Atlassian Launches New Collaboration Tool

12 Sep 2017

Atlassian recently unveiled a new team collaboration tool: Stride. This enterprise product is designed to provide voice, video, and text chat, as well as workplace collaboration features such as file sharing, and tools to set aside group text threads as sidebars.

While Atlassian already offers the HipChat collaboration platform (which it bought in 2012), Stride is designed from the ground up specifically for corporate use. It’s built to scale, starting from startups with 10 employees and reaching enterprises with tens of thousands, although it is primarily intended as an enterprise communication product.

Stride is available in a freemium model, and users can upgrade to the paid version at the cost of $3 per user per month. The free version offers messaging between unlimited users, chat rooms, group video, and audio, while the paid version includes screen sharing, dial-in features, and remote desktop control. Additionally, the free version only stores the last 25,000 messages, and provides 5GB of file storage, while the paid version has no such limits.

Additionally, Stride offers file sharing, voice and video calling, screen sharing, and the ability to search previous messages. Users can also view and annotate images, as well as remotely control access across platforms and devices. Text and voice chat meetings can be shifted to video chats, and team members will be notified of such changes as soon as they happen.

Furthermore, Stride offers a “focus mode,” which enables users to let colleagues know they’re busy, and saves messages for viewing later. There’s also the “Actions” and “Decisions” features, which can set messages from group chats in sidebars so anyone missing a meeting can easily catch the important highlights and the contexts for them.

According to Atlassian’s team, Stride is built upon three pillars: messaging, audio/video conferencing, and collaboration tools. The three are designed to work together, without requiring any new plug-ins, so as to help remove friction from team communication.

However, there are concerns that Atlassian may be creating its own competition, as many of Stride’s functions overlap with those offered by its existing HipChat and Confluence solutions. Stride is unique from either of those, though, which means users won’t be forced to upgrade or transition. Overall, its main competitor will not be any of its existing solutions, as Stride appears to be targeting Slack (even their names seems diametrically opposed).

“Stride has some compelling, unique features, but I'm concerned it's not enough to compete with the likes of Microsoft, Cisco, and Slack,” notes UCStrategies UC Expert Dave Michels. “It offers a seamless transition from messaging to conferencing, but does not address telephony. That means it comes up short on multi-modal communications, especially when compared to the UCaaS offers with integrated Team Chat, such as RingCentral, Unify, Avaya, and Mitel.”

For more information, visit www.stride.com.

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