Cloud-based workplace collaboration software provider Atlassian Corporation Plc announced today that a huge suite of its products will be getting a boost from Trello Inc., the maker of a powerful visual product management productivity dashboard that Atlassian bought in January.

Trello’s “Power-Ups,” or add-ons, will be integrated into Atlassian’s entire digital collaboration ecosystem, including Jira, Confluence, HipChat and Bitbucket.

On its surface, Trello provides a dashboard that simplifies information discovery and presentation for project management. It does so with “cards” that allow a user to contain a small bit of information (a chat, a bullet list, milestone, etc.) and connect with other members of the team in real time.

With the use of Power-Ups, Trello can integrate with other software, import and export data and integrate user interactions.

Users of Confluence, Atlassian’s tool for team collaboration and knowledge base production, will be able to attach pages to Trello cards and drill down into content and even create new Confluence pages directly from a card. With Trello, users will also see at-a-glance who is creating pages, what it’s being used for and even find more information by looking at the card details.

As for Jira, Atlassian’s issue tracking and resolution system, Trello cards will be able to display what work is getting done to anyone in an entire department with up-to-date information. Each issue can have a card made displaying status, priority, assignee and more right from the card’s details. Trello will also be able to create issues directly from the board and link back into Trello directly from Jira.

Chatting gets a lot easier with the Trello card integration into HipChat, Atlassian’s chatroom product. With Trello integration, it’s possible to link a card directly from HipChat without having to leave the chat and log into Trello. From the other side, HipChat messages and chats can be turned into cards that then update with collaboration and conversation.

Bitbucket, Atlassian’s code repository tool, will allow management and operations to sync up more easily with developers by having Trello cards surface information from code production. A manager can see where code development progressing by attaching Bitbucket branches, commits and pull requests directly to a card. Trello also makes it possible to create and attach Bitbucket branches directly from the dashboard. Important information, such as status updates, code reviews and such can even be displayed prominently on a Trello card making it easy to see what’s going on.

Doing away with ‘context switching’

Hamid Palo, director of product partnerships at Trello, told SiliconANGLE that the design intent behind this integration was focused on communication and reducing what he calls “context switching.”

That means needing to move out of one tool or product and into another. Often different teams use separate tools to do their jobs and those tools don’t integrate very well, meaning that collaboration between teams requires constantly logging out of one and into the other.

By integrating Trello tightly with Atlassian’s entire ecosystem and allowing Trello cards to edit or trigger events in Atlassian tools, team members need not leave Trello or their current product to collaborate.

“For Atlassian, and teams in general, this means that all the products work more tightly and more seamlessly,” Palo said. “It breaks down barriers to communication.”

Palo also mentioned that increased capability integration has been an extremely popular request from the user base since the company’s $425 million acquisition by Atlassian two months ago. Developers, information technology teams, management, marketing and others, he said, all want to work together but want the tools to get out of their way.

“This saves a lot of time because then you don’t have to click all these things, and log in, it’s just all there when you need it,” said Palo, who added that the team got the integration done in about a month.

Palo credited part of the swift development cycle to his team using the Trello-Atlassian integration during the process.

Image: Trello