JetBrains‘ long-awaited Space collaboration platform has arrived, with some reviewers saying it could challenge Microsoft Teams or perhaps Slack.
Bill Detwiler, writing for the developer section of TechRepublic, said JetBrains’ Space represents competition for Teams, Slack and Google Meet as well as Cisco Webex.
“Space has many features designed for the software development process,” he said. “Space also has features you’d expect in a standard collaboration product, such as chat and document sharing.”
Detwiler lists tools that support continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), code review, source control hosting (Git), the automation of building and deploying apps, and package and container registries for publishing artifacts as well as integration with JetBrains’ other products, such as its integrated development environments (IDEs).
On the collaboration side, he notes an internal blogging tool, project management tools, like planning checklists, visual boards, an issue tracker, and a team directory with visibility of which users are on a specific project, meeting schedules, calendar management, and meeting-room mapping. Cloud and on-premise versions are expected.
Detwiler also spoke with Mikhail Vink, global marketing programs manager at JetBrains and business development manager for Space, about why a company best known for developer tools was getting into the collaboration market.
“You can probably have this referenced to integrated development environments (IDEs), which we are known for — IntelliJ IDEA and IntelliJ based IDEs,” Vink said.
“Space is an integrated team environment, and that’s the server-based product in the cloud, which basically helps teams to collaborate. And that’s about all kinds of teams.
“We call Space the only tool you need for team collaboration, because it does include a lot of features which are used while working on projects like planning with all the issues or Agile boards and checklists and project documentation.”
Vink said Space would prove useful for a wide range of other industries and large markets — which is why they took their own need for more unified communications and collaboration within their software development focus and expanded the offering to customers and other sectors.
Read the full interview on TechRepublic.
Over at TechRepublic’s sister site ZDNet.com, journalist Liam Tung noted: “It’s possibly good timing for the company to officially launch its answer to Microsoft Teams and Slack, given that CRM giant Salesforce has just bought Slack for $27.7bn with about 12 million daily active users to boost Salesforce’s Customer 360 platform.”
He added though that although Space doesn’t yet offer video calling support, both built-ins and integrations with external tools are set for inclusion in 2021.
“The Czechia-based company [JetBrains] also designed Kotlin, the Java-compatible programming language that Google is encouraging all Android app developers to use and which it itself employs for its own Google Home apps,” Tung said.
“JetBrains isn’t a household name but it’s got broad reach into the software developer market thanks to Kotlin and its IDEs.”
JetBrains is looking to appeal more to marketing and human resources departments with a slew of new features on the platform, including video calls, Google and Microsoft365 calendar integrations.
Learn more about Space — watch JetBrains’ recorded Space launch.
(Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash)
