VersionOne, recognized by agile practitioners as the leader in agile management tools, today announced the availability of its Fall Release featuring a new team collaboration platform: Conversations. Used by agile teams for the creation of threaded, day-to-day communications, Conversations was delivered to help distributed teams communicate more easily and effectively.

VersionOne Conversations provides teams with a clear understanding of the context surrounding their activities. Conversations are streams of posts and responses that can be used to discuss stories or other relevant topics. By allowing team members to follow other members, share updates, questions, and observations, Conversations makes communication easier. Communication is both instant and secure regardless of location. Conversations will help teams work together to make better decisions.
 
Highlights/Key Facts:

  • Improved Collaboration for Distributed Teams

Organizations struggling with distributed team communication will benefit from a social media-style approach to team communication.  Beyond being work item focused, Conversations are people-centric and encourage a broader range of useful communication leading to better team engagement.  

  • Participation Leads to  Smarter Decision making

Conversations provides a near real-time communication hub that keeps everyone in the know. Relevant conversations are available and visible for others to see and collaborate on, helping teams work together and increase their velocity.

  • Shared Project Memory Drives Intelligence  

A record of historical actions and decisions, in context, helps team members to understand why past decisions were made.  Has someone else on another team, already researched this topic? Conversations provides organizations with the historical context they need to both work and learn together to continuously improve.

 In addition to Conversations, the fall release also features key performance enhancements for common high-volume user activities.  Continued enhancements to VersionOne’s free open-source integration platform include updates to popular developer tools including Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, Team Foundation Server 2010 and Bugzilla 3.6.  

Supporting Quotes:

Robert Holler, President and CEO, VersionOne

“One of the top challenges we hear over-and-over in the market is that teams are struggling with distributed team communication and coordination.  Our new Conversations platform ensures that the entire team has an interactive space for easily engaging one another within the context of specific stories, tasks and tests they are working on. Not only will this help teams accelerate decision-making, but it will give managers better insight into daily activities and progress.”