$27 billion Aussie software giant Atlassian is overhauling Confluence, its second-largest product, with 15 new features. And as part of the quest to improve Confluence, it acquired an analytics startup that helps customers track the ways employees use the tool.
Confluence is the second product Atlassian built, after its flagship product Jira. Originally launched in 2004, only Atlassian's first and flagship product Jira generates more revenue for the company.
Confluence helps customers create, organize and discuss work with their teams — sort of like a cross between Wikipedia and Microsoft SharePoint. On Wednesday, Atlassian announced a sweeping set of updates that make it easier for users to create, organize, and track their content across Confluence.
"We can collaborate and disseminate information," Atlassian's head of Confluence Pratima Arora told Business Insider. "We've really focused on the builders and makers of the world."
Specifically, Confluence users will get new options for creating content, including the addition of photos and gifs, templates for more visually-appealing posts, and shortcuts for adding emoji, simple tables, and more. It also carries a revamped search function, and improvements to how pages can be organized.
As part of its push to improve Confluence, Atlassian will acquire Good Software, a Sydney-based analytics startup that's best known for Analytics for Confluence. Indeed, Confluence is getting built-in analytics capabilities, which help companies make sure that everybody on the team has seen the latest version of documents and other content, while also optimizing to make sure it's content they actually want to read.
For example, if there's a page about a company's cell phone policy, but people aren't clicking on it, analytics can show that people might be searching "mobile policy" instead of "cell phone policy." This can prompt employees to reword their documents so their co-workers can find it more easily.
"The reason we went down the analytics route is we really want everyone to create content that is more engaging and also for the makers of the world to see who's reaching their content," Arora said. "That's the end-user benefit."
Initially, Confluence was used primarily in IT and development teams, but it has since expanded to other departments, like marketing, human resources and finance. According to a customer survey, a quarter of Confluence customers use it across their entire company, Atlassian says.
"Organically, people have grown and started using Confluence for their entire organizations," Arora said. "We really are focusing on Confluence for everyone. We really want to reach everyone in the company ... Confluence started as a tech heavy product, but we have seen Confluence used by entire organizations."
Meanwhile, Good Software is just the latest in a string of acquisitions for Atlassian: In March, the company acquired the company AgileCraft for $166 million.
