The company behind Kotlin, a preferred language for Android, announced today the early-access availability of Space, a DevOps collaboration tool that combines communication, team and project management into a single environment.

JetBrains announced the launch of Space at KotlinConf 2019, a conference that focuses on the company’s programming language.

Space is an integrated team environment designed to bring together all elements of project management into one interface while also providing each team member access to the tools that they need to do their job. To do this, Space combines instant communication, team and project management, internal blogs, meeting and scheduling and software development processes into a single environment.

With Space the needs of a creative team of any size can be covered, this includes startups just out of the gate and entire enterprise organizations. According to JetBrains, the percentage of companies using spreadsheets to manage single projects has dropped from 74% to 64% between 2017 and 2018, with many of those organizations switching to dedicated project management tools.

The issue with other tools is that many are not integrated with other parts of the creative workflow, such as development environments, creative editors, code repositories, deployment tools, asset storage and everything needed for a project to function.

Review code in Space (Image: JetBrains)

“Most digital collaboration environments are in fact a mixed bag of solutions tackling different problems, from development tools to task management ones,” said JetBrains Chief Executive Officer Maxim Shafirov. “This leaves people switching tools and tabs, manually copying information, and generally losing time and creative flow. JetBrains Space is changing this — and thus changing the foundation of creative work, software development included.”

With Space, all the data the team needs to work efficiently is stored in one place and therefore instantly at the fingertips of anyone who needs it at any time.

The solution applies identity management and security with project development tools, including source code management, code review and browsing, package repositories, issue tracking, planning tools, project documentation and continuous integration, delivery and deployment.

The software enables the automation of any workflow, from onboarding new employees to configuring rules for merging requests into DevOps continuous integration and delivery pipelines. It also offers a meeting schedule, projects, tasks, commits, code reviews and internal blogs feed.

“At JetBrains, we have accumulated tremendous technical expertise over the last 20 years developing tools for professional software developers and teams,” Shafirov said. “Thus, we have a complete understanding of not just the technology needed for successful creative projects, but also the processes and tools. Space fills a crucial gap in creative workflows, which is why we’ve been using it internally for two years now.”

JetBrains Space is available now through a subscription service model with a freemium starting tier. Paid plans start at $8 per active user per month. The vision of Space is to provide a unified companywide platform designed to supply everything any business team could need covering a range of disciplines including creative, design, marketing and sales.

Photo: Pixabay