Internal chat apps: how to save time and increase collaboration

Nieman Lab’s Caroline O’Donovan recently wrote about visiting Gawker’s offices in Manhattan and being surprised by the silence she encountered.
The reason? Everyone was talking via chat.

Gawker editor-in-chief Max Read then announced all of the internal chat discussion going on would be published externally on a new “Disputations” vertical with the idea being audiences would get extra value out of those discussions.

That’s a step most publishers wont quite be willing to take, but it does point to the fact that more and more teams are finding more efficient ways to communicate – something becoming increasingly important in an age where the traditional journalist/advertising/development walls in many organisations are being broken down.
We’ve rounded up a few of the most popular options available.

Slack

Slack has taken the industry by storm in a few months, and is used by teams at The Times, The Atlantic (including Quartz), Business Insider, Slate, The Guardian, Nieman Lab, the NYT and BuzzFeed.

The application supports private and group communication which can be organised into “rooms” – think one room for your reporters, another for your developers, and so on.


Slack can also be integrated with a number of other apps including Dropbox, Google Hangouts and Docs, Twitter, and GitHub, and some newsrooms have even built bots/webhooks that pull in election results or people’s schedules – massive advantages that entire teams can simultaneously use.

Slack’s killer features appear to be those webhooks and the fact up to the last 10,000 messages are searchable – very useful in large teams. Also: custom emojis.

Bitrix24

Bitrix24 is one of the more advanced options, which is closer to a company operating system than a chat app.

As well as the standard social messaging, Bitrix24 also has project management capabilities such as ToDo lists and tasks. These can be assigned to individual people or groups, and file storage and time-tracking capabilities are also included.

There’s also video, cloud storage, calendar and planning
Bitrix24 say over 200,000 organisations are already using the software.

Sqwiggle

Sqwiggle’s main selling point is that it sends photo snapshots of you throughout the day to a grid of your coworkers, “to keep you connected to your team.”

Some will no doubt find that too creepy and intrusive, but for business that have a lot of employees that work from home, it can be a useful feature. Click on a colleague’s face and you can instantly start video chatting with them, too.

Sqwiggle also has file sharing, group video, and dedicated support – something that its competitors Google Hangouts and Skype surprisingly don’t have yet.

HipChat

HipChat is used by companies including Quora, Hewlett Packard, Pinterest, and Wired Magazine.

As well as the usual private and group chat rooms, there’s screen-sharing, video chat, and drag-and-drop file sharing. It also has secure guest access allowing you to bring a client into a HipChat room and control what they can and cannot see.

It also hooks up to APIs and a number of other services in the same way Slack does. There’s not much between these two.

Campfire

Campfire is a web app which makes things slightly easier for teams that have installation privileges on lockdown.
Chatrooms can be password protected and clients can also be invited to participate. Inline YouTube viewing and support for Microsoft Office files is also included, as is conference calling.

Transparency initiative

Email isn’t sufficient for many organisations any more, as you end up with multiple voices and a crowded communications system that can easily ignore important people and include irrelevant employees when large email lists are brought into the equation.

The transparency that modern chat apps offers means teams can see what’s happening with other teams without necessarily having to ask them directly. That means fewer meetings and emails, and more in-the-know and time spent collaborating – something that any business can benefit from, not just publishers.

 Source : http://www.themediabriefing.com/article/communication-chat-apps-email-slack-bitrix24-sqwiggle-hipchat-campfire