Atlassian Corp. Plc. today launched a major redesign of Trello, its popular project tracking platform, that brings new ways to organize the tasks involved in a project and enables teams to preview files from external services such as Dropbox.

Atlassian acquired Trello four years ago in a transaction worth $425 million. The platform, which has since grown to more than 50 million users, enables teams to write down their outstanding tasks on virtual cards and organize those cards in lists on a virtual board.

The new design rolled out today gives teams access to five more board layouts for organizing tasks. Trello users could already display to-do items in formats other than the service’s default layout, but doing so often required installing plugins. The newly added board configurations reduce the need for plugins and, in the process, will allow Atlassian to support customers with specialized requirements that weren’t fully addressed by Trello’s default board.

The first new view, Map View, overlays a team’s outstanding tasks on a map that shows not only what work needs to be done but also where. “Map View is great for location-based uses like real estate agents showing properties, or field sales and service teams, who want to see what they need to do at each location,” Trello co-founder Michael Pryor explained in a blog post today.

The next two new views are for organizing time-sensitive tasks. Calendar View displays to-do items on a calendar and enables users to change the deadline for an item by dragging it to a different date. Timeline View, in turn, is for displaying tasks that are not only time-sensitive but also have to be performed at a specific order. Software development is one area where that’s important: During troubleshooting, the severity of software bugs often determines the order in which they’re addressed.

Capping off the additions is Table View. It’s a tracking dashboard that provides the ability to find and monitor the pace of projects easily across multiple Trello boards at once with a bird’s eye view. It’s aimed mainly at managers and team leads.

The other big change introduced in the redesign is to Trello cards, the information boxes in which teams write down individual tasks. Up until now, when a user pasted a file link into a Trello card, colleagues would have to click on the link to bring up the file. Now, Trello cards can display the files themselves directly in the interface thanks to a new preview feature.

The preview feature has integrations with more than 30 external platforms on launch, including Google Drive, Dropbox, Jira and specialized services such as the Figma interface design tool. Down the road, Atlassian will expand the integrations by enabling users to not only view files in the Trello interface but also edit them. Eventually, the company also plans to let third-party developers customize how the interface displays information.

“Imagine a third-party ‘Canvas’ view that changes your Trello board into a collection of floating cards that can be moved and grouped into freeform clusters, and you can draw on it too,” Trello’s Pryor detailed. “Or, a ‘Slides’ view that transforms your Trello cards into PowerPoint-style slides that you can do a presentation with, from within Trello.”

The new and upcoming enhancements will enable Atlassian to make Trello a bigger part of its users’ day-to-day work. In theory, evolving the platform from a tool for tracking outstanding tasks into the place where users view and edit all their files could unlock new revenue opportunities for the company. It’s a strategy other collaboration providers such as Box Inc. are also pursuing by expanding their platforms to more areas.

The upgrades to Trello’s boards today are accompanied by changes to the navigation experience. A new sidebar gives users quick access to all their boards, while improved filters will make it easier to find specific items inside a board.

Images: Atlassian