If you haven’t heard of group messaging services, you will soon, most likely because of massive hype about Slack—the current superstar of the tech world. Debuting in early 2014, Slack has eclipsed, at least in the public eye, the former hot messaging app, nearly six-year-old HipChat .

The elder service is now fighting back with a new feature called HipChat Connect, which pulls other apps into its interface so that you spend less time bouncing in and out. The idea behind Connect—which Fast Company recently got an exclusive early look at—is that HipChat should “not be just chat or just chat and video,” says Steve Goldsmith, general manager of HipChat at Atlassian, which bought HipChat when it was a young startup in March 2012, “but really a mission control, the place where you work with your team.”

The launch of Connect comes at a crucial point. Group messaging is booming as a real-time alternative to the tortured back-and-forth of reply-all emails. Slack is easy to use, with a cheery, casual design that’s inviting to newcomers—traits that also made HipChat popular. Slack, however, seems to have an Apple-like momentum that makes it feel like the first and only innovator in the market.

One of Slack’s oft-praised features, for instance, is its integration of other apps, such as Dropbox and Google Drive, for sharing files with coworkers right in the chat room, or Zendesk for handling customer support requests. But HipChat integrates about as many apps (around 100), and many of the same ones, such as Google Drive and Zendesk. Now, it’s about to pull apps in much tighter through Connect, which allows them to run completely inside the HipChat interface—a bit like games inside Facebook—rather than requiring you to click off to another app or site, as is often the case now with both HipChat and Slack.

HipChat, in fact, is ahead of Slack in several other features, too. Slack plans to add voice calling, which HipChat already has. HipChat also has built-in one-to-one HD video calling and is likely headed towards multiparty video conferencing and screen sharing. Slack says it plans to offer built-in video communication but doesn’t have a set time frame.

HipChat Connect, which will debut in beta in November, at first looks like a subtle redesign. It’s focused on the right third of its three-pane interface. Currently, that pane shows shared items like files and links. In the new setup, it’s also where you see integrated apps, such as New Relic, an analytics platform for monitoring servers, websites, or other IT operations.

In an example I saw, New Relic can post a warning message right to the chat room and open up a summary of its diagnostics in the right-hand pane of HipChat for everyone to see. People can interact with New Relic, like assigning someone to deal with a bug ticket, inside the HipChat interface. “I don’t need to tell everyone I’ve taken action because they are all right in there. They can see the result,” says Goldsmith.