Still waiting for migration from HipChat to Stride

[Trisha Miller]

Back in September 2017 we received an email announcing Stride and told we'd be updated "soon".....here's a quote from that email:

"We'll be releasing Stride to the world soon. We think you'll love it, so we've reserved a spot for you. No action needed! When it's time to upgrade, we will be in touch with you and move all your HipChat data to Stride for you."

Then in January 2018 I got another email, with this:

"We're currently inviting teams to upgrade to Stride over the next few months. If you're an admin of your Hipchat team, look out for an email from yours truly inviting you to upgrade."

Since then nothing......no invite, no contact at all.   I remember reading something very early on that said if we decided to upgrade early instead of waiting to be upgraded we would lose all history and other data.....so we've been waiting.

Our team is still all using the HipChat desktop app (which we prefer over the browser version) and I have a couple of minor issues with it but don't want to dig in since we're expecting that Stride should be available to us soon (?)

I can't find any way to contact anyone to find out exactly when our account will be upgraded but I'd like to do it soon, we just don't want to lose our chat history.

Any further updates on the process of migrating accounts from HC to Stride?

[Nágila Marques · Accepted solution]

Hi Trisha, 

Thanks for reaching out and thank you for your patience. We are super excited to see your Hipchat team in Stride soon! We’re still working diligently to upgrade teams from Hipchat to Stride, and your time to upgrade will come soon. 

When we're ready to begin upgrading your team from Hipchat, we'll reach out to you via email with all the information you need. We will take care of moving all your rooms, teammates, files, custom emoticons, and message history from Hipchat Cloud to Stride.

Based on your interest and enthusiasm about your team’s upgrade to Stride, we’ve added your team to our internal list of groups ready to go sooner rather than later. This should get things moving right along. Stay tuned for our separate email notification when the time is here.

In the meantime, we'd love to learn more about how your team has been using Hipchat. This will help us improve your experience using Stride. Check out this really quick survey:

•  http://www.surveygizmo.com/s3/4204352/Stride-Upgrade-Signup

Of course, if you have any questions at all, please don't hesitate to contact us. 

We'll be here for ya!

[Trisha Miller]

Aaaannd......I'm still waiting.  I did click on the link and completed the survey (almost 2 months ago now), and have heard nothing since.  :-(

[Javier Vidaguren]

Hello @Nágila Marques, would like to know the same.

We were about to migrate to Slack but stopped the project because of Stride migration announcement. Since then, almost an year has passed and still no news.

Do you have any concrete date or Atlassian will continue sending us "we're so close" emails till the end of time?

[Nágila Marques]

Don't worry, Daniel. After you receive the email, we will give your team time to make the decision to upgrade over to Stride. 

[Trisha Miller]

@Javier Vidaguren@Zoltán LehóczkyAfter looking at a long list of potential replacements we've settled on Glip from RingCentral (our #2 and #3 respectively were Flock and Chanty). 

https://www.ringcentral.com/teams/overview.html

Glip has a free level that is perfect for my small team, and their paid level for larger teams is very reasonably priced.  It has some nice features in addition to the IM-style communications, but the overall user-friendliness is what tipped the balance in their favor as my team is not particularly tech-savvy and I wanted to keep any confusion they'll go thru with migrating to a new tool to a minimum. :-)

Quite some time ago we were customers of RingCentral using their phone system (which I loved and was so sorry to see us move away from), so I can speak to the terrific team at RC - great software and great support.....I'm really happy with this decision and hope it might help others still looking for a Slack alternative.

Good luck to all!

[Zoltán Lehóczky]

Thanks Trisha!

[Trisha Miller]

@Nágila MarquesLike everyone else we just heard the sad news about the Slack buyout of HipChat, and we are NOT HAPPY about it.  We hated Slack and moved to HipChat for some sound reasons.

SO, what are our options BESIDES migrating to Slack?  Can we still purchase a version of HipChat Server that might last us a year or two until we can find a different Slack alternative?  Are you personally aware of any competitors we can check out?  We really, really, really do NOT want to go back to Slack........I would welcome ALL ideas please!!

[Nágila Marques]

Hey Trisha,

I'm sorry to hear you aren't as excited about the partnership as we are. Atlassian has put a lot of consideration into this. We anticipate the partnership will help facilitate integration and collaboration between the two companies. 

Since yesterday's announcement, it isn't possible to create new groups in HipChat Server, HipChat cloud or Stride. 

[Trisha Miller]

Very sad to hear that - a 'heads up' would have been nice, surely you must  have anticipated that a fair number of HC users would not be as excited as you are given that Slack is a bloated piece of crapware. :-(  

Guess we will start our search for a replacement, thank god we have until February.

[Javier Vidaguren]

Even more, Slack is 4 times more expensive than HC and -at the end of the day- features are the same.

Getting a 75% discount for the first year is not enough. Slack should keep HC customers's pricing and assume the cost of progressive ajustments.

That's would be a "we care about the customer of the company that we just acquiered" sign.

Right now we are looking for a new app other than Slack.

@Trisha Miller please share we us if you find any good prospect. Gonna do the same for you. ;)

[Trisha Miller]

@Javier VidagurenAgreed, it appears Atlassian did not "put a lot of consideration into this" or at least not consideration for their customers.   We left slack for those and many other reasons so we have no intention of going back to them......you have my word that if I find anything promising at all I will come back here and share it with you.   I know there are alternatives, but it will have to be - at the very least - as user-friendly as HC since many of my teammates are somewhat less than tech-savvy. ;-)

[Zoltán Lehóczky]

We haven't made our choice yet, but apart from slack one the candidates for us is Microsoft Teams. For that we've also created a migration app, see my post here: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Hipchat-discussions/HipChat-to-Teams-migration-app/m-p/985202

[Trisha Miller]

Thank you for the input Zoltan - much appreciated!

My understanding is that in order to use Microsoft Teams, you must also be a customer of Office 365, is that correct? 

We are a very small team and NOT Office 365 customer, so I've been looking at other alternatives, two that I particularly like are Flock (my first choice so far) and Chanty........both do more than we need, which is just a very simple IM function, but they seem pretty user-friendly and offer free versions for smaller teams.

[Zoltán Lehóczky]

No problem Trisha!

Yes, Teams if part of O365. Since we're already using it for mailboxes and else it's easier for us, but otherwise you need to sign up with O365.

The good thing is that Teams in its basic form is free (and you don't need to use or pay for anything else from O365 either). But if you outgrow it it seems the first paid tier is an O365 subscription which will probably include a lot of things you don't need: https://products.office.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/group-chat-software#sku-business-chart It seems to me that you'd be fine with the free tier for a long time though.

If you just want IM and since you're a small team probably Teams (and due to its pricing Slack as well) is too much for you (we also need the pretty good video chat and various access control features it provides). I'd encourage you to probably check out Discord (https://discordapp.com/) if you would change your mind on video chat (it's a good software but not suitable for a company like us). Or Basecamp (https://basecamp.com/) might be something that can cover all your collaboration needs (it has IM too but not voice, we use it for client communication on software projects and for that it works really well). The apps you mentioned seem fine too; something similar we also checked before is https://hey.space/.

[Trisha Miller]

Thank you so much for all the info & suggestions!  I will definitely look into those, and I didn't realize we could use Teams just by signing up for O365 without paying for anything, that's a huge plus.   Feb. 15 is coming up fast! :-)

[Zoltán Lehóczky]

Sadly it seems that Microsoft won't support the Teams migration better until then, so it's coming too fast! (Our Teams migration app can't do a a complete job because necessary integration points are missing in Teams; we try to do our best to work around those.)

[Zoltán Lehóczky]

Would Atlassian please consider extending the deadline? https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Hipchat-discussions/Please-extend-the-HipChat-shutdown-deadline/td-p/985575

[Daniel Leonhartsberger]

Hi @Nágila Marques,

Do you have any roadmap for this migration process? We also received this information, I received and replied to this survey twice and still no news on when it's expected to migrate our account from HipChat to Stride.

Dis you had better luck @Trisha Miller?

Thanks!

[Nágila Marques]

Hi Daniel, 

We don't have an ETA to provide customers for when all accounts will be migrated, but we'll send you another email with more information soon. Stay tuned! 

We're focused to make sure the upgrade goes well for everybody and that the transition from HipChat to Stride is as smooth as possible :) 

[Daniel Leonhartsberger]

hanks for the follow up! I just need to plan the internal migration and make sure it is a good moment for our team, but it's hard when I don't have an estimation for this.

I'll keep waiting for this e-mail then.

Kind regards

[Trisha Miller]

Many thanks Nagila for the update!  We will continue to wait, I just wanted to be sure we didn't miss it!  :-)