Atlassian is getting more competitive with social collaboration companies like Jive Software with a new offering thst extends its social collaboration service beyond its core users.

The new service, called Confluence Blueprints, extends the Confluence platform, the company’s collaborative environment for developers. The blueprints are designed to create and share work within the Confluence environment.

Atlassian is starting with three blueprints of its own, including a contextual framework for organizing meetings, as well as a file-sharing service. In addition, there are five blueprints from other companies in the Atlassian marketplace: Gliffy has developed a blueprint to help people perform such tasks as creating an organization chart; a blueprint from Comalatech offers ways to do SWOT and risk analysis and a task-management service; Stiltsoft is providing an Evernote importer; and the Simplenia blueprint is for things such as custom polls.

Previously, people had to do their own manual set up of extensions to fit with Confluence. The new service is designed to overcome that barrier and provide a way to help non-technical users onboard faster.

Atlassian executives say that the Blueprint offering stems from more use of the product across product management, sales and marketing, and human resources teams. And they see it filling a space left open by collaboration companies that have focused more on managing social frameworks. Atlassian sees itself more as a content creator, which brings up an analogy for me.

Some social collaboration companies do a decent job of building out social frameworks but do a below-average job of offering content-creation services. And others may have good content-creation tools but have sub-par frameworks for creating documents, pages, etc.

For me, it’s like coffee shops. Some have great espresso but pastries are not their thing. Others have great pastries but the espresso is just lacking. Offering the best of both is a rare thing, indeed.