Group Chat, Group Voice, Persistent Chat Rooms: Alternatives to Skype?

January 30, 2015 7:30 AM

My company has been using Skype as a chat (1-1, Group), voice (1-1, Group), and occasional video group chat app. Screen sharing is also used occasionally. The problem is, it doesn't do any of those things particularly well, with tons of dropped calls / dropouts, lack of a directory of group chats, poor quality screen sharing.

We've piloted HipChat, and it has a lot of the features we need (index of rooms, chat, files, other nice things), but it doesn't do group audio or video.

Can you suggest other things we should try? I'm in the development department, but our solution needs to be usable by people with a range of technical skill levels.

Thanks!

posted by grubby to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

What about Google Hangouts?
posted by xingcat at 7:32 AM on January 30, 2015 [4 favorites]

Yeah; seconding Google Hangouts. My experience is that Hangouts and Skype are roughly equivilant for one-on-one audio chats, but Hangouts is better at anything even slightly more complicated.
posted by Betelgeuse at 7:34 AM on January 30, 2015

Slack just bought Screenhero.
posted by santry at 8:07 AM on January 30, 2015 [2 favorites]

My company uses Fuze.
posted by girlmightlive at 9:03 AM on January 30, 2015

Response by poster: I don't like that there's (apparently) no way to initiate a call in Hangouts without video. Slack is slick, but the audio / video stuff isn't integrated yet.
posted by grubby at 8:49 AM on February 1, 2015