Team ’24 Keynote, what was announced?

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Good Evening, Jira Guys and Gals. Day 2 of Team ’24 is now complete, and it’s been a crazy full day. So what was revealed, what’s worth talking about, and what do you need to know to get up to speed? Let’s dig into this keynote and see what are the big features this year!

General Updates

Lets talk about how Atlassian now has 300,000 customers. As I stated last year when they have 250,000, growth in this number is great as it gives you more places you could potentially work. I would still like to see how they count this number. Does this blog’s test instance count? If not, where is that cutoff?

Atlassian also noted their commitment to scaling cloud by noting that they now support up to 50K users per site on the Atlassian Platform….

Or that was the limit. Atlassian announced that they can now support up to 150K users per site. Honestly, I’m certain they number of companies that have enough for this to be a concern is very very few. But they did it!

Atlassian now supports data residency in 11 countries, up from the four they supported last year. I did also notice that India doesn’t have a pin, and I know that’s been a problem for some friends of mine. Guess you guys will have to wait a bit longer….

Atlassian also stated they are working on C5, FedRamp, and IRAP to go along with their HIPAA, GDPR, finma, EBA, ISO, BaFIn, PCI, SOC2, and CCPA compliance. I will add to this that FedRamp Moderate is expected to be completed in 2025, which we learned at Team Tour: Government earlier this year.

Just….Jira?

So, if you are using Atlas, you can soon expect to see more of your features being moved to Jira. Atlassian found that the context switching to another site for updates wasn’t proving helpful, and in fact most people were just copying their Jira updates into Atlas. So why make it one? In speaking of combining things…

Atlassian is combining Jira Software And Jira Work Management into one solution that they are just calling…well, Jira! I’ve been calling this “Just Jira,” and I love the idea. Whenever a customer or client says they want Jira, I usually have to go into “Well, there are different flavors of Jira” and then explain all four. And for these two flavors, they weren’t all that different, so combining them was the low hanging fruit. However….

I don’t think they went far enough. I think if they really want to have a just “Jira,” that won’t happen as long as they still have Jira Product Discovery and Jira Service Management out there. Now, most people don’t see too much of a problem with JPD merging in, but they draw the line at JSM. And to be fair, the license model is completely different in JSM, and most people think it’d be too expensive to license Jira if all four functions were in one product. And yes, they might be right.

But I still think if they want to solve this problem, this doesn’t do that. It’s a start yes, but not a complete solution. I suppose I’ll see at Team ’25 if I was right or not.

One honestly crazy feature they previewed in Jira is the ability to pre-populate likely stories on an Epic using Atlassian Intelligence. AI will take the context of the epic title, description, and any linked content to generate the likely required stories for you. Considering how many times I’ve had to build automations like this, I can imagine this feature going over well with the scrum masters of the world.

Confluence Love

Now lets talk a bit about Confluence

They are continuing to improve on last year’s Whiteboards, with one new feature being the ability to vote on cards within a collaborative whiteboard.

They’ve also added the ability to put smart links not only onto pages, but onto the sidebar.

Atlassian also realized that many companies use Confluence as their intranet page, so they are letting teams set up a company hub, which can be a centralized landing page for your company.

They have, of course, been working on Atlassian Intelligence capabilities. These are all features that we have more or less known about, but many are now out in the wild, with a few still in early access.

Now we get into the big news. Confluence search has always been….problematic. Well, not always, but at least since 2009. So, fifteen years later Atlassian is finally doing something about it. They are introducing better searching in Confluence.

This is being made possible by Atlassian Intelligence – more specifically the Atlassian Platform’s Semantic Index (More on that later).

But they are going a step further. Instead of just improving Confluence search, this new AI-powered search will be a unified search, allowing you to search across Confluence, Jira, Bitbucket, Compass, Trello, and more.

Now – let it be clear, I have not seen or tested this myself yet. I’m all for improving Searching in Atlassian searching across tools. We all know it could be better. But, the problem with Confluence search before was too much noise. I do worry they solved the problem for Confluence only to reintroduce it by expanding the scope to all the tools. I could be wrong, as Atlassian says the Semantic Index of AI should still help you clear that noise, but I’m taking a “show me” approach.

Loom, the new kid

So, last year Atlassian purchased Loom. I know the #AtlassianCreators have been drooling to get our hands on it, but Atlassian decided to clarify quickly where they think Loom sits in the market. It’s not a replacement for Slack or Zoom, but is meant to be an asynchronous video tool.

I’ve always thought of it as “Youtube, but for your company”…or the answer to “Please. Stop. Uploading. Gigs. of. Videos. To. My. Confluence. Instance.”

And while I try to filter out the “Atlassian is great” parts of the keynote, I was struck by this claim. Atlassian claims that Loom has prevented nearly half a million meetings at Atlassian. It’s a big claim, and I’d love to dive into the mechanics of how this was qualified and calculated, but it is impressive.

But Loom is not immune to Atlassian Intelligence. One feature they showed is the ability to take a Loom video and convert it into a document.

They are also letting you add variables to your Loom videos, so you can customize them to specific recipients who will see personalized videos. It looked like from the demo that variables can be used in the title as well as in the video. Which would be amazing, but from a practical standpoint, not sure how that scales to large recipient lists…

Atlassian University is now Free!

Alright Jira Guys and Gals, I have been sitting on this news for what has felt like Months. They let us creators know about this when they first took down Atlassian University to retool it – but it was under embargo until the keynote.

As of May 1st, ALL COURSES on Atlassian University are Free to use.

They learning team has also been working to more modularize the learning so you can take it in byte sized chunks rather than hours-long lectures, but this is massive.

Jira Product Discovery

Lets start with the elephant in the room. Atlassian is going to be adding another tier to JPD – Premium Edition.

What makes it premium? We don’t know yet – that hasn’t been announced yet, but it is coming.

But most of the keynote for JPD was dedicated to “JPD is awesome, companies love it and you will love it too.”

For the Devs out there…

Atlassian hasn’t forgotten you. Do you know what I hate – making a bug report. Atlassian apparently feels the same way, so they showed us a bug report in Jira being filled out using a Loom video and Atlassian Intelligence.

But they are investing heavily in Compass. If you are not familiar with Compass – that’s probably my fault. I’m long overdue for a “What is Compass?” post. But think of it as a hub for developers. It’s meant to give you a view of your development efforts using data from Jira and your code Repositories…and now a few more sources.

One feature I’m excited about is the new code scorecards.

They also have a new activity tab that lets you bring together relative time data from all your sources.

But the biggest news was what broke the weekend before Team. Atlassian has acquired Optic, and is looking to use their capabilities to improve Compass

Optic is an API Documentation and management tool, and Atlassian intends to leverage its capabilities to further extend what Compass monitors and detects.

Jira Service Management

Again, this part of the Keynote started with a good few “Atlassian is great” slides that I will spare you. But one part they are really investing in is in Incident response, especially when combining Compass with JSM.

You can now bring Alerts and On-Call information into JSM to monitor and action on items that need immediate attention.

But – using the Automation platform, you can also attempt to autoresolve some alerts first before deciding it needs human intervention.

Atlassian is also continuing to make improvements to its Virtual Agents powered by Atlassian Intelligence. For example, last year, they demoed both fully autonomous responses as well as “Changing the tone” of a human-generated response. This year, they’re showing how you can manually generate a response based on a human agent’s prompt.

You can also get suggestions for relevant queues from AI. Honestly, I’m not sure if this is amazing or creepy, I will have to see it in action.

One of the big announcements for JSM is Instant Service Desks. It takes the template concept from Jira Work Management Jira and applies it to JSM projects, allowing you to setup a service desk quickly, including a full portal with populated requests.

The Atlassian Platform

If you are unfamiliar with the Atlassian Platform, it’s alright. We are all more familiar with what runs on top of it, such as Jira, JPD, JSM, Confluence, and more. But the Atlassian Platform is what powers all those tools. So what’s new with it?

Well, let’s first discuss how you can finally manage Trello and Bitbucket instances within the Atlassian Administration console. This has been a long-requested feature, and I’m glad to see it finally here.

The next announcement is around Atlassian Access. This was the paid featureset that lets you use your own Identity Provider and SSO with Atlassian Cloud products. And then there was Beacon, which let you monitor those logins for suspicious activity. Someone finally asked, Why are these two products?

So much like Jira Software and Jira Work Management, these two tools are being combined into a new product, called Atlassian Guard.

Atlassian Guard will come in two flavors, Standard and Premium. The latter is only under limited availability right now, but OMG does it add a lot of features.

Next, they talked about their Data layer, which they call the Teamwork Graph. The big development here is the Semantic Index, which should allow Atlassian Intelligence to understand not only general context but organization-specific context that would only apply to your org.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a lot of hype, but if it lives up to it – this could change how we interact with the tools and Atlassian Intelligence. Using this new Semantic Index, Atlassian has shipped upwards of 50 new experience features this year.

Lets Talk Automation

Do you know what one of the most popular features in Jira is? Automation. No really, after the keynote I was on a panel with Dan Tombs, Darryl Lee, and Tyler Woolstenhulme (Brought you by Appfire – more on that later too) talking about Automation and best practices.

Earlier this year, Atlassian announced that the number of automation executions you could perform for most lower tiers of their Cloud products would be limited.

And well, this might be why. Atlassian customers have had collectively over 1 billion Automation rules run each month.

I mean, someone is footing the bill for that…I can see why they needed to put limits into place.

So, people are using Automation. Great! Atlassian is working to make your job easier. First, just like with JQL and Analytics, they are letting you use the power of AI to build Automation rules with just plain text.

Atlassian is also empowering AI to auto-recommend rules that makes sense for how your team is using the tooling.

Atlassian Analytics

So, just putting this out there Jira Guys and Gals. Analytics isn’t my specialty – but any stretch. So, don’t expect too much analysis from this section. If you are an Atlassian Analytics geek, get in touch, I’d love to hear your thoughts about the announcements!

Let’s start with this—that some in the crowd seemed to like. You can now integrate your Atlassian Datalake with outside BI tools like Tableau, Power BI, and more to use as a source.

You can now also have Atlassian Intelligence recommend and generate charts from your data to show you what is actually happening within your Organization.

It can even interpret the data to give you insights into what it means.

Meet Rovo

Atlassian Intelligence had a big year last year. It was by far the star of Team ’23’s Keynote, and Atlassian actually shipped many of the features they debuted there.

But this year, they are debuting another aspect of it: Rovo.

Rovo allows your users to generate Atlassian Intelligence powered Agents that can be trained on your data and assigned specific tasks. And when I say “you’re data,” I’m not meaning just Atlassian Platform tools. This can take data from a variety of sources, from Slack, Google Documents, Repositories, and more.

What’s more, these other sources can be brought into your unified search engine to become searchable. Not sure how that will affect the noise problem I mentioned in the Confluence section, but again, it’s a “We’ll see.”

One thing Rovo will allow is Context specific keyword definitions. This honestly was my most anticipated feature from Team ’23, and I was quiet sad to see it not ship. But now it’s here!

You can even just ask Rovo to define a word in a search, and it will give a context-specific answer for you.

It can also give you details around questions, like “Who’s working on X?” or “When is Y releasing?”

But it doesn’t stop there. You can continue the conversation to gain greater insights and answer further questions.

And you don’t even have to leave your page if you started a query there.

But I think the breakaway feature of Robo is the Agents. These are the specific action oriented intelligent bots that help your teams with specific tasks.

And honestly, what they can do is pretty diverse.

One example they gave is an Agent that can redraft an announcement to fit into the Brand Guidelines.

Another “Out of the box” agent they demoed was one that Cleans up feature flags in their repository.

This one you can fire from a specific story, and it will use details from that story to go, generate the code commits to remove the feature flag, put it through testing, and alert you when it’s done and ready for Pull Request to check and merge the change.

I got a chance to talk to the Product lead last week, and according to him, there is currently no plans to limit how many agents you can have. I don’t know if that will stay the case, and honestly I have a hard time believing it will. But I just love the idea and can’t wait to play around with it.

Team ’25

Yes, We are already thinking about next year! And guess what? It’s not in Vegas! It will be an Anaheim, CA next year, near Disneyland. the TJL crew is already making plans, so we will see you there!

A Special thanks to Appfire

I want to say a special thank you to Appfire, who sponsored this Trip. The panel yesterday was amazing, and in fact, Appfire plans to hold it as a webinar soon. So stay tuned for more details.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t tell you about some of their automation Apps though. I’ve covered JMWE and I know I’ve mentioned Jira Suite Utilities. These two Apps allow you to put deeper automation into your workflows, allowing you to make all sorts of actions. But something I’m playing around with right now is their Power Scripts app.

And here’s the thing: These automation tools don’t have a limit. Definitely something to think about if you are having challenges with recent Automation changes…

I want to thank Appfire again for having me out here, and I hope I can work with you again soon!

What do you think?

What are your favorite new features? Anything you can’t wait to get a hold of? Let me know!

I also want to extend another congratulations to my The Jira Life Co-host and friend, Alex! He won the Atlassian Creator of the Year award last night during the Community Leader dinner. You freaking rock, man!

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