Multi-platform IM solution for small-medium business?
Jammin1911
Icrontian
Hi Icrontic,
I manage a small admin team and team of field technicians (roughly 125 total users) who I need to keep in contact with, in an organized fashion.
The field tech (majority of users) are going to be on their mobile devices most of the time, while the admin people (7 users + myself) are on Windows PCs most of the time, but sometimes mobile.
The best solution I've found to date, unfortunately, is WhatsApp. My issue with WhatsApp is that we make heavy use of groups and the group admin tools/features are crap. There is also limited functionality in general.
Lync was very promising, and I sold my bosses on the ~$5/month for Office365 and Lync online - but Lync (Lync Online anyway) turned out to be kind of crappy. Feature wise it is great however in practical use it's very clunky, switching between devices is pretty much broken, Lync Online has no persistent chat functionality (deal breaker for us), it is not compatible with our the audio hardware that nearly ever user in our office uses (Onboard Intel HD Audio.. how did they screw that one up?).
Line Messenger, functionality wise, was a step in the right direction to what I was looking for however it's very immature in it's presentation so it was quickly disregarded.
So I'm out of ideas, I've tried quite a few at this point.. does anyone have any suggestions? Pay solutions are okay if the price is reasonable and self-hosted solutions are an option as well - I know they're out there but I've never really looked in to any of them, when I started it seemed to be a bit over my head.
Group Functionality with good admin tools and persistent "chat rooms" and Multi-Platform support (Windows Phone, iPhone, Windows 7/8, Android, Blackberry all need to be supported) are the two primary features I'm looking for.
Comments
I'm not sure if it covers all of your mobile platforms, but we use HipChat pretty extensively here. We're on the hosted version right now, but working on bringing it in-house.
Not sure on the costs for in-house, but even if you need all the advanced features, it looks like $2/month/user. For basic IM/Chat, etc, it's free, though.
@AlexDeGruven Very cool software! Unfortunately like you said Blackberry and Windows Phone are not supported and we do have a bunch of those users we need to cover.
Also, is it just me, or is it very strange that the self hosted option is more than double the cost of the cloud hosted option............
So I looked in to HipChat a little bit further and it turns out the Android .apk can be sideloaded on to BlackBerry OS 10 devices and there is an unofficial open source Windows Phone client so I'm going to give this one a shop. Thank you very much for the suggestion @AlexDeGruven !
Also look into Slack. My team has used both products but we settled on Slack.
https://slack.com/
Thanks Buddy Jesus! slack looks awesome but holy damn is it expensive! After I'm done some HipChat testing I'm going to check out slack as well, maybe that will answer my questions regarding pricing
Try it for free first. That way you can show value if you like it and there is zero infrastructure/time costs to get it setup.
https://slack.com/r/024fspsl-02d5e5gq gets $100 of credit.
IRC?
eww
We use Slack as well. It performs quite well for our 38 independent users and also connects into our main Com framework as well, so that all the different regional admns can communicate with my teams and I. I am happy I work for people who don't mind paying for things that are proven resources.
Slack Master Race.
Slack.
@Thrax you are obligated to be pushing Lync Online for $4/month now arent you?
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Also, just saw this:
Just use Google Hangouts. Flexible, multi-platform, and free.
Yeah, it's been pretty flaky. One of the big reasons why we're bringing ours in-house.
Free Slack best slack if you're a slacker.
@Thrax yep I saw that outage as well (first hand) but then I looked at the Slack status page and they seem to have outages just as often (or more often) than HipChat... :/
I don't ever see the free slack down. Doesn't mean it doesn't happen, but it has been available every time I click over to it. I keep it pinned firefox.
Also, there's a pretty decent Windows client now too.
As a full-time HipChat user, I'll say that outages, while irrationally irritating, don't seem frequent. Their notes hint at tremendous growth, and overall the service has very steadily improved over the last 2 or 3 years.
Google Hangout, in my experience, has been unreliable at best, and a maddening odyssey of "omfg which account is this invite under / this mobile app might as well be a cardboard box" at worst.
?? For slack? All I see is the chrome "app window" stuff.
https://fool.slack.com/apps
@Tushon https://slack-ssb-updates.s3.amazonaws.com/releases/Setup.exe
Wow, that looks ... exactly like the chrome app version. I wonder if it performs better. I guess if your preferred browser is something other than chrome, you'd need that if you didn't want a window to have slack in it.
I second Google Hangouts.
Barring that, see what an IM client for your PBX would be.
Or set up your own Jabber server. My crappy $10/month hosting has a one-click install for it.
So, TIL (well, yesterday, but whatever), HipChat (and probably Slack, as I look deeper) uses XMPP/Jabber as its underlying protocol, which means your client options are wide open as long as you don't require any of the special premium features.
I think most everything uses xmpp? Whether or not it's been modified to do weird things, and is now incompatible with a vanilla IM client is a different story...
Back in the day you could use Google Talk with A Jabber server. Maybe go old school and use a Jabber server with Trillian desktop and mobile (yes, they're still around - and one of the few mobile I'M clients that can also do Facebook messaging...without the security concerns.)
Just trying to think of how to do it free. Or very cheap if the server isn't self hosted.
Mine is mostly because I have a billion browser windows and tabs open anyway and having one more drives me insane. A dedicated app just gives me a single thing I can pull up and know what it is. I've never had it crash though.
https://slack.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/201727913-Connecting-to-Slack-over-IRC-and-XMPP
that, plus Slack, plus this: http://xmpp.org/xmpp-software/clients/
edit: ctrl-f for "Windows/ OSX / Mobile / Browser", one entry: Trillian. IT'S LIKE I KNEW.
Or the native slack apps for mobile + web client for desktops (or better)