After trying Campfire<\/a>, Bitrix24 <\/a>and HipChat<\/a>, I finally settled on Slack as my preference for a collaboration tool for our team.<\/p>\n Campfire was very bare bones, and the various window client options just didn't do it for me.<\/p>\n Hipchat had huge potential, though when i get into it, most of the features I wanted where not in the software, but on their suggestions page<\/a>. Some with hundreds of votes but no reply.<\/p>\n Bitrix was close, but is a whole intranet in the cloud so was a bit of overkill. I only needed the chat. and it does that ok, though didn't have the IRC like room set up I was after.<\/p>\n Slack was everything I was after. I was a bit critical when the instructions for the windows client consisted of how to turn the webpage into a chrome application shortcut. I originally wanted something that would give the taskbar a notify glow (not a blink as some clients did) so the dev's new that there was a conversation going on, but not annoying enough ot break them out of the zone if there were not participating.<\/p>\n A quick search confirmed that neither a script, or extension that would glow the task bar, though the use of notifications would likely do the job, if not a bit more distracting than I would like.<\/p>\n The chat, room and search features were everything I wanted, but the real power cam via the integration <\/a>tools.<\/p>\n In a few clicks a Jira channel was showing new & closed tickets from my on premises install. Though I was sure to vote for confluence integration in their\u00a0integration feedback survey<\/a>, as that was not out of the box,. though likely not difficult to craft my own.<\/p>\n Next was SVN, this was a bit trickier as the instructions for integration was a perl script on github<\/a>.<\/p>\n The next challenge was that I was not suing SVN on a linux box,. but SVN server in windows. This meant that Visual SVN called a batch file, passed in the repository name and revision as arguments, which needed that to fire the Perlscript.<\/p>\n First of all, I needed Perl. and grabbed a download of Active State Perl<\/a><\/p>\n Next, triggering the script via Visual SVN.<\/p>\n Right clicking on the repository in Visual SVN, then Properties<\/strong> then the Hooks<\/strong> tab brought up a window, where i could Edit<\/strong> the Post-commit hook<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Here I entered the DOS command to fire my batch file.<\/p>\n Next I created hook.bat and placed it in the folder above. This woulds take the 2 args and pass it to the PERL script.<\/p>\n With the plumbing ot the Perl script out of the way,\u00a0I modified the PERL script to run on windows, which involved changing the linux friendly...<\/p>\n To the more windows command line friendly...<\/p>\n <\/p>\n After testing by firing my bat file manually, and a few SVN commits, I had all my SVN updates posted to their own channel in Slack.<\/p>\n Confluence is next, so that updates and new pages can go into\u00a0<\/span>their\u00a0own channel too.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Finding a Suitable Collaborative Chat Tool After trying Campfire, Bitrix24 and HipChat, I finally settled on Slack as my preference for a collaboration tool for our team. Campfire was very bare bones, and the various window client options just didn't do it for me. Hipchat had huge potential, though when i get into it, most ...continue reading Slack<\/h3>\n
SVN Integration<\/h3>\n
c:\ncd\\Program Files (x86)\\VisualSVN Server\\bin\\\nhook %1 %2<\/pre>\n
\"C:\\Perl\\bin\\perl.exe\" \"C:\\Program Files (x86)\\VisualSVN Server\\bin\\svn.pl\" %1 %2<\/pre>\n
my $log = `\/usr\/bin\/svnlook log -r $ARGV[1] $ARGV[0]`;\nmy $who = `\/usr\/bin\/svnlook author -r $ARGV[1] $ARGV[0]`;<\/pre>\n
my $log = `svnlook log -r $ARGV[1] $ARGV[0]`;\nmy $who = `svnlook author -r $ARGV[1] $ARGV[0]`;<\/pre>\n