Messaging applications have become the most common way for development teams to collaborate in real-time, with each other as well as their application and infrastructure. Since Pantheon and other common development tools allow for integration, a team’s messaging solution is often the centralized hub for notifications from application performance monitoring, version control platforms, project management application updates, and automated testing results.
Even Drupal and WordPress sites can be configured to route information regarding application errors, job processing, or available updates, ensuring the right departments, teams or individuals are made aware.
Because most messaging apps have a searchable history, file storage, and rich interaction, they often provide more streamlined team collaboration than email or conference calls.
Pantheon’s platform was designed with collaboration in mind—between developers, site owners, project managers, or any other team member involved with a site or an organization. It’s easy to add team members securely across all Pantheon sites within an organization. It’s also easy to work together without stepping on another team member’s code. And when Pantheon is augmented with a messaging application, not only can team members work more closely together, they can be automatically informed when code is deployed to a Pantheon environment or when applications require attention.
Slack provides messaging, API integration with external applications, video and voice calling, file sharing and many other features. Slack has apps for Mac, Linux, Windows, iOS, and Android. Slack allows a user to be signed into multiple teams, so it is an ideal tool for many users whom are using Slack for work as well as an open source project or software conference.
Slack allows for public rooms to be quickly and easily spun up as needed for ad/hoc customer interactions, which is helpful during launches and faster than setting up conference calls. This allows agencies to have a dedicated channel with a searchable history for any customer, which also displays recent code deploys, messages from New Relic’s performance monitoring, or other relevant notifications.
[BLOG] Posting Drush Site Audits to Slack with Quicksilver
[DOC] The Pantheon Community and Power Users Group
Hipchat is an Atlassian product, and provides fast and seamless integration with Jira, Bitbucket and other tools in the Atlassian Suite. It offers external integration with a host of other applications, as well as custom integration via its API. Video chat is also easily kicked off through the downloadable application for Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS, or Android. Hipchat offers a free and paid version, with the latter offering unlimited file storage, unlimited chat history and group video chat. HipChat also offers an on-premises version, which can be installed on internal servers.
Hipchat allows for an unlimited number of integrations: with Atlassian products, such as Bitbucket or Jira; with a large set of pre-configured integrations, such as Google Drive, SalesForce or Trello; with “connector apps” such as Zapier; or finally, by using the HipChat API with your custom code. Drupal and Wordpress sites can be configured to send notifications or warnings to the HipChat, and Pantheon’s Quicksilver hooks are easily configured to send notifications when code is deployed to a site.
