Bringing Structure to your HipChat Instance

Is your HipChat instance growing and growing? Does it become harder and harder every day to find the right room or person? Well we've been having similar issues at De Persgroep but came up with some guidelines to start seeing the wood for the trees again.

Screenshot 2017-10-07 at 20.41.23.jpg

In particular we've created some naming conventions for:

  • Account names
  • Mention names
  • Rooms

Account Name

The account name is the ultimate way of identifying who you're chatting with. So this should clearly identify who you are. Most commonly your first name + last name is more than enough to help others find you on HipChat. 

But once you get more than 500 HipChat users it tends to get harder. At de Persgroep, we have over 30 squads/teams and from time to time you simply want to get in touch with someone within that squad. Therefor we decided to add the squad name to our Account Name as well. 

Fe.: Maarten Cautreels (Digital Nomads)

Mention Names

Using your nickname as a mention name seems logical. This is how you identify in online communities, games, etc. But can I expect that all my 500+ fellow HipChat users know that I use Duckness or MCautreels as my nickname? Probably not. So we decided to have mention name FirstnameLastname.

Fe.: @MaartenCautreels

This certainly helps to know who is being mentioned in a conversation. Imagine your colleague sends the following message: 

@Duckness are you here? 

How would you know who @Duckness is? I would certainly know who @MaartenCautreels is.

HipChat Out of Office

Some don't mind getting HipChat notification when they're having a day off, others do. But basically, when you're taking a day off, you should get a day off. You could off course turn off notifications from your HipChat but we agreed on another way to let your colleagues know you're on holiday.

We add our holiday period to our Account Name:

image2016-11-16 8_14_48.png

 

Adding it to your Mention Name as well, helps for those on mobile:

image2016-11-16 8_18_14.png

 

An extra plus to changing your mention name is that this breaks any mentions in aliases you've setup. See Alias bot for more info on Aliases.

Don't forget to change it back to normal when you get back to work.

Rooms

We have a HipChat instance with almost 1.000 (pretty active) rooms and finding the right room for your question is pretty difficult.

Location Location Location

We have office across 3 countries and sites with multiple buildings. Having a room for each of these locations/buildings helps to communicate location specific announcements. Fe.: free ice cream at 2pm at the restaurant in Kobbegem.

That message wouldn't make sense for someone in our Amsterdam office. So these messages typically get shared in the Location Kobbegem room. 

Team Rooms

Most of our teams/squads have their own room (either private, public or both). A couple of public team rooms as an example:

  • Anonymous Squad
  • Tar.get() Squad
  • Digital Nomads Squad
  • Seduction Squad
  • ...

Fun ...

  • Fun @ Work

  • Fun Running

  • Fun TetriNET

  • Fun Counter Strike

Expert ...

The best place for your questions about a certain topic

  • Expert HipChat
  • Expert Mongo
  • Expert Gigya
  • Expert JavaScript

1 comment

Kevin Pauwels March 5, 2018

Duckness ++

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