Atlassian Releases Stride API PlatformAtlassian Releases Stride API Platform
Goal is to help developer teams customize their Stride experiences.
February 20, 2018
In recognition that "every team communicates differently," Atlassian today opened access to a new API platform that allows developers to customize its team collaboration tool, Stride, as they wish.
Stride, introduced in September 2017, is Atlassian's next-generation team collaboration -- or as it likes to say, "team communication" -- tool (see related No Jitter post). Built from the ground up, Stride moves beyond the capabilities enabled with its earlier-generation HipChat team collaboration tool (a 2012 acquisition), offering improvements in team messaging, meetings, and collaboration capabilities.
Atlassian has reported significant uptake of Stride among its existing customer base and greenfield deployments, with "tens of thousands of teams" already using it, Oji Udezue, head of product for Stride, said in a No Jitter briefing. As the company continues working on "information worker-level integrations," today's announcement isn't for the average business user, he added.
Rather, the Stride API platform is all about technical teams and developers -- and not just the sophisticated ones, said Udezue, who will be sharing Atlassian's view of team collaboration next month at Enterprise Connect 2018 in the Monday morning general session, "Is Team Collaboration the Future of Enterprise Communications? The goal with the new API platform is to allow any developer team to build and deploy custom apps in Stride, capitalizing on the ability to surface content outside of the conversation stream, introduce bots into the flow, and automate simple task assignments, for example. Stride can render custom content in inline frames via a JavaScript API, and allow interactivity of the content with "almost any element in Stride's user interface," as Udezue wrote in a blog announcing the Stride API.
With the Stride API, for example, developers can use the Stride sidebar, which sits to the right of the communications stream, to surface information without needing to push it into the chat conversation. "By moving, aggregating, and updating alerts in your right sidebar, Stride delivers more signal with less of the noise you'd traditionally get from chat apps," Udezue said.
And, developers can install a bot into conversations just by inserting an "@mention," and configure them to listen for events that trigger webhooks to the application. The webhooks, in turn, can initiate other workflows or feed responses back into the conversation.
Developers, too, can leverage "Actions" and "Decisions" inputs in custom apps, allowing the automation of task assignments -- say when an external service issue pops up -- in a team messaging room.
Since releasing Stride, Atlassian has been working with a group of key developers interested in building customized applications for internal workflows, with a list of others in the Atlassian application ecosystem waiting to get their hands on the Stride API nearing 1,000, Udezue said. With today's announcement, all developers now have access to the API platform.
The Stride API is built on the new Atlassian API platform that will power other Atlassian applications, such as the Jira tools for project and issue tracking, service desk management, and business management; and Confluence, for document collaboration, Udezue said. Developers will be able to manage app credentials via Atlassian's new app management console, and they'll have access to new documentation that will help them as they play around with the Stride API, he added.
Learn more about Team Collaboration at Enterprise Connect 2018, March 12 to 15, in Orlando, Fla. Register now using the code NOJITTER to save an additional $200 off the Regular Rate or get a free Expo Plus pass.
Follow Beth Schultz and No Jitter on Twitter!
@Beth_Schultz @nojitter
