I agree completely, that's a terrible statement for an executive to make and PR should have stopped that. But on the other hand, I can almost see the logic in it. I'm making a huge leap here, but I remember back in the early 2000s, I had some friends who used AIM. I had some friends who used MSN. I had some friends who used ICQ. I had some friends who used Yahoo. These different chat services were really all exactly the same, the only difference is you can't chat between AIM and MSN. I don't care which chat service "wins", I just want all my friends using one so I don't have to sign into fifteen different services just to communicate.
In that situation, Adium or Trillian or various third party clients were basically required if you had any sizable group of friends. Just standardizing on one chat platform would have been better than everyone making their own, since they weren't really competing to make anything better. They just existed, and all did exactly the same thing and were incompatible with each other.
The question is, does Slack differ from Hipchat differ from Teams in any meaningful way, and does Hipchat disappearing actually make a difference when Slack exists? I honestly don't know the answer.
> I just want all my friends using one so I don't have to sign into fifteen different services just to communicate.
If only the different services would be able to talk with each other, you wouldn’t have to get your friends to all switch to one of them. But, here we are, a decade or two later, and interoperability is still nonexistent.
Could also be a reporter misquoting. Reporter says, “how do you respond to someone who says this creates fewer choices for people?” CEO: “There’s fewer choices for people, but they are better than choices.” Boom, first half is the money quote.
And it's very good for the company, as they don't need to do as much competition with HipChat so they can slow down innovation and raise prices. Win, win.
It's true that individually most people are happier without a choice, but when you take them away you end up cutting out whole chunks of people. What if the thing that went away was accessible to people with certain types of disabilities and the new thing isn't? What if the old one wasn't a public company but the new thing is and now they have to comply with U.S. export laws and you were perfectly okay using it in Iran before but now can't? etc. There are a number of cases where most people won't want a choice, but by giving them what they want and removing one you hurt a lot of other people.
Am I the only one who sees this as anti-competitive? This is basically collusion - Atlassian agreeing not to compete in chat in return for a payment from Slack. It almost seems like we're intent on making literally every mistake we made with traditional businesses, but with electronic products.
Slack's competitors include Google, Microsoft, and Facebook. You can say that all of those companies have terrible products if you want (Hangouts, Teams, and FB for Work), but all have been positioned to act as Slack alternatives.
I don't think Slack is worried about looking anti-competitive in that crowd.
Depending on how you define "immediately". This is from the Atlassian FAQ:
The end-of-life dates for each products are below:
Stride: February 15th, 2019
Hipchat Cloud: February 15th, 2019
Hipchat Data Center (v3.0): June 22nd, 2019
Hipchat Data Center (v3.1): September 26th, 2019
Hipchat Server (v2.1): December 8th, 2018
Hipchat Server(v2.2): May 30th, 2019
Hipchat Server (v2.4): June 30th, 2020
Okay, so given that Atlassian has a clear and direct reason to develop a competitive chat application, presumably they'll embark on producing a new solution and marketing it to their customers as a competitor to slack? I'm not sure I buy it.
If by "anti-competitive" you mean all of a sudden there's less competition, then yes it is although that's nothing unique, competing companies merge or make strategic deals all the time. But if you mean "anti-competitive" as in violating anti-trust laws then probably not given the amount of choice that still exists and the apparent lack of monopolistic strong-arm tactics being employed by either side. I'm no lawyer of course.
Edit: Original made it sound like I was suggesting the companies were merging, which isn't the case.
Despite slack being quite popular and truly a good product, Microsoft still has the upper hand. If you have the "Microsoft Suite" you get everything, access to all their products. Slack is fighting an uphill battle against Microsoft and eliminating Atlassian will help.
Dividing those who aren't diehard Microsoft fans won't help.
How is anything aside from legal infiltration going to make the playing field any less competitive? If we're all still playing by the same rules, there is still competition.
I mean this without being tongue in cheek, but Teams itself is anti-competitive. It's a horrible product which is basically only in use because it's bundled into Office 365. Absolutely nothing in Teams is not done better in other products, including Microsoft's own products such as Skype for Business or plain old Skype.
Business chats in general are just completely incongruent with what users are expecting from end-user chats like Telegram or WhatsApp or Messages. Even Google has fallen far behind with regards to Hangouts, and Allo is not a good answer either. From a business perspective, I get why businesses choose Teams or Allo, but the actual products have usability as an incidental feature. With both major players, the chats are just there to ensure that Slack cannot/will not grow, same with other programs such as Discord. It's a revenue stream that is yet untapped, and soon Microsoft and Google will come calling for their payment from Businesses.
Same here. We just started using it and everyone really likes it so far. Much better than Skype. I've tried Slack and didn't really care for it. I realize MSFT is mimicking the Slack style in Teams, but I just didn't really actually want to use Slack. But Teams seems like something I want to use.
1) It constantly minimizes for seemingly no reason (at least once a week).
2) The "Teams" and "Chat" menus are separate. They're in the same window in Slack, and that just makes sense.
2.1) The "Teams" menu won't list more than 4 channels per Team by default. If you want to open a channel there you have to open the menu or favorite everything. I know this can be fixed by good sanitation by Team admins but Slack's way of doing it encourages it automatically.
3) Can't invite outside users like you can with Slack.
4) The chat history is so short it has to load after maybe 10 lines when scrolling up.
5) The "thumbs up"/message menu covers the message when hovering over it so it's impossible to highlight a message to copy/paste starting from the right to the left. You can go the other way but I never have until Teams.
6) Updates take forever to release! I've googled issues that MS staff note as "on the docket" for adding but months later it's still not added.
7) I frequently don't see the toast/popup notifications for some reason. I don't know what's going on there and it could be me but I don't remember it happening when I used Slack at work.
8) When it updates it shuts down without notification.
9) This might be the Android "work profile" in play but if I get a call or sometimes even a message the Android notification will not go away until I restart my phone.
I mean, Slack isn't perfect but I didn't have any complaints about it except that the call functionality would disconnect randomly.
re toast/pop ups, it’s SO frustrating that they don’t use the OS built in notifications framework! doesn’t respect DND and plenty of other integrations because of this ridiculous decision
This list contains the majority of my and my teams' complaints about Teams. For us, the big issue is that historical data is near impossible to dredge out of Teams because of the aforementioned scrolling issue. Search is universal and cannot be limited to a single user, and also is fairly literal, meaning you can't really search for something that So-an-So posted awhile back about X, unless you know the exact content of X.
Bookmarking exists, but you can't link to public bookmarked chats.
5 is a surprisingly frustrating one for us as the exact way it occurs is simple: Someone messages you, then right away attaches a ticket number, for example, which appears on the second line. The context menu will obscure this number completely, and only if there is enough whitespace on the line to double click to "Select All" can you select it.
Teams gives incredibly limited access to the calendar, insomuch that you can only go a few days back and forth, not a week for example, and you can't block out your time via Teams (i.e., add just an appointment time for yourself, since you need to add someone else to the meeting)
The mobile client seems to be absolutely the only application that decides there is a low internet condition, despite every other application on my phone fetching content happily and freely (Outlook on Android likes to do this too and refuse to fetch message content, frequently requiring a force quit of the Application to recover from and the Application becomes completely unresponsive)
Back to the Desktop app, it's also quite slow just in general, moving between Team Chats is very sluggish whereas other chat programs handle this in a snappy and graceful manner. File uploads are very awkward, and the fact that dragging and dropping a picture from a browser uploads it as Sharepoint content instead of as just inline (like other messaging clients) do is just a bit asinine. To have to first drag it to the desktop, then attach the file is just another annoyance.
All in all, for me it's just comparing what Teams offers to what something like Telegram offers, and it's night and day between the two. Most of the time in our org, as soon as you're past the acquaintance stage with someone after discussing an issue on Teams, you ask to be allowed to talk with them on Telegram instead.
For the actual chatting part of a chat program, it's really bad. For internal video/calls, it's not too bad (though our experience trying to use the Web-version to make a video call was an exercise in Microsoft frustration, as we found out that we basically had to use Edge if we wanted to use the Web Version to do it, and even then it didn't work). Nevermind that a Safari Version has been promised from months at this point without any delivery.
To me Teams feels like Microsoft saw that there was revenue in locking clients into their chat eco-system, but didn't have a product ready, so they decided to release Teams and just get everyone onboard. My cynical take is that soon they realized they didn't have to compete if they bundled Teams with their Office packages and called it a Slack Competitor; suddenly, the decision was pay for something like Slack, or a "Slack Competitor" you already bought.
I will give Teams this thought, their bot integration is very nice. I think Telegram does it a bit better, but we do make very good use of the chat bots for basic automated updating and information distribution.
I didn't know they had a desktop app. I only use it in a web browser and on my phone and I don't think they have those issues. Maybe you should give those a try?
FYI, as a Microsoftie, (so I really have no horse in the teams v skype/lync debate) I find teams to be FAR better than skype. I'm on a half-remote team, and when we have to interface with groups that preferr skype, it always seems more frictional; I even was joking to my peers today that in teams we are more prompt+get through+done with meetings even faster than our in-person versions. It has rough edges that I trust engs are looking into, but I raise an eyebrow at the assertion that skype does it better, outside of integration scenarios which are rapidly improving. (And I used to use skype as the primary method of communication between my breakdancing crew a decade or so back, and used slack more recently for another job, I simply don't see Teams being as far behind as you imply.)
Similarly, I personally find the bundling->anticompetitive argument very unconvincing, especially given G-suite and other players in the cloud office space, especially in this context as atlassian's business model "rhymes" pretty heavily.
(As always disclaimer all opinions are my own, etc etc)
> Absolutely nothing in Teams is not done better in other products, including Microsoft's own products such as Skype for Business or plain old Skype.
I haven't tried Teams yet, but I struggle to imagine how anything could be worse than the current state of Skype for Business and still function even minimally.
(Disclosure: I work at Microsoft but not on Teams / Office)
I've used Slack for 2+ years, hipchat for ~1 year, Discord for gaming for years, and now Teams for ~1 year. For work, I like Teams best.
In my mind the most significant, perhaps the only significant, difference between Teams and the rest is the threaded-by-default approach. It was hard to get used to at first, but this make it so much easier to keep track of different conversations that would otherwise overlap. In my mind, it's the best of both chat and email. Slack kind of does this but it's not nearly as seamless. You have to hover over the small reply icon and most of the time people don't do this. In Teams, you are forced to use threads and I think it is a good thing. Teams definitely has its quirks but with the velocity of improvements I've seen, most have already been fixed and I'm optimistic the rest will all be ironed out before long.
I don't even include Skype for Business in this comparison because in my mind Skype for Business is in a completely different category. It doesn't do the same things. And I can't think of another software product I dislike as much as Skype for Business / Lync.
Right, because everyone knows the second law of business is that the number of competitors in a market can never decrease over time.
Jokes aside, how is this anti-competitive other than trivially reducing the number of total competitors? If 4th place wants to give up in the race, should all of their work be in vain? AFAIK a product like Slack doesn't require tons of up-front legislation preventing new entrants in the race. Competition in this domain is very much alive, regardless of what a few big kahunas decide to do.
Using collusion without knowing what it means... Businesses make business deals all the time. If I had a company that made an inferior product and wasn't able or willing to invest time and resources to improve it, you know sure as hell I'd look to sell that product IP off before my competitors take all of my marketshare anyway and my company gets nothing for years of pre-existing work.
That's a sensible business move that lets them allocate resources to their strengths. To believe it's some kind of secret or illegal deal is pretty naïve. It's obviously not a mistake either - Hipchat is technologically behind other products on the market, and Atlassian has other core products that are doing really well (JIRA, for example).
HipChat had some major uptime issues. I have friends who experienced whole day outages at their companies.
I hear a lot of people on HN say it was "Just IRC" and I'm always surprised by that. If IRC was so compelling then why didn't it take off? Why did Slack have a meteoric rise? It can't be for no good reason.
I think the answer is that the interface fluff they added is actually extremely important and valuable. They made it dead simple, and fun to use for EVERYONE. My limited experience with IRC was honestly not great (please don't kill me, I'm sorry). Where is the mobile app? How do I get notified when I'm not online? What is EFNet/Freenode/etc? I use a slash command and paste my password in plain text to login? I can't just paste an image?
Social apps are extremely difficult to get right. People seem to discount "silly" things like Emoji reactions. Honestly it DOES sound silly to say this, but it really is a great way to express and communicate. This is especially true for our large and diverse team. It also cuts down a TON of message spam ("Congrats!", "Yay!" etc)
My Linux user group used to hangout in IRC until 3 or 4 years ago when little by little we stopped joining the channel. Some of us tried IRC clients for smartphone and it was a lousy experience.
Until one day someone created a Telegram group. Now we are all there, the conversation might not be as fluid as IRC, each is in their own timezone, but it is there.
Yes, IRC I think finally "failed" once persistence went from "nice to have" to "need to have" feature. Yes, you can work around this if you are a top 20% techie who enjoys that stuff, but most don't.
Mobile basically made the "all clients synced from anywhere" a necessity, and then lack of IRC client development for things like rich media hurt to boot.
Scrappy founder here. Telegram crushes it for low latency, instantly synched desktop/mobile flexibility, easy topic channels and groups, and trivial bot API. I've not seen anything do what it does as perfomantly.
For code, wiki, and issues, it's self hosted Gitea. It's a dream to fire up thanks to Go and SQLite, and users forget you're not at GitHub.
Nothing more than those two plus email needed here, yet anyway.
>If IRC was so compelling then why didn't it take off
Define 'take off'. It was quite popular in the 90s and early 00s, but not in comparison to say AIM or ICQ for example. But where are those two networks now ... and IRC is still there.
People seldom seem to acknowledge this, but software apps go through fads just like everything else. Slack won because it was the new hotness and it was able to get the network effect snowball. Especially in the beginning, small things matter a lot, and Slack was pretty polished right out of the box.
IRC's main issues in my opinion are a lack of integrated file/attachment handling (you can't just post that meme GIF in a channel without finding someplace to upload it first) and hideous clients. If there were more free clients like the Colloquy Mac client I still use even though it basically has been abandonware for almost a decade, I think IRC would have had an easier time getting traction.
Indeed so, if judging in a reference frame of gross oversimplifications and dismissing importance of details.
I hate Slack, the client, the cloud lock-in.
But I think they and those in between of golden IRC times and them did refine team chatting experience.
Speaking of my own experience: it's now easier to follow discussions and way easier to form more complex messages (mostly thanks to markdown) that convey your point. Just some things of the top of my head.
> Indeed so, if judging in a reference frame of gross oversimplifications and dismissing importance of details.
I'll admit, re: IRC - yes, that's a stretch and ignores details. It's more that Slack managed to kick Hipchat's butt so thoroughly that really surprised me.
No. Hipchat had an on-prem option. In fact, I'm kind of stunned to see that the blog post on Slack's website doesn't mention the on-prem version at all. Given that on-prem was one of the differentiators that Hipchat had against Slack (and one of the reasons that many companies stuck with Hipchat, even though Slack had more features), the lack of discussion around the on-prem version seems like a huge mistake.
Hmm mentioning it would probably be a bigger mistake. If they say anything they'll have detractors and proponents, by staying silent it allows them to prep & bleed off users who MUST have onprem.
All in all I would guess that slack will probably retain more than 80% of users, which is pretty good.
We were using hipchat, worked fine with our custom integrations and workflow. Stopped working when they switched to stride ( had to do with version of jira we are on)
Now that my integrations are all most working again I have to probably look at using mattermost.
And yet most large companies are using AWS and the like. This obsession with "MUST be behind OUR firewall!" is very arrogant, penny-wise pound-foolish thinking - and it tends to wither in the face of a frank, honest cost/benefit analysis.
Amazon probably has more, if not better, security and engineers than most of the companies we're talking about.
Pricing mostly
Can't host it ourselves, not really an issue now that we have a new boss and he doesn't care as much about hosting everything ourselves. Thats why moving to stride was in the works.
I tried testing slack with a sub section of our team and they didn't like it at all.
I've been toying switching to mattermost for a year now though.
See how it goes.
This reminds me of Aaron Levie’s recent take on Kara Swisher’s podcast - on how enterprise software is going to be either about Microsoft (jack of trades) or about a collection of smaller companies (specialists in their fields) integrated with one and other. Slack and Atlassian focusing on what makes them great and working together makes a lot of sense
Levie is wrong. His personal bias is showing: an over optimism that Box can survive as an independent long-term. It's going to be Microsoft and other giants. There's no scenario where Slack remains an independent company, for the exact same reason there was never a scenario where Github remained an independent company. It'll be surprising if Slack is still independent three years from now.
It's perpetual consolidation in enterprise, nothing has changed about that in decades. Microsoft eats Github. Atlassian eats Slack (or some other company does). Maybe Atlassian is the next Oracle, or maybe Oracle or Salesforce or SAP or Microsoft eats Atlassian.
The one thing every scenario has in common: the little fish don't stick around and cooperate, they all get eaten and merged into ever larger companies. Nothing can stop that process, all the little fish have shareholders more than willing to sell when the big price comes in from the giants.
PeopleSoft, Siebel, Sun, MySQL, Great Plains, Sybase, Business Objects, Ariba, SuccessFactors, Concur, RightNow, Taleo, MuleSoft, Demandware, ExactTarget, etc etc
It's the same thing going on over and over again. The little fish never stick around. Box will end up in someone's stomach just the same as the rest.
What big corp wants to own the liability of Mailchimp? The minute you crack down harder on customers using spammy email lists, the revenue picture changes dramatically.
The big fish (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple) will continue to buy smaller companies until governments steps in and breaks them up in an anti-trust suit. The EU will lead that charge. The writing is on the wall.
if the EU just wants to fine the big tech companies out of existence, then the big tech companies will just stop doing business there. The EU cannot break those US companies up. If disproportionately large fines (e.g. the fine Google recently paid) continue, the tech companies will just leave - which may be what the EU wants, but it also seems that the EU is pretty bad at creating technology companies
an example -- i currently have 3 workspaces on my slack client (on linux) and it's currently using 500mb of RAM, which is insane for a chat client. the only thing using more ram is firefox with literally 25 tabs, including gmail's inbox and pocketcasts playing a podcast (~1gb).
You can reduce this a huge amount by simply using it in a tab in a browser. When I'm travelling I use it this way, as it eats much less battery - I just pin a tab.
Although it reduces competition in short term, it’s likely to give more competition in the long term by creating a strong competitor to Microsoft.
And based on the numbers in the article, it seems like Atlassian had less than 4% marketshare (Slack expects single digit growth - and assuming they have around 50% of the market)
This deals seems like the last step before a full - and in competitive terms logical - merger between Slack and Atlassian.
>Although it reduces competition in short term, it’s likely to give more competition in the long term by creating a strong competitor to Microsoft.
That's pretty dependent on which way Slack decides to go in terms of facilitating large Enterprises' needs for absolute control of and visibility into communications platforms. Monitoring and governance of Slack is, at present, a goddamned nightmare. The third party tools that currently exist are, in my experience, somewhat unreliable, and all of them are crippled by the fact that Slack's API drastically limits visibility into the platform. I've worked with more than one very large Enterprise customer with special compliance needs whose Slack instance(s) are one foul-up away from having a regulator rain down fines/sanctions, and in every case Slack is pretending like the issues don't exist while my customers shove their head in the sand. And compliance aside: the Slack API doesn't even have methods in place to deal with things like emoji-react trolling on read-only announcement channels, and a plethora of other little features required to control toxic and obnoxious behaviors.
I love Slack to death, but it's not an Enterprise product yet.
I see it as a step towards integrating more (or in this case better IMO) things into their ecosystem. Consolidating Hipchat with Slack is a step toward that.
I haven't looked at them in a while but I believe Mattermost is still offering self-hosted options and I believe they still market themselves as a slack alternative.
What options are left for self-hosted chat systems with comparable features? We've been using self-hosted Hipchat at our company and there is zero chance we will ever use a cloud solution.
For example when a company acquires another, your workflows will be broken, you are forced to move and learn the new tool and you have no control over YOUR OWN data at all.
When did you last try Zulip on Android? I agree it was pretty much unusable in 2017, but everyone who actively uses it agrees it's improved a lot in recent months (I use it every single day, and have a good experience using it to get my work done). The mobile apps remain our top engineering focus area, since they're certainly far behind the desktop experience's level of polish, but we've generally stopped hearing new users describe them as "unusable".
I should also mention that Zulip's threading model makes the experience of replying to a conversation when you get back to your computer feel great, which isn't true for any other chat tool. You don't have to be glued to your keyboard/phone in order to communicate effectively or avoid missing out on participating in important conversations, and I can't emphasize enough how much better this makes life.
That doesn't eliminate the value of mobile (as I said, this is our top focus area right now), but it's a big part of why people love Zulip today, despite the mobile experience being way behind the desktop experience.
Did you tried Movim? It's a web based XMPP platform.
* Self-hosted (simple web application), a Docker image is available, Debian package incoming
* Chatrooms and one to one chat with file sharing, embeded pictures, administration, discoverability, message editing, archives management, synchronisation between devices
* Post publication in Communities and personnal accounts
* Compatible with XMPP transports and services like Biboumi to bridge it with IRC
* Responsive so it fit on your desktop and your mobile (the UI is also fully in sync between your devices)
I've never really gotten into any of Atlasssian's products. It seems like they make tools for managers with bolt on functionality for engineers (which may be why I never caught onto their products). I hope this is good news for Slack, but as a software engineer today, Atlasssian's products are not the first ones I would recommend in any category.
An opinionated workflow of collecting from a development team and its customers potential future efforts, estimates of the cost and value of those efforts, prioritizing based on those estimates (maximize expected value, minimize expected cost), scheduling & forecasting efforts based on a sound statistical model (e.g. estimation error).
You can accomplish most of that with Phabricator[1], except for the forecasting efforts. As for the forecasting; I worked at Amazon which had a dedicated JIRA engineer and that was the best I've ever seen JIRA being run and used. In my time there, I never saw any manager predict anything consistently accurate over the course of a long project with it without actually talking to engineering.
JIRA promises armchair management, but I've yet to see those tools actually work. That being said, you may be a better JIRA user than anyone I know. JIRA has always be promoted as a tool from the top down, never from the bottom up.
JIRA's problem is it's too configurable and popular with folks who are into prescriptive authority, so it absolutely can be worst tool you've ever used, and frequently will be.
Stick to github issues or similar. Whatever is closer to the real work and gives you the biggest bang for the buck. Not the most wet dream. You do not need a gazillion of workflows and checks and stories and epics and boards etc. "Keep it simple, stupid"
What I like is to specify dependencies. Unfortunately, the simple ones (Github, Gitlab, Trac) don't have that feature.
The Jira we use at work has gone overboard. There is too many ways to specify and people are confused. For example, we have "blocks" (B cannot be finished without A closed) and "follows" (B cannot be started without A closed).
I would also recommend this. I've been using it for a while and it's amazing. Tightly integrated into version control, great team/project/task management, code review tools, great command line integration though arcanist.
Jira was great, ~15 years ago. It was a tool that actually helped development, especially with the GreenHopper plugin
Now almost the entirety of its functionality is to help various middle managers track things that are important to them, while continuously making development slower. Manager 1 wants to track Metric A? Add a drop down. Manager 2 wants to track Metric B? Add a new form to fill out. And tie them all together with workflows so that you can't do your work and mark it as complete until all the boxes are checked and fields are filled.
Those that haven't experienced this probably just haven't worked in a medium or large corporation.
> Now almost the entirety of its functionality is to help various middle managers track things that are important to them, while continuously making development slower.
> Those that haven't experienced this probably just haven't worked in a medium or large corporation.
So true, though I expect that of the HN crowd (given it's hosted by YC).
Everytime I hear someone praise Jira, I think "Do you have more than 100 people using the same instance?" Middle manage needs charts and reporting, and that's Jira's strength. It's an absolute disaster to use on a daily basis.
We chose Pivotal Tracker over Jira because we didn't need all that stuff, and PT fit fairly well with our existing workflow. But... is the ability to do those things really a disadvantage? Seems more like a problem with the way these medium/large companies work than with the tool itself. If Jira didn't exist I don't think they'd use something like Pivotal and just do without all the tracking; they'd just have something ad hoc and unwieldy cobbled together instead.
Amen to that! Both as a user and a developer in the atlassian ecosystem, the experience is like you're 2 decades behind simple basic features with astronomical implementation effort. "Enterprise" has never gotten a negative connotation within atlassian walls it seems.
I run the Atlassian stack for my company, so here's some thoughts on this:
- Jira is pretty bog-standard these days, huge installed base. It's a bit weird to administer, and not as powerful in many ways as I'd like (especially compared to a more flexible system like ServiceNow). However, it's entrenched and a lot of people like it.
- Confluence is a top tier wiki. I actually find it very nice to work with, both from an editing, organizing, and also an API standpoint. It's much nicer than MediaWiki or Sharepoint for this purpose, and though it's not ideal for collaboration on MS documents, it's still very solid for working on shared documentation.
- Bamboo is a decent build system. It's lagging behind Jenkins in terms of integrations and support for source-controlled declarative build stuff, but for teams that like to point and click it works well, and the support for parallel builds, branch builds, etc. is all much easier than it is in Jenkins.
- Bitbucket is a reasonable choice for on-prem Git hosting. I prefer GHE, but if you have the rest of the Atlassian apps, there are some integrations that are nice, and it's not terribly expensive, so if you have ops familiar with running Atlassian apps it may be a good choice for you.
That's about it. Not something I love, but definitely not something I hate. Their support is also quite good, and guided me through a painful upgrade of a stack that my predecessors had left neglected for five years with no patching. Can't complain about that!
Can you explain why you feel this way? I've felt nothing but frustration using Confluence internally. It seems to continually get in the way and have an obtuse and unintuitive way of doing things.
I'm in a company which uses the full atlassian suite (on premise) and I find your comment is a very good summary. I always see people complaining about jira on the internet, but in real life, everyone I know seems happy with it, I have no idea where that come from. Maybe it depends on your admin and/or the size/culture of the company
Whenever someone passionately hates Jira my go-to line is "your Jira instance can only be as good as its admin."
IT departments in charge of installing and upgrading Jira don't tend to bother with optimizing it, and most companies don't have dedicated Jira admins.
So you either have a motivated employee that will moonlight as an admin and figure out how to make it better in their spare time, or you just end up using all the defaults, which most projects probably don't need.
Every engineer I met dislikes Confluence. Engineers who write most of the documentation don't like using Confluence which lead to out dated, subpar and incomplete documentation.
In my org, I noticed this and created a github repo to push documentation in Markdown. I created initial version of docs and now every engineer in our team uses it because they know markdown, appreciate version controlled docs and can use whatever editor they want to. This repo is now filled with quality documentation for most of our stack and operations.
I'm an engineer and love Confluence + Gliffy. Writing fully interlinked documentation with illustrations and tables and styling is much easier than with any other tool.
I'll second the love for Confluence as an engineer. Easy to use and navigate imo. Hate JIRA with a passion though, at least the two implementations I've use have been exhausting with fields and options.
I'm an engineer and I like Confluence, especially compared to any other options. And doubly compared to markdown (although I concede I'm probably the only engineer who dislikes markdown)
Confluence's editor is truly awful. I've spent 15 minutes just trying to remove superfluous newlines -- it's maddening. If you do something like {{fsck}} to create a bit of monospace text, it's totally unclear if there is a space after the text, or there isn't, due to the way the reverse video section is larger than the actual text. God help you if you accidentally backspace into the monospace section, everything you type after that is monospace. It's extremely frustrating.
I wouldn't be surprised to learn that many folks when faced with the prospect of updating a document using the Confluence editor will instead just find something less terrible to do.
I often write my entire document first using the old style Confluence markdown, and when done I import it into a new Confluence page. You can't take an existing document and convert into markdown, but if you are the only person working on the document this is a workable approach.
I don't care for Confluence at all. It feels engineered to death (as does Jira, for that matter)—it can do everything, but nothing well. I've been trying to organize my team's Confluence space but I'm constantly confused by the software which seems to be working against me.
I think my issue with Atlassian software is that it feels so unopinionated—they've added every option and customization because they have such a large enterprise customer base with unique needs—and the result is that it becomes byzantine and unfriendly because it can do _everything_.
We've been working on an open source solution for this, if you're interested - markdown or wysiwygy based editing with a hosted option – http://getoutline.com/
> (especially compared to a more flexible system like ServiceNow
Oh dear god no. Our company runs mixed Jira and Service Now, and for all Jira's disadvantages, at least I can get a link. to a ticket. To you know, reference or share. Without explaining the awful UI for where people need to put the ticket number in if they want to see it.
- Jira is tolerable. Many of the more essential features are only available as plugins and many of them feel like ugly bolt-on hacks (looking at you, Insight) to the point that Atlassian won't even investigate your problems unless you replicate them without plugins. But my largest complaint about the system is how dreadfully corporate and boring it feels to me in a very abstract sense. Jira is the least fun I can have with computer.
- Confluence's search is abysmal; fgrep would do a better job. The markup language could use improvement but it's not that awful.
- No comment on Bamboo and Bitbucket. I'm not a developer.
Stride was launched last year. I guess it didn't get much traction then if they gave up on it in less than a year. For consumer it is of course bit sad to see the 800lb gorilla just keep growing and eating up competition, but I can see how this makes sense to at least Atlassian; they are getting better Slack integrations, and possibly other partnership benefits for what seems like essentially free. Not sure how much this move will benefit Slack (the company, not the product), but maybe they'll absorb few more customers this way. Although I imagine many Hipchat/Stride admins will be reevaluating their choices instead of just jumping blindly to Slack.
I was curious whether or not the Sride project was failing. We were about to do a migration once some key integration things were done; doesn't look like they'll finish those.
Even those less competition normally isn't good I'm hopefully optimistic about this. It seems by and large slack has won the chat wars for open projects/podcast live chat/business. My company uses HipChat (due to being in the Atlassian suite) and so I'm not going to have both Slack and HipChat open but if we move to Slack it means I can participant in some other open Slack channels.
As someone who uses both Slack and HipChat on a daily basis, I am very happy to see that HipChat is the one shutting down. The "cute" features that Slack adds aren't worth much individually, but the overall user experience is much better on Slack than HipChat.
Well, I wouldn't say Slack is a superior product necessarily. Stride had some really great ideas, like focus management and designating decisions out of discussions.
Well in that case I hope MS gets a second wind like it does for VSCode. I use IntelliJ daily since I use a lot of the bells and whistles, but VSCode is great and also runs on Electron. It seems that there's a lot of things MS is doing right with the tool that Slack can't or won't.
Microsoft is the only company I've seen that can actually get any performance out of Electron, and even then it's still a resource hog. In their favour, though, VSCode is written exclusively for Electron, unlike many of these apps which are essentially SPAs lightly reworked for a non-browser.
Of course, in an ideal world, the obvious technical flaws in chat products would easily enable competitors to “take on” the broken ones.
Why does it seem so hard to get chat right? Heck, Yahoo Messenger had lots of features in about year 2000 that we still lack or struggle with in newer products?
Well, thanks to this today I learned that Microsoft had a product called Teams. I didn't see anybody using it but I saw plenty of people using Slack. Maybe is Team addressed to big companies? My customers are all medium or small.
Does anyone here have some experience using Teams? Is it really in competition with Slack?
Teams at the moment is mostly used by massive companies, as Slack is really built for smaller teams. I like Slack, but it is very unreliable. I am constantly disconnected, have messages never sent. This is not on the free version, it's almost inexcusable in the amount of times it happens.
I used it in two different jobs, both with paid plans (and obviously different internet services) and both have had the same disconnection problems. Maybe it's a regional issue? I'm around Nashville/Atlanta. I have had multiple instances of someone asking me why I haven't replied only to see a message marked as "failed to send" because of a disconnection. This is multiple team members too, not just myself.
The huge advance of Teams is that you get it in a package if you buy Office365. Otherwise it is a chat app similar to Slack with less ready made integrations.
I use Teams at work. Rumor has it that we are switching (back) to Slack, and I cannot wait. Teams is terrible. The UI is sluggish, and the UX is unintuitive to the point that it almost feels intentionally confusing.
Teams is a shitty version of Slack but it’s bundled and included with Office 365 which almost every big business licenses. Free is a hard offer to refuse.
I use Teams in a small, half-remote team within a large company (50K+ employees). It's been great in comparison to the other option available to us, which is Skype for Business.
We have both HipChat and Teams at work, with my team using HipChat. My team ran an experiment to move all conversations and collaboration to Teams for a trial period. That trial period ended with everyone feeling very frustrated that they spent more time trying to figure out WHERE things were going on in Teams rather than the content of actual collaboration efforts. Teams has a horrible design for threads, and is ill-suited for the type of rapid-fire communication of a highly vocal team. I dread having to go back to that product and will be pushing either Slack or Mattermost as a migration path from HipChat Data Center.
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[ 10.9 ms ] story [ 7784 ms ] threadStrange quote.
In that situation, Adium or Trillian or various third party clients were basically required if you had any sizable group of friends. Just standardizing on one chat platform would have been better than everyone making their own, since they weren't really competing to make anything better. They just existed, and all did exactly the same thing and were incompatible with each other.
The question is, does Slack differ from Hipchat differ from Teams in any meaningful way, and does Hipchat disappearing actually make a difference when Slack exists? I honestly don't know the answer.
If only the different services would be able to talk with each other, you wouldn’t have to get your friends to all switch to one of them. But, here we are, a decade or two later, and interoperability is still nonexistent.
I'd say interoperability _again_ nonexistent. For a brief while it looked like XMPP federation was working.
https://sheenaiyengar.com/the-art-of-choosing/
And it's very good for the company, as they don't need to do as much competition with HipChat so they can slow down innovation and raise prices. Win, win.
I don't think Slack is worried about looking anti-competitive in that crowd.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6K8PZxyQfU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUzvo4HwojU
> Slack will pay an undisclosed amount over the next three years to acquire Atlassian’s HipChat and Stride products
https://slackhq.com/atlassian-and-slack-partnership
They are immediately deprecated. It doesn't appear that Slack has any real interest in Hipchat/Stride tech (I know I don't).
Edit: Original made it sound like I was suggesting the companies were merging, which isn't the case.
Dividing those who aren't diehard Microsoft fans won't help.
How is anything aside from legal infiltration going to make the playing field any less competitive? If we're all still playing by the same rules, there is still competition.
Anticompetitive practices aren't illegal though. They are only illegal if a company has a monopoly or has significant market power.
Now, the question we have to ask is is Slack a near monopoly in it's marketspace? Maybe. I could see the argument go either way.
Like if my neighbors and coworkers and friends use Slack, I'm not sure if they're a proxy of the entire market.
The reason I say that is because there are other apps that do similar things that hail from Microsoft, Google and Facebook.
Then the retort goes: well they don't do integrations and aren't as developer focused as Slack and Hipchat.
Then, naturally, wouldn't that incentivize those other apps already in the market to build out those features, and do it better?
Business chats in general are just completely incongruent with what users are expecting from end-user chats like Telegram or WhatsApp or Messages. Even Google has fallen far behind with regards to Hangouts, and Allo is not a good answer either. From a business perspective, I get why businesses choose Teams or Allo, but the actual products have usability as an incidental feature. With both major players, the chats are just there to ensure that Slack cannot/will not grow, same with other programs such as Discord. It's a revenue stream that is yet untapped, and soon Microsoft and Google will come calling for their payment from Businesses.
1) It constantly minimizes for seemingly no reason (at least once a week).
2) The "Teams" and "Chat" menus are separate. They're in the same window in Slack, and that just makes sense.
2.1) The "Teams" menu won't list more than 4 channels per Team by default. If you want to open a channel there you have to open the menu or favorite everything. I know this can be fixed by good sanitation by Team admins but Slack's way of doing it encourages it automatically.
3) Can't invite outside users like you can with Slack.
4) The chat history is so short it has to load after maybe 10 lines when scrolling up.
5) The "thumbs up"/message menu covers the message when hovering over it so it's impossible to highlight a message to copy/paste starting from the right to the left. You can go the other way but I never have until Teams.
6) Updates take forever to release! I've googled issues that MS staff note as "on the docket" for adding but months later it's still not added.
7) I frequently don't see the toast/popup notifications for some reason. I don't know what's going on there and it could be me but I don't remember it happening when I used Slack at work.
8) When it updates it shuts down without notification.
9) This might be the Android "work profile" in play but if I get a call or sometimes even a message the Android notification will not go away until I restart my phone.
I mean, Slack isn't perfect but I didn't have any complaints about it except that the call functionality would disconnect randomly.
Bookmarking exists, but you can't link to public bookmarked chats.
5 is a surprisingly frustrating one for us as the exact way it occurs is simple: Someone messages you, then right away attaches a ticket number, for example, which appears on the second line. The context menu will obscure this number completely, and only if there is enough whitespace on the line to double click to "Select All" can you select it.
Teams gives incredibly limited access to the calendar, insomuch that you can only go a few days back and forth, not a week for example, and you can't block out your time via Teams (i.e., add just an appointment time for yourself, since you need to add someone else to the meeting)
The mobile client seems to be absolutely the only application that decides there is a low internet condition, despite every other application on my phone fetching content happily and freely (Outlook on Android likes to do this too and refuse to fetch message content, frequently requiring a force quit of the Application to recover from and the Application becomes completely unresponsive)
Back to the Desktop app, it's also quite slow just in general, moving between Team Chats is very sluggish whereas other chat programs handle this in a snappy and graceful manner. File uploads are very awkward, and the fact that dragging and dropping a picture from a browser uploads it as Sharepoint content instead of as just inline (like other messaging clients) do is just a bit asinine. To have to first drag it to the desktop, then attach the file is just another annoyance.
All in all, for me it's just comparing what Teams offers to what something like Telegram offers, and it's night and day between the two. Most of the time in our org, as soon as you're past the acquaintance stage with someone after discussing an issue on Teams, you ask to be allowed to talk with them on Telegram instead.
For the actual chatting part of a chat program, it's really bad. For internal video/calls, it's not too bad (though our experience trying to use the Web-version to make a video call was an exercise in Microsoft frustration, as we found out that we basically had to use Edge if we wanted to use the Web Version to do it, and even then it didn't work). Nevermind that a Safari Version has been promised from months at this point without any delivery.
To me Teams feels like Microsoft saw that there was revenue in locking clients into their chat eco-system, but didn't have a product ready, so they decided to release Teams and just get everyone onboard. My cynical take is that soon they realized they didn't have to compete if they bundled Teams with their Office packages and called it a Slack Competitor; suddenly, the decision was pay for something like Slack, or a "Slack Competitor" you already bought.
I will give Teams this thought, their bot integration is very nice. I think Telegram does it a bit better, but we do make very good use of the chat bots for basic automated updating and information distribution.
Similarly, I personally find the bundling->anticompetitive argument very unconvincing, especially given G-suite and other players in the cloud office space, especially in this context as atlassian's business model "rhymes" pretty heavily.
(As always disclaimer all opinions are my own, etc etc)
I haven't tried Teams yet, but I struggle to imagine how anything could be worse than the current state of Skype for Business and still function even minimally.
I've used Slack for 2+ years, hipchat for ~1 year, Discord for gaming for years, and now Teams for ~1 year. For work, I like Teams best.
In my mind the most significant, perhaps the only significant, difference between Teams and the rest is the threaded-by-default approach. It was hard to get used to at first, but this make it so much easier to keep track of different conversations that would otherwise overlap. In my mind, it's the best of both chat and email. Slack kind of does this but it's not nearly as seamless. You have to hover over the small reply icon and most of the time people don't do this. In Teams, you are forced to use threads and I think it is a good thing. Teams definitely has its quirks but with the velocity of improvements I've seen, most have already been fixed and I'm optimistic the rest will all be ironed out before long.
I don't even include Skype for Business in this comparison because in my mind Skype for Business is in a completely different category. It doesn't do the same things. And I can't think of another software product I dislike as much as Skype for Business / Lync.
Jokes aside, how is this anti-competitive other than trivially reducing the number of total competitors? If 4th place wants to give up in the race, should all of their work be in vain? AFAIK a product like Slack doesn't require tons of up-front legislation preventing new entrants in the race. Competition in this domain is very much alive, regardless of what a few big kahunas decide to do.
That's a sensible business move that lets them allocate resources to their strengths. To believe it's some kind of secret or illegal deal is pretty naïve. It's obviously not a mistake either - Hipchat is technologically behind other products on the market, and Atlassian has other core products that are doing really well (JIRA, for example).
Then Slack starts up later - makes literally the same exact product, and manages to surpass, and eventually subsume Hipchat.
Crazy.
I hear a lot of people on HN say it was "Just IRC" and I'm always surprised by that. If IRC was so compelling then why didn't it take off? Why did Slack have a meteoric rise? It can't be for no good reason.
I think the answer is that the interface fluff they added is actually extremely important and valuable. They made it dead simple, and fun to use for EVERYONE. My limited experience with IRC was honestly not great (please don't kill me, I'm sorry). Where is the mobile app? How do I get notified when I'm not online? What is EFNet/Freenode/etc? I use a slash command and paste my password in plain text to login? I can't just paste an image?
Social apps are extremely difficult to get right. People seem to discount "silly" things like Emoji reactions. Honestly it DOES sound silly to say this, but it really is a great way to express and communicate. This is especially true for our large and diverse team. It also cuts down a TON of message spam ("Congrats!", "Yay!" etc)
Until one day someone created a Telegram group. Now we are all there, the conversation might not be as fluid as IRC, each is in their own timezone, but it is there.
Mobile basically made the "all clients synced from anywhere" a necessity, and then lack of IRC client development for things like rich media hurt to boot.
For code, wiki, and issues, it's self hosted Gitea. It's a dream to fire up thanks to Go and SQLite, and users forget you're not at GitHub.
Nothing more than those two plus email needed here, yet anyway.
People seldom seem to acknowledge this, but software apps go through fads just like everything else. Slack won because it was the new hotness and it was able to get the network effect snowball. Especially in the beginning, small things matter a lot, and Slack was pretty polished right out of the box.
IRC's main issues in my opinion are a lack of integrated file/attachment handling (you can't just post that meme GIF in a channel without finding someplace to upload it first) and hideous clients. If there were more free clients like the Colloquy Mac client I still use even though it basically has been abandonware for almost a decade, I think IRC would have had an easier time getting traction.
Indeed so, if judging in a reference frame of gross oversimplifications and dismissing importance of details.
I hate Slack, the client, the cloud lock-in. But I think they and those in between of golden IRC times and them did refine team chatting experience.
Speaking of my own experience: it's now easier to follow discussions and way easier to form more complex messages (mostly thanks to markdown) that convey your point. Just some things of the top of my head.
I'll admit, re: IRC - yes, that's a stretch and ignores details. It's more that Slack managed to kick Hipchat's butt so thoroughly that really surprised me.
All in all I would guess that slack will probably retain more than 80% of users, which is pretty good.
We don't want to use slack.
I still find it hard to believe that so many companies are okay with doing that.
Amazon probably has more, if not better, security and engineers than most of the companies we're talking about.
And Slack has...? A bunch of VC money and a hastily thrown together chat app?
I've been toying switching to mattermost for a year now though. See how it goes.
It's perpetual consolidation in enterprise, nothing has changed about that in decades. Microsoft eats Github. Atlassian eats Slack (or some other company does). Maybe Atlassian is the next Oracle, or maybe Oracle or Salesforce or SAP or Microsoft eats Atlassian.
The one thing every scenario has in common: the little fish don't stick around and cooperate, they all get eaten and merged into ever larger companies. Nothing can stop that process, all the little fish have shareholders more than willing to sell when the big price comes in from the giants.
PeopleSoft, Siebel, Sun, MySQL, Great Plains, Sybase, Business Objects, Ariba, SuccessFactors, Concur, RightNow, Taleo, MuleSoft, Demandware, ExactTarget, etc etc
It's the same thing going on over and over again. The little fish never stick around. Box will end up in someone's stomach just the same as the rest.
It would be nice if Slack took a leaf out of the Hipchat play book and made a native (non-electron) Mac app.
(Crazy btw that I get downvoted to oblivion within seconds for asking an honest question.)
That said, there are ways to create performant electron apps (vscode as an example), just seems like slack isn't able to do that for some reason.
https://mattermost.com/
And based on the numbers in the article, it seems like Atlassian had less than 4% marketshare (Slack expects single digit growth - and assuming they have around 50% of the market)
This deals seems like the last step before a full - and in competitive terms logical - merger between Slack and Atlassian.
That's pretty dependent on which way Slack decides to go in terms of facilitating large Enterprises' needs for absolute control of and visibility into communications platforms. Monitoring and governance of Slack is, at present, a goddamned nightmare. The third party tools that currently exist are, in my experience, somewhat unreliable, and all of them are crippled by the fact that Slack's API drastically limits visibility into the platform. I've worked with more than one very large Enterprise customer with special compliance needs whose Slack instance(s) are one foul-up away from having a regulator rain down fines/sanctions, and in every case Slack is pretending like the issues don't exist while my customers shove their head in the sand. And compliance aside: the Slack API doesn't even have methods in place to deal with things like emoji-react trolling on read-only announcement channels, and a plethora of other little features required to control toxic and obnoxious behaviors.
I love Slack to death, but it's not an Enterprise product yet.
Well, not all of your customers. Unless Slack is introducing a self-hosted version?
They've already nuked the page on the self-hosted hipchat offering, which now redirects to https://www.atlassian.com/partnerships/slack
Which is a complete bummer. Slack isn't an option for us.
It's pretty simple to adjust permissions using Riot - I haven't tried it with the other clients, though.
* Rocket.chat https://rocket.chat/
* Mattermost https://mattermost.com/
* Riot/Matrix https://riot.im/
And XMPP is not completely dead, depends on what you mean "comparable features".
--Hipchat onprem user
¹: https://twitter.com/b0rk/status/986444234365521920
When did you last try Zulip on Android? I agree it was pretty much unusable in 2017, but everyone who actively uses it agrees it's improved a lot in recent months (I use it every single day, and have a good experience using it to get my work done). The mobile apps remain our top engineering focus area, since they're certainly far behind the desktop experience's level of polish, but we've generally stopped hearing new users describe them as "unusable".
I should also mention that Zulip's threading model makes the experience of replying to a conversation when you get back to your computer feel great, which isn't true for any other chat tool. You don't have to be glued to your keyboard/phone in order to communicate effectively or avoid missing out on participating in important conversations, and I can't emphasize enough how much better this makes life.
That doesn't eliminate the value of mobile (as I said, this is our top focus area right now), but it's a big part of why people love Zulip today, despite the mobile experience being way behind the desktop experience.
* Self-hosted (simple web application), a Docker image is available, Debian package incoming
* Chatrooms and one to one chat with file sharing, embeded pictures, administration, discoverability, message editing, archives management, synchronisation between devices
* Post publication in Communities and personnal accounts
* Compatible with XMPP transports and services like Biboumi to bridge it with IRC
* Responsive so it fit on your desktop and your mobile (the UI is also fully in sync between your devices)
* Video-conferencing (one to one)
* and many other things…
You can check it on https://movim.eu/ and give it a try :)
P.S.: I'm the maintainer of the project
JIRA promises armchair management, but I've yet to see those tools actually work. That being said, you may be a better JIRA user than anyone I know. JIRA has always be promoted as a tool from the top down, never from the bottom up.
[1] - https://www.phacility.com/phabricator/
The Jira we use at work has gone overboard. There is too many ways to specify and people are confused. For example, we have "blocks" (B cannot be finished without A closed) and "follows" (B cannot be started without A closed).
[1] https://clubhouse.io
Now almost the entirety of its functionality is to help various middle managers track things that are important to them, while continuously making development slower. Manager 1 wants to track Metric A? Add a drop down. Manager 2 wants to track Metric B? Add a new form to fill out. And tie them all together with workflows so that you can't do your work and mark it as complete until all the boxes are checked and fields are filled.
Those that haven't experienced this probably just haven't worked in a medium or large corporation.
This!
So true, though I expect that of the HN crowd (given it's hosted by YC).
Everytime I hear someone praise Jira, I think "Do you have more than 100 people using the same instance?" Middle manage needs charts and reporting, and that's Jira's strength. It's an absolute disaster to use on a daily basis.
It’s really an organizational problem, not the tool.
- Jira is pretty bog-standard these days, huge installed base. It's a bit weird to administer, and not as powerful in many ways as I'd like (especially compared to a more flexible system like ServiceNow). However, it's entrenched and a lot of people like it.
- Confluence is a top tier wiki. I actually find it very nice to work with, both from an editing, organizing, and also an API standpoint. It's much nicer than MediaWiki or Sharepoint for this purpose, and though it's not ideal for collaboration on MS documents, it's still very solid for working on shared documentation.
- Bamboo is a decent build system. It's lagging behind Jenkins in terms of integrations and support for source-controlled declarative build stuff, but for teams that like to point and click it works well, and the support for parallel builds, branch builds, etc. is all much easier than it is in Jenkins.
- Bitbucket is a reasonable choice for on-prem Git hosting. I prefer GHE, but if you have the rest of the Atlassian apps, there are some integrations that are nice, and it's not terribly expensive, so if you have ops familiar with running Atlassian apps it may be a good choice for you.
That's about it. Not something I love, but definitely not something I hate. Their support is also quite good, and guided me through a painful upgrade of a stack that my predecessors had left neglected for five years with no patching. Can't complain about that!
Can you explain why you feel this way? I've felt nothing but frustration using Confluence internally. It seems to continually get in the way and have an obtuse and unintuitive way of doing things.
IT departments in charge of installing and upgrading Jira don't tend to bother with optimizing it, and most companies don't have dedicated Jira admins.
So you either have a motivated employee that will moonlight as an admin and figure out how to make it better in their spare time, or you just end up using all the defaults, which most projects probably don't need.
In my org, I noticed this and created a github repo to push documentation in Markdown. I created initial version of docs and now every engineer in our team uses it because they know markdown, appreciate version controlled docs and can use whatever editor they want to. This repo is now filled with quality documentation for most of our stack and operations.
How exactly is it Confluence's fault if your team does not update the docs?
I wouldn't be surprised to learn that many folks when faced with the prospect of updating a document using the Confluence editor will instead just find something less terrible to do.
I often write my entire document first using the old style Confluence markdown, and when done I import it into a new Confluence page. You can't take an existing document and convert into markdown, but if you are the only person working on the document this is a workable approach.
I find that hard to believe but have reported it to Atlassian?
If all the problems which have mentioned are true why not move to something else?
I think my issue with Atlassian software is that it feels so unopinionated—they've added every option and customization because they have such a large enterprise customer base with unique needs—and the result is that it becomes byzantine and unfriendly because it can do _everything_.
Oh dear god no. Our company runs mixed Jira and Service Now, and for all Jira's disadvantages, at least I can get a link. to a ticket. To you know, reference or share. Without explaining the awful UI for where people need to put the ticket number in if they want to see it.
- Jira is tolerable. Many of the more essential features are only available as plugins and many of them feel like ugly bolt-on hacks (looking at you, Insight) to the point that Atlassian won't even investigate your problems unless you replicate them without plugins. But my largest complaint about the system is how dreadfully corporate and boring it feels to me in a very abstract sense. Jira is the least fun I can have with computer.
- Confluence's search is abysmal; fgrep would do a better job. The markup language could use improvement but it's not that awful.
- No comment on Bamboo and Bitbucket. I'm not a developer.
Most of the time companies stick with their own products as if they were a sacred cow no matter the costs.
Maybe WASM to Electron is in the horizon? :)
Why does it seem so hard to get chat right? Heck, Yahoo Messenger had lots of features in about year 2000 that we still lack or struggle with in newer products?
Can you humor me with some nostalgia and tell me what features of Yahoo Messenger you used?
Does anyone here have some experience using Teams? Is it really in competition with Slack?
It's exactly the same product as Slack, almost carbon copy.
Weird, I have never had those issues, and have been using Slack heavily on a daily basis for a couple of years.
All that users need, most of the time, is a web app and a smartphone app for private messages.
Channels and voice are special cases. Voice is hard to achieve, and channels are usually covered by private servers.