Stride, Atlassian’s Slack competitor, opens its API to all developers
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Data center has not been sunset. https://www.stride.com/help-center/frequently-asked-question...
I also don't think anyone was forced to switch but I could be wrong. An email requesting or encouraging some action is different from being forced to do something.
Honestly I’m a bit dumbfound how they are handling the transition. I bet they end up losing a lot of customers to Slack.
If we have to move AND pay more money anyway, then why not just go to Slack?
If I was in charge of the decision for what communication tool to use at my company, I would take a long hard look at every single alternative to Slack.
As an example, the only way to edit a message is to use a sed-style "s/foo/bar", which is absurd. Because of this, you can't edit messages other than the most recent one, and if you want to edit one instance of "foo" but not another instance of "foo" you're out of luck. That's a terrible piece of UX even if you're in the only subset of users (software devs familiar with sed-style search and replace) where it makes any sense whatsoever
As a sibling comment said, the main reason my team abandoned Hipchat for Slack was Hipchat was hopelessly buggy and unreliable at the time we tried to use it.
HipChat is a terrible name for a work-related collaboration tool, but "Slack" isn't great either....
I guess it is a new major release of HipChat (with re-architecting) and re-branding. Same lead (Steve Goldsmith).
Unless an insider tells, we won't know I guess :)
Not curious enough to do the kind of blackbox exploration folks at https://webrtchacks.com or other sites do :)
Stride is a brand new product (not a rebrand of Hipchat), we did not repurpose Hipchat's code. It's built from ground up on Atlassian platform - new protocol, clients, platform, etc. One exception is the video bridge technology which remains powered by the Jitsi.org open source product (which we acquired in 2015). I do look after both products (Hipchat Cloud and Stride) for Atlassian, happy to answer questions.
Would have been a shame not to use the Jitsi technology for sure, I deeply respect Emil Ivov and team.
The more recent offering (Bitbucket Server) falls behind the curve as well, even when compared to their own Bitbucket Cloud service.
Anecdotally, anyone working in a startup with an opinion on design will know how shallow a judgment has to be to switch to a competitor. App is functional but has 2008 design? The less functional equivalent with 2017 design is better because it looks up to date
3 years in, and still randomly missing messages for a while until it’s somewhat synched.
Whole ongoing conversations don’t appear on other devices if I don’t manually open them.
Getting notified on my phone while I’m on my laptop.
Lack of integrations is the most sailant thing to point st, but I think at its core Hipchap is also a very meh service.
Anyway, hipchat's faults:
Search is garbage.
Editing a message is garbage.
Joining a room/messaging a specific person on mobile is annoying.
I'm not sure about how Slack handles it, but when a person leaves our company, our Hipchat chat history completely disappears. All those decisions we made with our old Product Manager via private message? Into the ether.
Want to delete a file you uploaded? Too bad. Maybe you can do it via the web interface?
Want to delete a message? Same deal.
I had never before gotten in an argument about a chat app, but HipChat made me passionate about using anything else.
That said from everyday desktop use it’s not bad. It’s nowhere near as unreliable for me as other posters are commenting about.
That's completely irrelevant though.
You will find pretty annoyed people if you search for "report hipchat bug".
In what world would one imagine that a suggestions box was in any way different from reporting a bug? "Suggestions box" is a bug report but renamed to be understood by Joan from accounting.
So you could try to get their attention to the bug of "when you paste XML into a code block, it replaces it with subtly different, broken XML, my suggestion is to stop doing that", but it's going to be sitting several pages beyond "please add a left shark emoji!!!"
You can try to get your whole office to stack the vote, but why? I only have to be one person to report a bug to Slack.
Google for example makes it 1000x harder to give feedback and report bugs, which greatly limits the amount of quality feedback they get.
Anecdote: hangouts didn’t let us accept external users into a hangout today. Google will never know that because I have no easy way to tel them that.
Also, Atlassian used to be loved by developers, after it ipoed it just seems not loved
https://s2.q4cdn.com/141359120/files/doc_financials/Q12018/T...
Oh and the FU on all of our existing integration use is cute.
They should have released it as a UI improvement for HipChat, not a whole new ecosystem.
I certainly didn't appreciate it. As someone who invests significant portions of time building integrations between various systems in our development team, I quickly hit the brakes the second I heard the Stride announcement.
Since our organization is being forced to move from HipChat, we're reviewing alternatives rather than blindly continuing onward toward Stride.
I strongly doubt that this will have any impact on Atlassian's bottom-line, however.
Now it has some kind of Designer disease, where it looks beautiful (truly, I love the style and fonts and colors), but I simply can't find my way around it. And I get very frustrated trying to do basic things because the app is also really slow (clearly 500ms+ per request). It's clear that it's still a server-side app and not a SPA which is the kind responsiveness everyone expects nowadays.
So our two person team went back to using Excel. Jira just takes too long to get things done with.
I have an open ticket to have a profile option to disable it, but ...crickets.
Also, many people use skype for business, and so slack faces the exact same problem.
Atlassian can sell you the integrated package. One price, one invoice, tight integration between products.
I don't have any data on this, but I think one reason for Slack's success was that people could just start using it without going thorough the IT. I'd assume there's still a huge number of companies who haven't made an official choice on this space. Those might be tempted to go with offerings from Atlassian or Microsoft.
Slack could be interesting acquisition for Dropbox (haven't thought out if it could work financially).
I want to believe that keybase will be soon mature enough to compete against Slack and other similar services...
I've used Confluence for two years. It's slow and the editor is buggy. The primary function is to prevent me from making a document public. I've used JIRA for 8 years. JIRA's primary function is to send email.
I'd say your assessment is accurate.
Not only is that funny, it's pretty accurate. If it weren't for that requirement it could all be replaced with git, ftp, and email.
I don't need any more bright, pastel colours, cute little characters, etc.
I don't need any more bright, pastel colours, cute little characters, etc.
What other "enterprise ready" solutions are there for this purpose? My other options based on the team's familiarity with them are are O365 (SharePoint/Outlook/Teams + MS Project), ServiceNow (I guess?), or HP PPM. I'd rather use something hosted because getting internal infrastructure is hard.
We have not been forced to migrate to Stride yet, but I am bummed about this can I keep kicking down the road.
I don't care how much better Stride is, Hipchat is good enough for us.
If you need real time there is IRC. Otherwise, just setup a mailing list.
Why separate your communication into two tools instead of one?
The problem with IRC is that you cannot get chat history of a channel unless you configure a bouncer to do it for you. On that note, what's your opinion on XMPP? We used to use a XMPP server for internal company communication and the server was configured to replay the chat history to a client when it connected.
> Otherwise, just setup a mailing list.
That has a similar problem to IRC which is that new members cannot easily access messages sent before they joined. A better option would be an internally hosted NNTP server.
Open protocols can certainly do this.
I like IRC since the protocol is so simple you could almost type in a raw telnet session live.
That simplicity also means it's not to hard to add additional things to it. If you want.
You mean replaying channel chat history on the server side without having to use a bouncer?
> I like IRC since the protocol is so simple you could almost type in a raw telnet session live.
That is true and it makes writing bots relatively easy. From what I've read about XMPP, it appears that most languages have libraries to abstract the XMPP protocol to make writing a bot easier.
There's a difference between being "wrong" (which you're not), and realizing that 99,9% of people in the world aren't you.
IRC will never be used for corporate communication. IRC usage has been declining steadily since 2003[1]. It's over.
Facebook solved a problem that many people had, despite the fact that Myspace, group e-mails, real-time chat and online photo sharing already existed. That's why they today have a market cap of over 500 billion US dollars.
Slack made the concept of IRC usable for "normal people". You're not normal people (that's meant as a compliment), so your capabilities aren't really relevant when looking at why things succeed or fail on a larger scale.
[1]: http://royal.pingdom.com/2012/04/24/irc-is-dead-long-live-ir...
And, to this day, Hotmail is still significantly slower and harder to use compared to Thunderbird. The only advantage is that it still has emails that I received almost 20 years ago.
> IRC will never be used for corporate communication.
As recently as last year, we were using IRC for corporate communication where I work. Fortunately, I'm still able to use the IRC gateway with Slack, but I really don't see any real advantage to using Slack over IRC on a work computer that's always connected. My client's logging easily beats what Slack provides.
> That's why they today have a market cap of over 500 billion US dollars.
I don't think it's because it solved a problem about keeping in touch. It's just an advertising platform and the reason why it has a market cap of that value.
> Slack made the concept of IRC usable for "normal people".
A decade or so ago, I communicated with many normal people over IRC and Usenet. More normal people were able to use chat clients like ICQ, and the various messenger clients (AOL, MSN, Yahoo, Google).
I simply don't see why people keep saying that Slack and hosted chat providers like it are some new innovation that people can finally use when they've been able to do so for the last several decades.
You don't even have to sign up to connect to IRC (though you can register with a nickserv if you want).
> and pay if you want history over 10,000 messages
IRC is only limited by disk space on your local machine.
> IRC, possibly available by hacks/add-ons and not by default or available via quick button, is missing chat history
I'm not sure what you're referring to, but pretty much every client can keep a log of messages sent and received separated by channel/dcc session.
> doesn't support uploads
You can send files to others via DCC.
In any case, the other messenger services I mentioned did not have a long sign up process either. Creating new accounts for AOL instant messenger didn't require much effort at all, for example. Their clients also handled logging much like an IRC client would.