Atlassian, best known for its Jira, Trello and Confluence platforms, is acquiring helpdesk company Halp.

• Confluence Help Desk
• Halp Atlassian

The purchase, announced today, comes amid the backdrop of the ongoing global COVID-19 pandemic, which has made collaborative platforms essential for teams looking to remain productive with workforces largely distributed.

Launched in 2017, Halp is a conversational ticketing solution that enables IT teams to assign, prioritize and answer requests from Slack, turning the popular enterprise chat platform into an internal helpdesk solution.

Once Halp has been integrated into a Slack Workspace, users can react to a message with a specific emoji to turn any message into a ticket that tracks the progress of inbound and outbound requests. Halp also offers menu options in Slack that allows help-desk staffers to process and manage requests without having to leave Slack.

Internal help desk tickets are naturally conversations between coworkers. Unlike traditional customer support, in an internal help desk there is a much closer relationship between the end-user and the support agent. That’s why Microsoft Teams is such a natural place to create and respond to a help desk ticket. Why Atlassian is buying Halp, a Slack-first help-desk company Instead of competing with Slack, Atlassian is acquiring a service that lives right inside it. Halp co-founders CEO, Fletcher Richman.

Confluence Help Desk

While the Halp purchase will bolster Atlassian’s integration abilities, Atlassian has a number of tools that offer Slack integrations. In April, Trello’s no-code automation tool, Butler, announced an integration that would allow “automated workflow [to] extend even further beyond the boundaries of Trello to the tools where other teammates are working.”

Halp already integrates with Atlassian’s Jira Service Desk and Confluence, allowing organizations to keep records via their support tool of choice. And Atlassian intends to keep Halp as an independent product; current Halp users will still be able to use it as a standalone product.

In a statement announcing the acquisition, Brad Armstrong, vice president for business development and corporate development at Slack, said the company was thrilled to hear that its “strategic partner” Atlassian is acquiring Halp.

“With its messaging-first approach to support ticketing, Halp is an outstanding tool for any team already collaborating in Slack channels,” Armstrong said. ”We see enormous opportunities in building this business together with Atlassian.”

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