Atlassian has added a set of new social collaboration features in version 5 of its popular bug tracking tool JIRA, available as both a hosted service or as an installable on-premise application. And perhaps more importantly for collaboration, the company is still supporting the Networked Help Desk API, a standard for integrating various systems pertaining to customer support, plus out of the box integrations with tools such as Zendesk, Salesforce.com and GetSatisfaction.

JIRA 5 features an activity stream along the lines of Twitter and Facebook, complete with the ability to “@ respond” a particular user. JIRA’s RESTful API lets these streams flow into other applications. That means that developers, customers, operations, business executives and customer support representatives will be able to collaborate on problems more seamlessly.

As SiliconAngle editor Alex Williams has written before, the activity stream is becoming the information cortex for enterprises. And I’ve long made the case that integration is crucial for activity streams to be useful and successful. The streams need to flow through the apps that employees actually use to get their work done, not sit in a new silo outside of their workflow. The JIRA activity stream and the Network Help Desk API look like steps in the right direction.