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Archive for the ‘HipTips’ Category

Keep Customer Dialogue Open with Guest Access

By Jeff Park | 3 weeks ago | 4 Comments

Internal chat is great, but sometimes you need to bring an outsider into the conversation. Guest access lets you do this by allowing you to bring guests into your chatroom via a URL. Invite outside consultants, contractors, or whomever you need into the conversation and get everybody on the same page. You can even invite customers to a chatroom, and this is where guest access becomes interesting.

We all know that listening to customers is important to the success of your business. However, it’s often difficult to have direct conversations with your customers. With HipChat, you can invite customers into chatrooms to talk to live support, get sales questions answered, or chat with devs about bugs or issues. We’ve even seen customers use HipChat to host user groups like CraftCMS does here:

The #craftcms chat room is open. Come join us this Friday afternoon for some great discourse!hipchat.com/gk5d6y2jq

— Craft (@craftcms) April 26, 2013

Cool! How do I set it up?

On the bottom right hand corner of a chatroom, you’ll see this dialog:

Guest access off

Simply check the box next to the Guest access dialog to turn it on. HipChat will provide a URL that you can use to invite anybody to your chatroom.

Guest access on

A guest can participate and chat just like a normal user while he/she is in the room, but guests will not be able to see any messages sent before entering or after leaving a chatroom.

We hope you enjoy using Guest access, and you find it useful in connecting with customers. Let us know the creative ways you’re using Guest access — or come and talk to us in person at UserConf NYC this Friday! We’ll be there handing out t-shirts and learning more about keeping our customers happy.

Pro Tips and Tricks for the Power User

By Jeff Park | 4 weeks ago | 14 Comments

Ever been the the first person on your team to introduce an emoticon to your office-mates? What a great experience that is. Everybody gets excited and praises your discovery. How progressive of you! How avant-garde! How hip!

If you haven’t had this experience, don’t fret. There are all sorts of hidden features that you can impress your team with. In this post, I’ll share some tips and tricks, and you’ll be showering in your coworkers’ admiration in no time.

Auto-hide .gif files - Let’s face it. Animated gifs is one of the best things about the internet. And HipChat is great at sharing them. But when everybody is posting their favorite gif, your computer can slow down and then nobody is having fun. So we’ve added an option to auto-hide gifs. Simply go to HipChat’s preferences and check the box to auto-hide .gif files.
Slash commands - We’ve blogged about these before, but we’ve added a couple more since the last time we wrote about them. Here are all of HipChat’s slash commands. Each of them takes the form “/<command> <argument>”
- /join <room name> - This will let you into any pre-existing room, but since HipChat rooms have fairly loose naming conventions (we allow things like spaces and non-alphanumeric characters), we generally suggest using the ctrl-t shortcut instead. Still, if you just can’t give up your IRC-style navigation, it can be helpful.
- /part - Leave the room you’re currently in.
- /available | /back | /here <msg> - Shortcut for setting your status to available (green bubble). The <msg> part is optional.
- /away <msg> – Set your status to away (yellow bubble). In appearance, this is the same as going idle, except it doesn’t automatically return your status to ‘available’ when you come back.
- /dnd <msg> - Set status to do not disturb (red bubble)
- /topic <msg> - Set the topic for the current room (just like if you hit ctrl-t or double clicked on the topic bar and typed something in)
- /code <msg> - Displays the message with code syntax highlighting (language is autodetected). Not yet available in all apps.
- /quote <msg> - Displays the message formatted with a monospace font, regardless of length or number of newlines in the message
- /me | /em <msg> - The “emote” command. This will let you display a line of grey text with your name at the beginning, similar to the style room join and leave messages. For example, if I typed “/me is happy.” it would show “Jeff Park is happy.” in the chat.
s/…/… - Everyone makes mistakes, but it doesn’t mean that you have to let anyone know about them. HipChat comes with a substitution command that will fix any spelling mistakes that you make in your last sent message. But you’ll have to be quick. You only have one minute before you’ll no longer be able to correct your mistake.
Web colors - For all of you designers out there, you can show pantone colors right in HipChat. Simply type in #<color hex>, and HipChat will render the color into your chat!
New emoticons - These pro tips are all about providing functionality to help you save time and work more efficiently. Because really, ain’t nobody got time for that. In that spirit, we are making (timeforthat) a global emoticon! Heck, we’ll even throw in (grumpycat) as well! Who’ll be the first to show it to their team?

Hope you find these tips useful. These are only a handful of tricks that HipChat’s got up its sleeve. Let us know what your favorite tips/tricks in HipChat are in the comments below!

Make HipChat your Team’s Command Center

By Jeff Park | 3 months ago | 4 Comments

Our customers love HipChat because it’s so easy to extend. HipChat connects to over 45 tools that your company uses every day. Here are 5 ways to make HipChat your team’s command center and stay on top of everything your team needs to know about.

1. Connect to JIRA and Pivotal Tracker

Every company has projects they need to manage. Keeping up with the issues your team needs to address for these projects is a breeze with HipChat. Integrate with project management tools like Atlassian JIRA or Pivotal Tracker, and receive updates whenever an issue is opened, commented on, or resolved.

2. Collaborate on code with Bitbucket or GitHub

With software eating the world, your team most likely has some code to work with. Tie in your repositories from Github and Bitbucket to receive a notification whenever a teammate pushes code, creates a branch, opens a pull request and more.

3. Builds and deploys with Bamboo or Jenkins

Deploying clean code is critical to your team’s success. Integrate HipChat with a continuous integration tool like Jenkins or Atlassian Bamboo and be the first to know whenever your code passes or fails a build. If your team deploys with Heroku, you can have HipChat send you a message to let you know a team member deployed your app.

4. Tackle customer service with UserVoice and Zendesk

No matter what your company does, the customer is critical to your success. Stay connected and provide immediate kick-ass service to your customers by bringing UserVoice and Zendesk into HipChat.

5. Missing something? Zapier has you covered

Using Zapier, you can integrate HipChat with any other tool your team uses. Zapier supports 200+ services and has a simple interface, so your team doesn’t have to spend any time writing code to get these integrations set up. Start getting notifications in HipChat in just a couple steps. Check out the list of services and instructions to set up your Zaps, and when you’re ready, sign up through this link to get an extra 100 tasks per month!

There’s no need to fumble around to stay updated of what’s going on. Keep a pulse on your team’s activity by integrating the tools you use with HipChat. With one service sending notifications, your team spends less time distracted and more time shipping awesome products.

HipTip: Slash commands

By Chris Rivers | 2 years ago | 15 Comments

Today, we bring you another HipTip that anyone coming from the world of IRC should enjoy. While keyboard shortcuts are great for most things, sometimes you need to add a little context to your commands. Enter slash commands.

All HipChat slash commands take the form “/<command> <argument>”:

/join <room name> - This will let you into any pre-existing room, but since HipChat rooms have fairly loose naming conventions (we allow things like spaces and non-alphanumeric characters), we generally suggest using the ctrl-j shortcut instead. Still, if you just can’t give up your IRC-style navigation, it can be helpful.
/part - Leave the room you’re currently in.
/available | /back | /here <msg> - Shortcut for setting your status to available (green bubble). The <msg> part is optional.
/away <msg> – Set your status to away (yellow bubble). In appearance, this is the same as going idle, except it doesn’t automatically return your status to ‘available’ when you come back.
/dnd <msg> - Set status to do not disturb (red bubble)
/topic <msg> - Set the topic for the current room (just like if you hit ctrl-t or double clicked on the topic bar and typed something in)

If there are any other slash commands that you wish HipChat had, let us know. We know how hard it can be to switch from another system for internal communication and we’re always looking for ways to improve workflows for people coming from other chat products.

HipTip: Shortcut Keys

By Chris Rivers | 3 years ago | 0 Comments

Something that I couldn’t live without in HipChat are shortcut keys. Unfortunately, we don’t really have any great way of informing users about them (at least not yet). Here are some of my favorites (btw anything using CTRL will also work using the command key on mac):

CTRL+W – Close the current tab. I’ve never been a fan of trying to mouse over little “X”s in tabs. It’s especially annoying if you want to close a bunch of tabs (maybe if you’re done for the day and want to close all your one-to-one chats). I also use CTRL+<tab number> in combination to quickly close tabs I don’t want open anymore.

CTRL+J – This one lets you join a room or one-to-one chat using a little auto-completing text field. If you find yourself going to the lobby and double clicking to start private chats often, this one might be quite a time saver. Just CTRL+J, type a couple letters, and chances are you’ll be good to go. If you just can’t get enough of the lobby though, you can use CTRL+1 to go to the lobby, start typing and your roster will filter in much the same way.

CTRL+F - Open the search box. Trying to look up something that was said yesterday in the room? A quick CTRL+F brings up search and you’re already focused to start typing.

CTRL+SHIFT+F - Upload a file. I have to say, I don’t use this one quite so much anymore now that HipChat supports pasting images directly, but it’s especially nice when you frequently upload files from the same place on your computer. Usually I’ll just hit CTRL+F and ↑ or ↓ a couple times and I’m ready to upload.

We’ve added a page that lists all of our current shortcuts here: http://www.hipchat.com/support/shortcut-keys. Let us know if you have any requests. We’ll be happy to try and get them in.