Give Us All Your Email: Why Team Chat Will RuleGive Us All Your Email: Why Team Chat Will Rule

Chalk me down as a believer. After nearly six months of using a team chat app, I'm hooked, and I never want to go back to email.

Call it "team chat," "team messaging," "workstream communications and collaboration," or whatever else you want, apps like Atlassian HipChat, Cisco Spark, RingCentral Glip, Slack, Unify Circuit, and so many more are rapidly changing the way people communicate and collaborate. What started as a response to a growing affinity for texting, and hatred of email, is now bringing many positives (and a few negatives) to business collaboration.

At Nemertes we first looked into team chat apps in late 2014, but quickly decided they didn’t improve workgroup collaboration. At the time, the apps weren't all that user friendly and didn't have strong mobile clients. Our internal processes were tied to email, and ultimately we couldn't get any buy-in or find a problem that team chat could solve.

Fast-forward to this past January, when we launched an Agile approach to research development. Email, we discovered, was a poor medium for the continuous team collaboration that Agile demands and so we gave team chat another look. We quickly found that we finally had a substitute for email.

Team chat isn't all that new. Internet Relay Chat (IRC), for example, allowed early Internet users to carry on conversations on topics ranging from politics to chess. And back around 2007 Microsoft acquired Parlano, a vendor of a persistent chat room server that tightly integrated with Microsoft Live Communications Server and became a part of Microsoft’s on-premises instant messaging offering. However, outside of a few verticals like financial services, persistent chat spaces never really caught on, even as IM flourished.

Today, thanks to the ease of use, the fun factor,and growing availability of apps (I'm currently tracking 37 different team chat apps), team chat appears to be a collaboration tool whose time has finally arrived. Witness the entrance of large collaboration vendors like Cisco and Unify, Slack's rapid growth, Microsoft's acquisition of Talko (and reported interest in Slack), RingCentral's acquisition of Glip, ThinkingPhones purchasing Fuze, and most recently, BroadSoft's acquisition of Intellinote.

Ultimately, the goal of most team chat apps is to bring the conversational ease of texting in the consumer world into business, tying conversations to context such as projects, roles, and teams. We've found the following benefits to using team chat for our internal communications:

Using team chat hasn't been all roses, though. After nearly six months of use, we have found some challenges:

For me, the thought of giving up team chat apps and going back to email is about as enticing as trading in my iPhone for a feature phone. Team chat has made my communications and collaboration far more effective and fun, warts and all. If you aren't already looking into the team chat app space, what are you waiting for?

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