After acquiring Trello earlier this year, Atlassian is now getting to the point where it is bringing more of its services to Trello’s lightweight project management service.
Given that Trello already has a framework for bringing third-party services into its tool, it’s no surprise that Atlassian is also going this route. The company today launched Trello “power-ups” (as Trello calls its extensions) for JIRA Cloud, Confluence Cloud and Bitbucket Cloud, as well as an improved integration of Trello into its HipChat messaging services.
For the most part, there are no major surprises here (and it’s definitely no surprise that Atlassian is tying more of its products into Trello). Using the Confluence power-up, you can now attach Confluence pages to Trello cards, for example, or create new pages right from Trello. The JIRA power-up similarly lets you link JIRA issues with Trello cards and attach issue status, priority, assignee etc. from the back of your Trello cards, too. The Bitbucket integration is pretty straightforward, too, and lets you attach Bitbucket branches, commits and pull requests to Trello cards, for example.
The HipChat integration is obviously a bit different. Here, Trello users can now create new cards from their chat window and get automatic updates in HipChat when there are changes to a card.
As Atlassian and Trello told me soon after the acquisition, the two companies started working on different integrations between Trello and its other products almost immediately after the acquisition announcement. While there is some overlap between Trello and JIRA, the company is positioning Trello as its lightweight collaborative productivity tool that doesn’t force users into a specific methodology (Trello isn’t all about agile, scrum and kanban, after all). That doesn’t mean that it can’t profit from being able to pull information from those tools, though. It’s that kind of flexibility, after all, that made Trello popular in the first place.