As I mentioned, we have 150+ rooms that we chill in, and most of our day-to-day work practices are tied into chat. Mention someone's name in a room they're not present in and we send push notifications to their phone and desktop- works great to pull people in as needed, without needing to distract them with the noise of being in the room 24/7.
Our ops team is particularly in deep with chat. Instead of siloing everyone's process off individually in SSH sessions, many operations happen in chat, so everyone can learn and help out when diagnosing problems. They've built some really fascinating tooling around the problems they face- if you're interested, check out @jnewland's talk on ChatOps: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NST3u-GjjFw
I've been working on adding configuration management via environment variables at work. We allow setting configs via the command line, but it posts a notification to our devops room in Hipchat showing who made the change, and which config was changed, but not the new value.
This means that people can see what is going on, without having full access to the settings which may be sensitive.
I suppose you could also set sensitive credentials in a one on one chat with Hubot.
I've seen this done by locking the room, too. That way, everyone in the room when you make the change sees everything (and can check your work), but it's not recorded in the transcripts.
As I mentioned, we have 150+ rooms that we chill in, and most of our day-to-day work practices are tied into chat. Mention someone's name in a room they're not present in and we send push notifications to their phone and desktop- works great to pull people in as needed, without needing to distract them with the noise of being in the room 24/7.
Our ops team is particularly in deep with chat. Instead of siloing everyone's process off individually in SSH sessions, many operations happen in chat, so everyone can learn and help out when diagnosing problems. They've built some really fascinating tooling around the problems they face- if you're interested, check out @jnewland's talk on ChatOps: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NST3u-GjjFw