Please extend the HipChat shutdown deadline!

[Zoltán Lehóczky]

The 15 February deadline for the HipChat shutdown is coming fast. And although the announcement came about half a year before that I'm sure that not everyone is fully ready, and it would help to have a bit more time for the final push (not to mention having some more safety time to be able to go back to HipChat after moving to the new platform).

Microsoft is also still working on supporting some kind of migration for people who'd move to Microsoft Teams, and having more time to test the migration app we've created would be quite nice too.

So Atlassian, could you please consider extending the deadline by let's say a month? Thank you!

[Mirek]

To be honest .. not sure if Atlassian would do this..

In my opinion half a year is a pretty good time to plan moving to an alternative solution. If this would be Slack, rocket.chat, Mattermost, Microsoft Teams or any other.. Most of them have already reacted to market change and prepare solutions to migrate to them.

If you cannot migrate before that date I suggest you to simply test exporting all of your data and keep somewhere safe.. Later you can maybe try to import it to a solution that you would be using.

[Zoltán Lehóczky]

I agree that half a year ought to be enough but still we see our clients starting to push the matter just now. Switching out something as crucial and central to a team (company) as HipChat is not an easy task, especially if the platform you plan to move to wasn't already prepared for a HipChat import at the time of the announcement.  One of the biggest players, Microsoft Teams, was not prepared at all and still isn't.

Now I'm not arguing for Atlassian to help out Microsoft, but rather to offer additional breathing room for those HipChat customers who'd choose something else than Slack.

[Mirek]

Hi @Zoltán Lehóczky,

I agree with what you are saying, however no matter how much time you would give to people most of them would always say that there is a reason to extend. Good that Atlassian is communicating this all the time and not simply waiting up to this date.

Think that you can still do maybe is to give feedback via this form..

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/PRK7PK5

[Zoltán Lehóczky]

Thanks, I've filled out the survey.

Extending the deadline last minute is much more powerful than having a longer deadline in advance :). My point is that such a migration is hard and Atlassian caused some huge headache for all of their HipChat customers. Doing such gestures makes it easier to get over the headache (and thus e.g. remain loyal to Atlassian's other services).

[elbrunner]

Same for me, but deadline ends in July. We've asked Atlassian to extend the deadline for several reasons (e.g. Slack postpone their hosting in europe further and further back) but they answered, that they have sold all their messenger rights to Slack and they don't have any options of influencing that. That's not the answer, we've expected, as they push the customers to migrate to Slack.

[Zoltán Lehóczky]

Keep in mind that Slack is not the only option. It's a very good chat app, but it's "just" a chat app. We were hesitant to use yet another independent platform for this (HipChat was part of the many Atlassian services we use) so we went with Microsoft Teams instead, which offers a lot more tools for collaboration.

The main selling point for us was the great webmeeting capabilities that we need but Slack only offers some basic features for that. And the migration app we've developed that I linked above was good enough for this (it imports all rooms and attachments into Teams from HipChat).