order to use it properly.

Working for a company that uses Bitbucket, Jira and Slack, I'm carefully optimistic. It would be great to have reliable, well maintained integration between chat and the Atlassian tools.

So... is this a website, an Electron app or a native app?

I wish companies would stop doing big release announcements followed by a signup that puts me on the waitlist. Let me try it out right now if you want to tell me about it. I'll get an email nine months down the road and probably just delete it because I won't even have thought about it after the announcement.

I realize there is a lot of Hipchat hate but ...

One of the things I really liked about Hipchat was the information density vs Slack.

Stride seems to be very loose in how much information it shows.

See screenshots as a comparison.

[1] https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2017/09/actions...

[2] https://ga0.imgix.net/screenshot/o/10167-1442255801-0858462?...

For the privacy conscious, there's also https://www.secure.chat/ if you want a slack alternative with end-to-end client-side encryption. You can choose which channels or even individual messages you want private and encrypted. Of course, the tradeoff with end-to-end encryption like that is the content is opaque to the server and can't be indexed or searchable, but you get to choose how you want to make that tradeoff when you send the message.

Disclaimer: I worked on secure.chat in the past.

Fingers crossed it has desktop clients that aren't written in Electron...

Have you noticed Slack slow down/use too many resources as a result of being an Electron app? Honest question, I've never used Slack, but have used other Electron apps and never really have any issues.

The Slack app on my mac kept using up a lot of RAM frequently. I'd have it running for a few days and suddenly the laptop would be unusable, with only ~200MB of RAM free. Slack would suddenly be using 2-3GB of memory. Kill slack and everything works fine.

I've restored to using slack on Safari now. This problem still occurs, but reloading the slack tab is easier then finding and killing the slack process.

Yes (crazy CPU/memory/battery usage). I switched to using it in a browser tab and it's been much better.

I'm on a new computer and Slack takes at least a second to react to mouseclicks. It's completely ridiculous since, let's be honest here, Slack is a pretty basic chat app.

We moved away from slack due to it crashing peoples desktops (Mac, Windows and Linux all have had this problem). I've not used other electron apps though, so maybe I'll stop blaming the underlying tech :)

Why is that? I have had a great experience with slack on desktop, I was skeptical but it turned out great.

Would either of you be interested in this? https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=15194413&goto=threads%...

This is exactly what I came here to find out. I like most things bout Slack, except when it starts behaving like a web page in the "native" app.

I find Slack to be less useful when it is used by more than a single person. I use it as a notification log/sink and it works great. Definitely trying out atlassian stride.

One thing Slack could improve is handling this when following multiple slacks. At least with the windows client it seems that I need to occasionally click through all of them to see if there are messages for me. Not sure if this is a bug or a feature (could be some attempt to minimise resource usage).

For just keeping track of what's happening around, I would love a view showing all the messages across all (or selected) Slacks/channels.

let's hope that Stride will have minimalistic memory footprint ...fingers crossed. It's not nice to have 400mb taken from 5 Slack IM's.

I'd be very surprised if it wasn't an Electron app, which comes with all the baggage you describe.

Does this have native clients for desktop (instead of Slack's Electron garbage)? If so this might be one of its key selling points.

Seeing as Atlassian is a Web + Java shop, and reasonably invested in React, it's doubtful.

Electron :(

Does each chat line submission take at least one second to process? If so I will feel right at home, knowing it's Atlassian-made!

At least this is a better attempt than RingCentral's chat app which was a shameless, cheesy knock off of Slack.

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*I50CoGFK328HeWSvu...

I thought HipChat was their Slack competitor? Jesus christ make up your minds people

HipChat was them buying time to compete with Slack.

HipChat was around way before Slack.

No reaction emojis? That's such a useful feature to avoid :thumbup: / yes / no / me too / haha messages. In bigger groups it's also a really nice and lightweight way to do quick polls.

If this has an API, I'm fully onboard. The remote desktop control is something I've been patiently awaiting in Slack since they scooped up ScreenHero but they've done nothing with it.

It has an API --> https://developer.atlassian.com/cloud/stride/

no end to end encryption?

This is seriously one of the killer features. How can a company use this if everything is in the clear? How can you even have a conversation if at any time it can all be dragged up and pored over? The double ratchet of Signal, for instance, is open source so just implement it already.

But companies want records of communication! They want/need auditable records.

If two employees want to chat in secret, companies sure don't want that happening

I really like the Actions/Decisions concept and also the Stride Focus Mode. Good UX improvements that seem likely other messaging applications will borrow from.

If Stride is its Slack competitor what the hell is Hipchat?

More examples of needless tool cloning. Rather than reinvent IRC of the 90s/00s, where is the real innovation from Silicon Valley and the tech world?

Sometimes tech isn't about innovation, discovery and breakthrough. Sometimes it's about integrating existing technology into the workflow of your customer base. Plenty of businesses big and small use the Atlassian product suite. This is a way for those businesses to have a chat client that is native to their suite.

Tech isn't always sexy. Sometimes tech is just good business sense.

Don't agree. I will accept the term "business technology" insofar as Atlassian is rewriting existing concepts for business. But that's like saying buying a house and renting it for profit is "good business technology" -- its just an existing method being used for something else, I guess a house is a type of technology.

In my mind, when someone says they are a "technology company", what that means is that they want to sell technology (new approaches to solving problems). Making the same thing over and over with minor variations and calling it "tech" just because it runs on computers (30 year old tech) is just excusing it.

The truth is, Atlassian saw the $$ that slack is making and wanted to get a piece of the pie, I highly doubt they thought: "Eureka! I've come up with a new technology to improve communication of a team. Its like email but in real time!"

That's literally what I said:

>> Sometimes tech isn't about innovation, discovery and breakthrough. Sometimes it's about integrating existing technology into the workflow of your customer base.

Technology companies don't just create new things. Business is not 100% innovation. Not even the giants like MSFT, Google, FB, Amazon, and Apple spend all of their employee power on creating something new. Sometimes it's giving your customer base what they want.

I don't think anyone is billing Slide as the next frontier in chat software. Atlassian is porting over existing functionality to work natively with their other products. With the wide adoption of Slack, it's obvious that chat software is something Atlassian's customers are probably using, so why not make that hooks into the other products?

It doesn't matter if you're a tech company, a real estate company, a law firm, or a medical practice - if your customers want something that integrates well with what you're offering, it makes good business sense to see if it can work.

And this after they just got done doing a massive rearchitect of the self-hosted HipChat. Now I wonder where they plan on going with that...

Info on the Stride API at https://developer.atlassian.com

Is this thing a fork of Rocket.Chat? Looks a lot like it, I hope it won't be as bad as rocket chat.

What's wrong with Rocket.Chat? It looks like it takes some design choices from it.

As long as we can get rid of Skype and Webex with a single tool, I'd be more than happy

Is it going to be as bad as JIRA?

How bad is JIRA?

That depends heavily on how bad the person controlling your Jira configuration is. If they are bad it is pure torture. If they are good it is tolerable.

I can't find any information about accessibility features.

Getting zero results in their docs.

Another Slack clone that's not end-to-end encrypted. Why even bother?

now we just need a chat app that bridges all the chat apps. (again)

http://rambox.pro/ Free, Open Source and Cross Platform

Yes, but it’s essentially loading a bunch of webviews in tabs.

I really like finch (pidgin terminal version). It's small, lightweight, and doesn't annoy me with notifications/emojis/gifs.

I just checked if Trillian was working on something like this, similar to their IM/IRC/Email/FB/etc. bridging tool. Instead, they are offering more competition in this space, Trillian for Business: www.trillian.im

Guess we will have to wait for someone else to fill this niche.

Why would a business use multiple solutions?

As a contractor with multiple customers and each their own chat solution it is kind of handy to have it all in one area.

Businesses might not, but users do. I use Ryver for work, Slack for friends, and have a Discord for a group in a game.

I hope the client is not resource hungry like slack.

They named it after the worst gum on earth. C'mon at least call it 5 or trident.

Bubbalicious for Business is even a better name.

So is Wrigley's for Work.

Is it Electron based ? :(

So...HipChat?

So... a reskinned version of HipChat, ok.

From the makers of Jira and Confluence... no thanks.

Could you at least add what your criticism on those two products is?

Jira and Confluence get a lot of hate, but I feel like that's mostly because of how it's set up by organizations.

At my organization we've set up Jira (and later Confluence) in a very developer-centric way, by looking at the best way it could help the developer first, project manager second.

This has led to universal adoption and no complaints or ill attitudes toward Atlassian products.

I can definitely echo this. Confluence is just a wiki, Jira is just an issue tracker - both of these kinds of tools are table stakes for any serious development group. Most of the hate comes from the crappy setups enforced by overbearing companies. I've got very few complaints with either of these tools when developers are included in the talks about how they're to be set up and used.

Any tool can be made obnoxious if managed incorrectly.

Not who you are replying to but...

I feel like Jira is trying to be too many things, instead of focusing on one goal, which leads to the bad setups that you mentioned. Though I agree that at the end of the day, it seems more like the org's fault, rather than Atlassian's.

Confluence feels amateurish: email notifications never work right, and the search is a joke. The buttons are unintuitive, and the overall organization of pages is a mess.

Debugging either of them when they crash all the time is a pain. Upgrades never go smoothly, and Atlassian can't even read their own core-dumps.

While Jira isn't amazing, its been a useful addition where I work. I just wish it wasn't so slow, and it could integrate better with some kind of scheduling software to flag obvious shortfalls.

    > Atlassian, the company behind popular tools like … Trello

sigh

It's somewhat of a misleading statement that. My take on the "behind" is in the sense that they designed and created the product from its conception. I really love the Trello UX and believe that Atlassian products are the exact polar opposite. The only way an Atlassian product seems to gain love from a community is if they emulate something already in existence.

Hi! Co-founder Trello here. Agree that “behind” is maybe weird here and probably not intentional but then again the whole Trello team is now part of Atlassian. Every day we are part of the group of people that are building the future products and features. Even without us, I think today’s launch shows Atlassian is heavily invested in “unleashing the potential of EVERY team” (emphasis mine) and their design and understanding of how to do that is evolving. If you love the Trello UX then my guess is you are going to be pleasantly surprised about where we go in the future.

Just wanted to take a second and thank you for Trello. It's a staple of my everyday life and helps me get things done. I'm sure you've heard those sentiments before, but I can't describe how much better it makes my work.

Now if Atlassian would care for its self-hosted/on-prem products, I would believe that.

> Atlassian, We make the software you're forced to use.

I thought Trello was created by FogCreek, no?

Yes. Fog Creek spun Trello off as its own company (July 2014), which was acquired by Atlassian (January 2017).

https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/09/atlassian-acquires-trello/

Camfrog still reigns supreme IMHO. Voice and video chat with thousands of people at once, notifications are easily disabled so you can just focus on the conversation while doing your work, and if someone wants to show you something, all you have to do is click on their name to open their video window. The chat rooms can be set up to allow a single person to speak at a time or multiple people to speak simultaneously.

Even has a words filter so you can just filter out words you don't like from conversations, if you don't like vernacular.

So good Paltalk bought Camfrog just for the video tech, then resold it back to Camfrog.

The only real downside to Camfrog is a lack of chat history, excepting in your IMs. Rooms do not have a chat history (admins have log access, though.)

When these other apps provide a real chat function instead of it being a bolted-on afterthought, I might be convinced to switch. Until then, Camfrog's been the only social/chat/networking program/app that I've paid money for.

Atlassian should fix their other shitty tools.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com