It’s safe to say that today’s companies have countless opportunities for communication. The question is whether all the extra messages and emojis in our networks are really making us more productive. With workers literally having nightmares over the messages they miss on Slack, Atlassian has decided to take a new approach to the world of team collaboration, a productivity solution designed to change the business landscape.
“Stride”, is the first major product launch by Atlassian since it purchased Trello for $425 million at the beginning of this year. The product is all about efficient activity, cutting down on notifications by allowing users to choose the information they want to receive. The app is versatile, and device-friendly, just like Slack, but according to Atlassian’s product VP, Joff Redfern, it’s about moving teams into the future, not just helping them to communicate.
A Collaboration App for Getting Work Done
The Stride solution combines a lot of the functionality that comes in Trello, and Hipchat, as well as some of Atlassian’s other apps. Basically, what you get is a simple, yet feature-packed collaboration solution intended to keep teams focused and connected in one place. According to Mike Cannon-Brooks, Co-CEO, the company has been working on the app for more than a year. They went back to the drawing board to create something entirely new, and they believe that the unique features of Stride will set it apart from its competitors.
In the creation of Stride, Atlassian has focused on cutting out the noise and clutter of notifications, while making messaging a more customised experience. Joff noted that employees were feeling overwhelmed by the messaging setup they’d been given by Slack and Teams. People were concerned that they were going to miss out on crucial messages that were constantly moving. However, Atlassian’s Stride offers a simpler solution, along with a “Focus” mode that marks an employee as unavailable for certain periods of time.
Never Miss Another Message
To address the concerns of missed messages, Stride also features a unique “While you were away” box that appears when an employee exits their Focus Mode. This breaks up all the messages that you missed by person, and channel, and also outlines what was done in the form of tasks, messages, and decisions.
If that wasn’t appealing enough, Stride also delivers channel-specific, one-to-one video chats. Any room in the Stride platform can implement a meeting where workers can join via video or audio. This eliminates any need to make the move over to Skype for Business or Google Hangouts, which should hopefully encourage the modern workforce to start using video more often.
Another major feature of Stride is the “Decisions and Actions” tools which allow users to cap specific conversations with takeaways and summaries, and tag people responsible with items or tasks listed for employees in a separate form. This helps to reduce the chaos of the message board, and though it’s only a basic feature, for now, there’s always a chance that Atlassian might bring more project tracking solutions to the suite at a later date.
If you’re a customer of Hipchat Cloud already, you’ll be switched onto Stride during the next few weeks. On the other hand, you can make a request for the software on the Stride.com website. The software is free to use, and there’s also a “paid” tier that will allow for unlimited screen sharing and message storage access.
