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IRC is a bit less accessible for non-technical people. We had a lot of trouble getting our team to adopt it. It's not for everyone.

That's why products like Slack, HipChat, Campfire, etc exist.

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I don't want to dismiss your efforts, but in the spirit of the original question I'd like to know: Is it only a UI problem, or is there a problem with IRC (the protocol) itself ?

It was definitely a UI problem for us. I don't think the underlying protocol matters much, we could have used IRC.

The lack of persistence built into the protocol (and thus clients) is a big problem for team communications. You can have a bot log your channel, but they'll often have holes creep into the logs somehow, and for private discussions require yet one more access control system.

Having a web irc client that provided a common backlog and search for all users, instead of requiring things like znc to make that usable, would be great. The private part is fraught though.

/query?

/query command is news to me, but appears to be completely unrelated (I don't really understand the naming).

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