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Tag: team collaboration

  • HipChat Maker Atlassian Calls It Quits, Sells to Rival Slack

    HipChat Maker Atlassian Calls It Quits, Sells to Rival Slack

    The saying “If you can’t beat them, join them” certainly holds true for Atlassian and Slack. The former is selling its rights to HipChat and Stride to rival Slack and will even be making a small investment in the company.

    The surprising news was announced recently by Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield. Aside from tweeting his company’s purchase of the two products, he also explained that the move was to “better support those users who choose to migrate” to Slack. Joff Redfern, Atlassian’s VP of Product Management, also confirmed the news. In a blog post, he said this was the “best way forward for our customers and for Atlassian.”

    What was not as surprising was the revelation that the company would be shutting down both HipChat and Stride. The former is one of Slack’s main competitor in the workplace chat arena while the latter is a chat and collaboration system that Atlassian rolled out in 2017.

    Atlassian clarified that they only sold the intellectual rights to HipChat and Stride and that Slack will not be handling support for the two products. However, existing HipChat Server and HipChat Data Server customers will still enjoy product support until their license period ends. The two products will be discontinued on February 15, 2019.

    Slack and Atlassian will also be working together to migrate all of the enterprise giant’s users over to Slack. The two companies will also be collaborating in developing future integrations. Atlassian will also be receiving a small stake in Slack, with the startup paying an undisclosed amount to the company in the next three years.

    Atlassian tried hard to remain competitive in the office chat space environment by moving its HipChat users to Stride. Aside from the usual chat and communication features, Stride also offered project-tracking and audio and video conferencing. However, the revamped system just wasn’t enough to bring in new users and the company started to consider selling.

    Atlassian co-CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes told Bloomberg that they’re proud of what their team has built, but also admitted that “it is a crowded space, and there’s a pragmatic option there.”

    The alliance between the two rivals makes sense, especially with Microsoft chipping away at Slack’s dominance in corporate chat software. Microsoft has put the pressure on with its Teams software, which is now available to its 135 million Office cloud subscribers. It has also released a free version of Teams to attract new users. At the moment, Slack reportedly has 500,000 live organizations using its system while Microsoft says 200,000 active organizations are using Teams.

  • Makers of HipChat Challenge Slack with New Communications App Called Stride

    Makers of HipChat Challenge Slack with New Communications App Called Stride

    With an increasingly global workforce, team collaboration tools are essential in the running of today’s businesses. Indeed, it would be hard to imagine how team members, who may be located on opposite sides of the globe, could manage to get any work done without these apps specifically designed for business needs. Currently,  Slack is leading the pack among cloud-based office collaboration software, but a challenger has arrived with Atlassian launching of a new app called Stride—a souped up version of its existing communication service HipChat.

    Atlassian is confident that Stride can hold its own against the more established Slack. Aside from carrying over the core functionality of HipChat, Stride is also packed with newer features that could give Slack a run for its money.

    For instance, Stride is touted to offer superior video and audio chat compared to other team collaboration tools currently available on the market. According to Steven Goldsmith, Stride’s general manager and head of Atlassian communication products, Stride will be able to provide better audio and video quality in team chats since the audio and video components are already integrated into the product and are not plugins.

    Apparently, the Stride developers had to go back to the drawing board and reimagined what a perfect team communication tool should be like. “The reason why we built a whole new product is there was nothing to acquire, nothing existed in this space,” Goldsmith told Fast Company. “We thought it was really important to step back and build something end-to-end that actually solves all these problems as one thing instead of bolting together parts that may or may not tie together.”

    A common problem often faced by users of team collaboration tools is the volume of messages one has to sieve through just to be updated after a vacation. But with Stride’s Actions and Decisions feature, keeping abreast of things should not be as tedious, according to Tech Crunch. You can create an Action task from the main interface and assign or pin it only to those users who are involved in that task. Similarly, a Decision marker can be created when someone on your team resolved an issue and you can check the messages related to that “decision” when you click on it. Even though reading your co-workers’ chats while you were away might be entertaining, Stride gives you the tools to cut to the chase when necessary.

    Sometimes, just being online can be overwhelming with distracting notifications that keep you from getting your work done. Stride has a solution for that in the form of its Focus Mode. Once activated, it mutes all those notifications temporarily for an hour or two to give you the quiet necessary to complete more important tasks. You can always view what messages, decisions, and actions that have been made while you were busy once the timer is up.

    But will Stride’s new features be enough to unseat Slack from the number one spot? Well, only time can tell how workers will receive it. While the cool features might become popular, they are still relatively easy for Slack to copy.

    And of course, workers might need to convince their respective companies to shell out some cash for the $3 per user monthly charge. While companies may use Stride without having to pay a fee, the free version limits users to 25,000 messages and 5GB of file storage.

    For those already who are already satisfied with using HipChat, it’s good to know that Stride will not be totally replacing the service. However, Atlassian is sweetening the deal for those who opt to migrate to the newer platform by offering existing users a one-year subscription priced at the lower HipChat rate.

    [Featured Image via YouTube]