Poll: What chat service are you using for internal communication with your team?

24 points by mace ↗ HN
What chat service are you using for internal communication these days? If you're using something that is not an option, leave a comment.

56 comments

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We used skype at my last shop and it was not very smooth. I prefer self-hosted jabber / XMPP.
I suspected many in the community here would host their own XMPP server.

What XMPP server are you using or would you use?

I've had great luck with prosody. I used to use jabberd2, but I switched away from it due to its dependencies on various badly-maintained libraries.
We also use Prosody and like it. For us it's been very close to an "it just works" solution.
Internally hosted Jabber/XMPP. It's actually been one of our longer lasting decisions, so it was a probably a good choice.
We use Google Talk.

My setup is LimeChat -> Bitlbee -> GTalk.

At my last company we made heavy use of Yammer.
Microsoft Communicator. If you're in a big company that already uses MS Exchange for emails then it's a pretty easy integration. Probably not a great solution for small companies due to the cost.
The O365 plans that include Lync aren't really that expensive, surprisingly enough. It's not a reason to switch, but for companies already used to Exchange, it's probably a viable option.
Office365 makes the cost pretty low. And Lync has got to be one of the better MS products. It blows other PBX/presence solutions out of the water.

Probably the main reason it hasn't completely dominated is because MS is taking a weird partner-oriented approach to VoIP with it. So getting setup with some numbers and outbound calling is tons more work than it should be.

IBM's SameTime (part of Lotus Notes).
I used to be on a team which used SameTime. Although I disliked using Lotus Notes for email SameTime was a joy, especially the ability to take and send screenshots from the chat window.
We also figured out you can add arbitrary gifs as "emoticons" with built-in keyboard shortcuts and everything. Great fun ensued sending terrible reddit gifs to communicate :-)
Flowdock, it's great.
I'll second this. We have a team in New York and a team in Paris, and flowdock has absolutely been the best hub for seeing what's happening across teams, and communicating with each other
Private Jabber/XMPP server.
At Mashape, we use Flowdock
Phones... and long, agenda-less, ad-hoc meetings.

And sometimes XMPP.

Humbug: https://humbughq.com/signup/

Still pretty new, and in closed beta. But it adds an interesting threading/topic model onto the typically chaotic stream of most group chat apps.

We predominantly use our feet. Unless someone's snowed in, sick, or subcontracted (and not local) we just walk on over to their desk and talk. Or, hold an ad-hoc meeting. When someone's physically absent from the office, we have no standard policy (though Skype is common).
My company uses Communicator. Not a big fan TBH.

A stupid configuration prepends an underscore to urls, preventing it to be clickable. Hate it.

Lync.

Pros:

-Outlook Integration

-Screen Sharing

-Decent UI

Cons:

-Literally the worst copy & paste implementation I've ever seen.

-No third party chat protocol integration. (I want to integrate Facebook and Google's Jabber).

Edit: Formatting.

Lync as well, like it quite a bit. Big company (100000+) and Outlook/Lync is a given.
VoIP, email and very occasionally an internal messenger. The idea is not interrupting others too lightly, since we already have scheduled meetings. If something needs dealing with urgently, then these measures kick in.
Flowdock. Holy moly Flowdock is slow. Have to restart it a couple times every day. SO ANNOYING
I hope selecting two options was ok. We use a combination of IRC and Google Hangouts.
In what situations would you choose to use one service over the other?
Engineers use primarily IRC and collaborating with non-engineers is in a Hangout, although we'll use Hangouts too when just need to over something in detail over a short amount of time.
SneakerNet and XMPP
(comment deleted)
We use a combination of Socialcast and Google Hangouts.