So, Jira Guys and Gals, last week was crazy. Can we get that blanket statement out of the way? I went back to my room early on two nights to do a write-up, only to fall asleep at my keyboard both times, wake up, set an early alarm, get some proper rest, wake up again, finish the article, THEN get breakfast. Thursday, I was running so late writing the article I never got a chance to copy it over to LinkedIn, and I have yet to copy either over to the Atlassian Community.  

That being said, I very much stand by this LinkedIn post I made Friday as I was packing up:

As the sun rises and I finish packing up for my return trip, I can’t help reflecting on #AtlassianTeam23 and this amazing community I fell into. Whether it’s #AtlassianCreators geeking out when meeting because we all are each other’s biggest fans, or individual interactions with each and every one of you, or Atlassian constantly asking what they can do to support thejiraguy.com, this week has been validating in a way I don’t think I’ve ever experienced before. So thank you, #atlassiancommunity, And I’ll see you at Team ’24

Being there, meeting so many of you in person, and hearing how much you get from what I do made it all absolutely worthwhile. And I have so many ideas for articles coming up. But we’ll get to that later.

No, today, I want to look back at the things I missed last week and review some of the smaller (but no less amazing) updates that came out of Team ’23. So, let’s dig into this!

Atlassian Together – Correction

So let’s start with the correction. Last week I said I couldn’t find the $11 price point on Atlassian’s website for Atlassian Together. Bela from EverIT helped me find the correct page. I was looking at the wrong spot because you need to look at their full pricing chart to see that the < $11 per user per month pricing is only available if you have more than 5000 users, so it is there, but only after you reach a certain scale.

Bring Your Own Key 

One new feature I glossed over last week was the availability of “Bring Your Own Key” Encryption. This feature allows your organization to hold the keys to your data hosted by Atlassian, meaning only those you grant permission to it can see the data at rest. Let me explain.

Jira, Confluence, and the rest of the Atlassian Cloud Platform will still need to be able to decrypt your data to run – that is impossible to get around. The question here is who else can decrypt that data and use it. To decrypt the data, you need the keys, and until this point, Atlassian was the sole owner of those keys. Now you get to specify, using AWS Key Management Service (KMS), which keys are used to encrypt your data, meaning you and Atlassian Cloud’s software are the only ones with access to your data. This arrangement will be a major relief to organizations storing highly sensitive data.

Your data will only be as safe as your keys, so proper security is still paramount. It’s not unheard of for someone to gain access to encryption keys after breaking into a Dropbox or stealing a laptop that had them on it. But as long as you maintain security around them, your data is much safer. 

Privacy & Security Tab on Marketplace

Atlassian states, “This new tab will provide important details about cloud app security and privacy all in one place, helping customers with security and compliance requirements assess apps during the procurement process.”

So, Apps in your Cloud environment have always been a thorny subject – especially regarding security and compliance. I want to say this was fixed with Forge, but in the older Connect framework, your data associated with Apps was stored on the App Vendors Systems rather than with Atlassian. Yes, this means that even today, you can’t always be 100% sure where your App Data is. You can imagine that if your organization is required to have strong security compliance, this is a nightmare scenario and a massive reason some are still unable to go to Cloud.

Now, it’s on Marketplace Partners to update their Apps to change how this works, but Atlassian is giving them an easy, uniform way to show how their Apps work right in the marketplace. This feature means once this is in place, you can tell if the App complies with your Security and Compliance regulations, meaning you can have confidence while testing a new add-on.  

External Users

Listen, we all know situations where you must collaborate with others outside your organization. And this can be challenging. For example, as a consultant, I have had several emails from various domains so that I can be granted access to a customer’s systems to do agreed-upon work. That is why I’m shocked no one thought of this sooner.

Soon, you can grant external users access to your Atlassian Cloud instances. You can also enforce that these users outside your organization must comply with two-factor verification and set how often they must verify. 

Still, this is such a simple concept that I’m surprised we are just now talking about it. 

Actual Teams!

For years now, I have had teams ask for one simple thing. “Hey, can we assign this to a team rather than a person?” This request just makes sense. Of course, some tasks require only one person, but more often than not, it’s an entire team responsible for a piece of work, not just an individual. So why is it, for twenty years now, issues could only be assigned to one and only one person at a time?

Atlassian is finally fixing this. You can define a Team within the Atlassian Platform, making the Team either invite-only or public. And then, you treat this new Team as you would any user account in Jira. Once formed, You can @Mention them in Confluence Document or Jira Comment. You also get a dedicated page for the Team, where you can define goals, work being done, etc.  

Atlassian said these Teams are not tied to your org chart, which is great, don’t get me wrong. But hear me out – can we also auto-populate certain Teams from the Org Chart? I want to preserve the ability to form ad-hoc Teams centered around specific goals, but I don’t want to have everyone re-create their internal teams on the Org Chart. That should be done for them. Can I have both? I have yet to find out, but I intend to play around with this feature more and find out!

What do you think?

Are there features you are looking forward to? Did I miss anything else that you are excited about? Let me know! I love reading your comments, either here or on Social Media!

So – I actually have a bit of a plan for the next month’s articles. Next week, I intend to discuss the best App demos of the conference. The following week, we are looking at someone currently on Atlassian Server with several limitations and seeing their possible moves as the EOL looms. I’m still researching this one, but the answer (#clickBait) may surprise you. Then I’ll take another look at Custom Charts for Jira in my first App Review in a long time.  

Oh, and somewhere in there, I’ll be doing a bonus article looking at the Best Swag of Team ’23. Also, I’m working with the Community Leaders to prepare a Trello Board where you can vote for your favorites ahead of time, so be looking out for that!

And where will you find the announcement? Why, on my Social Media profiles, which you can find on my Linktree. While there, be sure to Like, Comment, and Follow for more blog posts, updates, and general Atlassian Community thoughts.

But until next time, my name is Rodney, asking, “Have you updated your Jira issues today?”