Atlassian has put time and thought into what affects the role of everyone–including developers–when it comes to office interactions, communication, and project management with a suite of tools that simplify tracking and organizing the nitty-gritty social details of working together. While that last sentence may make sense to anyone who has worked with a group on a project, the actual implementation of project management and “herding cats” is rarely so easy.

To better elaborate on what sort of trouble a team might face, Atlassian released an interactive infographic–which, to me, felt much more like a sort of graphical story with statistics.

Take a few minutes and scroll through InfoQuest.

The presentation feels unique in a world filled with static in-your-face infographics–and it also contains a story. A story that I’ve faced more than once in my own career as a developer. While it’s true that most of us coders tell our stories in source, through comments, and in API documentation–but there’s so much more to project management, where e-mail, IM, and memos hang like rustling leaves branching from the trunk of the main project. Understanding the project from a year ago may even take some office archaeology in the sort of place I used to work.

Tomorrow, Atlassian is announcing a whole new search experience with their Confluence product that brings in more sources of communication than before and helps teams manage their information better. The tool will stack a new relevance algorithm, instant access to stored information, faster filtering, and it’s built to scale. With the addition of Ink’s Filepicker add-on, teams will also be able to wrap in the cloud via Google Drive, Dropbox, Box and other sources where documents could end up archived.

In the past, it may have just been a measure of internal e-mail, memos, or even shared file servers–but in the era of the cloud, and BYOS (bring-your-own-storage) that office archaeology I spoke of before has only gotten more complex. But being able to store everything in one secure place that can take advantage of employee preference in equipment or storage location can ease a lot of project stress.

The DevOps Angle

Confluence also has a thriving developer community and toolset for customizing the tool suite for internal use and this is where both development and operations come together. Confluence 5.2 is well on its way and Atlassian has already put documentation online for developers to keep up with the changes.

For the most part, it reads like a lot of quality-of-life changes, including greater functionality surrounding users, and some changes to the document storage format. Amid them appears to be changes to how add-ons work with Confluence, including a milestone change to Atlassian Connect. As above, all of these changes to API and add-on frameworks will leave more power in the hands of implementation teams and DevOps to provide working tools for project management teams to do their thing seamlessly.

The entire ecology of add-ons, the use of Connect and OnDemand, and the total amount of customisation that can take place is too extensive to cover here–but Atlassian is big on documentation, FAQs, and there’s a thoughtful community in the forums for interested parties to take part in.

In the world of content management–and easing that sense of “office archaeology”–it looks like Confluence is making a lot of smart moves.