Today we released the integration of AgileZen with HipChat, a private group chat and IM client for businesses that has features like file sharing, video and voice chat, and cool emoticons. This integration allows HipChat to be used as another stream for notifications about work items. What this means for you is that you can get updates about story cards along with your chat if you’re using both tools. Even if you don’t have your AgileZen project open, you’ll still be up on the latest information!
This is a project-based notification system (as opposed to email and IM notifications, which are user-specific), so you can associate messages in a certain AgileZen project with a team room in HipChat. If you’re the account owner, you’ll see the new integrations tab on the home screen of your projects. All you need is your HipChat Auth Token and the Name or ID of the room you use for chat to get started. It’s really easy to set up, and the full instructions are available on our help site.
While this is our first integration, many of our customers have posted integrations they’ve written to the API forum on our help site. We have a lot of integrations planned for the future, but we started with this one for a few reasons. First, we use HipChat and we love it. We also use the GitHub/HipChat integration and have found it very useful for visibility in to what’s being committed. Our friends over at Adzerk use both AgileZen for project management and HipChat for team communication and thought it would be useful if they could have information about their work items from AgileZen posted to HipChat. We thought that this would also be really useful for us too, so Nate started working on a proof of concept for Freeform Friday, our version of hack days.
For the proof of concept, Nate created the AgileZen “cash register”, so that every time a customer buys an account, it posts that information to the chat. It’s a great way for everyone to have visibility into the number of new customers, and it’s definitely a motivator to see all the new sales as they come in. Now that we’ve been using this for a while, it was time to take Nate’s hack project and make it into a customer-facing feature. With a few tweaks, we created the integration of AgileZen and HipChat.
We’ve also released the source of the node.js HipChat library that drives the integration. It’s pretty simple, and just does what we need it to do. (Pull requests are appreciated if you’d like to add features!)
If you’ve written integrations with AgileZen or would like to, let us know because we’d love to see them!
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