Atlassian Launches Stride – A New Slack and Teams Competitor

Atlassian has announced Stride – their new collaboration platform. While Hipchat has been around for a while they say Stride will be Atlassian’s core communications and collaboration platform. The company says it will offer a zero-click upgrade path – part of what Atlassian’s head of communication products Steve Goldsmith calls their guiding principle: “Don’t F**k the Customer”.

As well as the usual chat and file-sharing capability we expect in collaboration software, Atlassian has rolled in online meetings, with voice and video support. That’s a shot straight across the bow of Microsoft Teams and its integration with Skype. Those capabilities won’t be limited to people in your organisation. Stride will allow you to invite external parties as every Stride meeting will have a unique that can be shared.

One of the neat features is the ability to hold online meetings, over chat, and have specific messages marked as either Actions or Decisions. So, in the course of a chat, if someone is asked to follow up on a task, the message can be tagged and it won’t get lost in the stream of everything else being discussed.

In effect, it becomes the meeting secretary, capturing the outcomes so you end up with a set of meeting minutes.

There’s also a Focus mode – what most other applications call mute. This stops notifications from interrupting work. When you turn Focus mode off, any actions and decisions you’re mentioned in will be brought to the fore.

For those times you send a message in chat, only to realise you’ve made an embarrassing typo or goof, you’ll be able to edit sent messages.

As I said earlier, enterprise collaboration is one of the last big software problems. Over recent months we’ve seen Slack also add new features such as AI to help clear the holiday message backlog and their Enterprise Grid for linking small teams in large businesses.

I haven’t trialled Stride yet. But I’m a Hipchat user and can see the immediate value of some of th new features. I work remotely most of the time so being able to easily chat and capture actions and decisions would be great. And the ability to send external links to meetings would be handy as well.