HipChat Cloud to Slack Migration
Wednesday, October 24, 2018
In late July of this year, Slack announced that it was purchasing HipChat from Atlassian. Because Concise has been using HipChat cloud for group collaboration for many years, we followed this news with great interest. Slack has a significant number of features that HipChat did not, such as limitless integrations with third party applications. However, if you are just interested in migrating because you have no other choice due to the sun-setting of the HipChat product, have no fear.
HipChat (and Stride) will be discontinued on February 15th, 2019, but thankfully there is a migration path (and web-based wizard) to ease the transition for HipChat users.
A summary of the process:
- Export your data from HipChat to a file
- If the file is larger than 2 GB, upload it to a file sharing service
- Import the data into slack
- Configure slack
An important note about changes in functionality and terminology:
- HipChat Rooms are referred to as Channels in slack.
- Hipchat Emoji were surrounded with (parenthesis), whereas Slack emoticons begin with a :colon
- The equivalent to HipChat’s @all is @channel in Slack
Another very important note about the migration. Custom icons (also known as emoticons, or emoji) are NOT transferred during the migration process. Surprisingly, Slack does not currently offer any options to bulk import emoji to Slack, from Hipchat or elsewhere. The only way to add custom emoji (slowly, one at a time) is by following the steps outlined here.