Stride (previously HipChat) vs TeleMessage

You can access HipChat from pretty much every common platform. HipChat even allows chatting via SMS.

You can ping people to get their attention even if they are not online by @mentioning them. Depending on how the person has set their account up it can be by notifications via in-app sounds, visual alerts, and even email, SMS, or mobile app push notifications.

Including Asana, Github, Zendesk, WordPress, MongoDB, TeamCity, JIRA, Confluence, PowerShell and more that 40 others.

Free with unlimited users, $2/user/month for voice + video calls, screencasts, full history retention and management. (Even enterprise feature like SAML)

An intuitive, easy to overview interface listing both online and offline users.

Things like photos get automatically embedded in the chat thread once you upload them.

You can invite people to join conversations even if they don't have a HipChat account. HipChat will generate a link to share and the guest will only need to enter their name to join the conversation.

HipChat has an optional desktop client powered by Adobe AIR.

HipChat audio and video works on mobile platforms and web browsers.

Participate and keep tabs on ongoing discussions on particular topics or amongst certain groups of people.

If you are worried about third-parties getting access to your data you should consider self-hosting. With self-hosting you are in control over where your data is stored, who has access to it. You will also not be vulnerable to exploits of a third-party provider.

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A big company with experience will bring in more options like Google Apps One Time Login.

E.g. part, away, all, here etc.

They've been in the messaging business for over 15 years. Not a start-up, and use carrier-grade infrastructure.

They offer a bunch of APIs that you can integrate with own apps to automate messaging.

While the solution includes an app, messages can also be sent from a computer or Outlook. It can send data messages, text messages, voice messages, etc (as long as there are enough message credits).

An organization's mobile messaging can be managed by an administrator. That means admins can add, delete or suspend users and enforce messaging policies.

TeleMessage uses end-to-end encryption, with an additional encryption layer while data is in transit. It also offers a bunch of other security features such as PIN lock, time limited messaging and forward locking.