Atlassian Corp. Plc. today revealed that its Trello to-do tracker for teams has passed 50 million registered users, a milestone it’s marking by releasing a set of new time-saving features. 

Trello became part of Atlassian’s product portfolio through a $425 million acquisition in 2017. The service enables users to post outstanding tasks to a team bulletin board, check off items when they’re completed and see how colleagues’ work is coming along.

One of the flagship features in today’s update is a workflow tool called Butler. It lets users define rules that allow Trello to automatically perform certain actions, like send the project manager an email every time a task marked as high-priority is completed. Previously available only as an extension, Butler is now a native part of the Trello console and sports a new interface meant to lower the learning curve.

The second automation feature Atlassian introduced today is rolling out for Trello’s search function. When a user wishes to look up, say, one of their team’s bulletin boards or a colleague they want to invite to a project, Trello will now automatically suggest relevant results based on their activity history.

The suggestions “incorporate machine learning to understand your most frequent actions on a board,” Trello head of product Michael Pryor wrote in a blog post. “Trello will then suggest these specific actions right when you need them most, saving you time and mental energy.”

The automation capabilities are joined by a number of sharing features likewise meant to save time. Workers can now make their boards available for colleagues as templates, access a public catalog of board templates contributed by other companies and create reusable to-do note formats. The idea, Atlassian’s Trello explained, is to “alleviate the anxiety of getting new projects started” for users so they can be more productive. 

These features enhancements, and the Butler workflow tool in particular, follow a trend. Collaboration unicorn Asana Inc. this month introduced a similar task automation capability for its service and Slack Technologies Inc. has Workforce Builder, which streamlines common tasks such as sending help-desk requests. 

Major collaboration providers are expanding the role of their platforms from a place where teams coordinate their work to a tool for automating that work. In addition to Workflow Builder, Slack offers access to an array of partner-developed chatbots, while Trello and Asana provide integrations with external cloud services to speed up tasks that involve multiple applications. 

Photo: Atlassian