Category: Atlassian Summit/Team Tour

Well, well, well. Here we find ourselves again. Today we’ll see the second keynote and find out what else Atlassian has planned for the day. But first, do address a comment from yesterday’s post:

Maxim is correct, they certainly were cloud heavy yesterday. This is likely because most features start out in cloud and eventually make their way into Server and Data Center. That being said, you know we love your self-hosted systems here, so I’m hoping to hear what they have planned for those today. (Future Rodney here: it’s still mostly Cloud. Sorry! But we do get some Data Center and Server info today!)

Otherwise you all loved yesterday’s recap, so lets get on with an encore!

And we begin again!

Mike Cannon-Brookes does the introduction this time. He features a chrome extension that lets people watch Netflix together as a way to show how the world is already adapting to the current situation.

And he also mentioned Summit next year. I can tell you I’m already planning to go, so hopefully I’ll see you there!

Scaling the future of Cloud[…again.]

So they don’t announce it now, but it looks like there is a new cloud tier on the horizon…”Enterprise.” Hope it’s not the spaceship

Again, Finally. If I had users complain about anything with JIRA, it was about the amount of email it sends them. Atlassian claims their new method of sending digests instead of distinct emails reduces the mail spam by 30%! If true, I cannot wait!

So – this should allow Apps (plugins) within Atlassian cloud to do more. I’m excited that maybe we’ll get some of the functionality us self-hosted people enjoy into the cloud!

And it looks like they added the Premium tier for JIRA Service Desk. Seems like it should have happened sooner, honestly.

So you will soon be able to whitelist which IP’s can access your site. I can think of a few customers this would be handy for.

It looks like they also plan to bring Archiving in JIRA Software Premium some point soon. I thought new features were supposed to come to Cloud first, not Data Center 😛

Based on Automation for JIRA…I see what you did there. But seriously, I love me some Automation for JIRA, and glad to see it being incorporated.

JIRA Align is getting the ability to manage OKR’s. Being honest, no clue what they are. Sounds like a research topic to review later. But if you know – I can imagine you’re excited.

And Trello is being integrated into JIRA Align. Because you need ALL THE DATA!

So, they are adding an ability to bridge unlimited 10K instances of Atlassian Cloud Applications to support companies’ growth…

As a part of a new access Tier. Called it!

Sounds like you get some pretty big benefits from Cloud Enterprise though…

Like one place to manage all the chaos of multiple instances

Single place for user directory management, check.

Unified Billing, Check

And those sweet sweet statistics, check.

Looks like they are bringing Data Residency to their Enterprise Tier too – which could be big for government requirements.

This one is big. Rather than just getting new features whenever they are pushed, you can now delay a release for up to two weeks, and bundle them up. The ability to give our users warning will be very VERY nice.

Now I will say this. A sandbox is something Salesforce has always done better (That’s right, I’m also a salesforce admin. Bet you didn’t see that!). So it’s nice to see Atlassian start to do something for us here.

Wooo! Partners! But seriously, I’ve worked with the Atlassian TAMS and Premier support, and they know their stuff. Between them and, well, partners like me, you are in good hands.

Looks like they are making it easier to go to the cloud. That should help a lot of folks out there!

Building for change and scale (aka Data Center)

So Finally, Data Center…what have they got going on…

So – stuff they’ve done recently….I mean I’m happy for all of these features, but still….

And finally, the new things! So it looks like they are tweaking things here to improve performance in JIRA And Confluence Data Center – but the biggest one is that you can have more than four nodes in the applications. Finally!

Fun fact. A company I worked for asked for this three years ago. Glad to see it finally come!

Adding OpenID Connect as an identity provider!

Soon you will have the ability to have multiple identity providers.

And also just in time User Provisioning is coming to Data Center soon.

My Workspace One peeps back at VMware should love this.

Auditing in Atlassian apps have always been…..lacking. Glad they agree.

You can now audit user actions, not just admin actions. And it looks like this is across multiple areas of the application.

You can export these as a file log to send to ELK, Splunk, etc.

You can also delegate users to access the audit log – very much a “not my problem” move.

YES. SO MUCH YES! I’ve been wanting them to update Confluence Permissions FOREVER!

You can audit permissions for users or spaces to see who can see and do what.

This one is for server and data center. Looks like they intend to make it easier to access for those with certain impairments. I am definitely excited to see them make this move.

So moving on to new features for Agile teams…

Looks like you will soon be able to create multiple sprints quickly – while specifying dates. As a person who has had to bulk create sprints before, this is big.

Another data point for JIRA Align. Seems they are working on all the connectors!

The first thing I do in any company is figure out and document their language. Will be nice to do this in-app. And Release management love is long overdue…

Portfolio for JIRA is getting some updates to capacity planning too…

…and a Confluence Macro. This will make it soooo much easier to share a roadmap.

They already mentioned this, but it looks like they are sharing more details on the JIRA Align <> Trello connector.

And a connector for BI systems too.

I hate buzzwords, and AI is one of the worse offenders. But I promise not to judge it until I can actually see what it does…

So onto my I.T. Brethren…

I think we saw some of this in yesterday’s Cloud presentation, but it’s nice to see it come to Server and Data Center too!

You can search for incidents in OpsGenie directly in Service Desk….Nice!

As well as see a list of all present and past incidents.

Agent Queues are getting some love.

Including improved sorting, the ability to favorite queues, and bulk edits in queue. That will definitely come in handy.

This seems obvious in hindsight…if you support people who speak multiple languages, maybe come to them in their own language.

And finally, some news for developers

Looks like they are making some information about build available in Bitbucket. The real surprise here is that it’s from both Bamboo and Jenkins!

You will also be able to set build configurations per branch – which will be great for experimenting!

Looks like they are adding some more context highlighting in the diff page

As well as letting you add a comment anywhere in the diff, not only on what’s different.

And last but not least, you can search for specific files from within the pull request. Should make it so much simpler to get to what you need.

And done!

That was the end of the keynote. I’m not remembering why I only do one post a week. But it’s been great seeing what’s new. Things maybe crazy now, but it’s always important to remember there is a tomorrow, and to plan for it.

Which reminds me, you should totally check out our Discord chat. I’d be happy to hear what new features you are excited for! https://discord.gg/mXuRsVu

If you’ve enjoyed the Keynote Recaps from the past few days, check out some of my other posts! I try to post on a wide range of topics affecting JIRA Administration, and am always up for a reader suggested topic! Also, subscribe to get new posts directly in your inbox! Sign-up form will be at the bottom of the post!

Until next time, my name is Rodney, asking “Have you updated your JIRA Issues?” I’ll check you next time!

I am so sorry for the delay…I tried to get word out that today’s post was going to be a bit late. But given when this event is, there wasn’t much choice. However, it’s an exciting day! Today we’ll start to learn about all the new things Atlassian plans for the next year.

In speaking of exciting, last month was another amazing month for the blog. And that’s with having to miss a post! Thank you all so much! Considering the events of last month, it is most definitely appreciated!

That being said, the event is starting, so lets get into it.

And we’re “live”?

Its’ a prerecorded event, but still exciting! Honestly, I’d prerecord too. No need leaving things up to chance when you don’t have to.

Try Any Atlassian Product for Free!

So, a lot of teams are having to try remote work for the first time. Given that, Atlassian has made ALL their products free for up to 10 users. So what are you waiting for! If you’ve been wanting to try JIRA, Confluence, or any other of their tools, now’s your time!

Trello Business for Educators!

Additionally, teachers are having to teach classes from afar – most of which this is there first time doing so. To support our educators, Atlassian is giving them a year free of Trello Business Class. Share this with a teacher in your life.

• Click here for more details

Today’s Agenda

Just a quick view of what to expect today – and honestly, it doesn’t tell me much. Guess I’m going to have to sit in for the full time…

St. Jude’s use of Atlassian Tools

So considering I started with Atlassian tools within a software company, it still amazes me how many companies now adopt the tool set as their default. St. Jude’s Children hospital is on that list.

Okay – had to add this slide in. Don’t worry, you’re not alone.

Software and IT Team updates! (This is my jam!)

Looks like we are finally getting into what new things to expect. If this follows normal trends, we can expect the “new, shiny” features in Cloud first, and eventually they’ll make it to either Server and/or Data Center. But still, it’s nice to know what to be excited about!

Users can customize Notification settings!

This one is big. If I had one complaint I’ve heard everywhere from users, is that JIRA sends out WAAAAY too many emails. It looks like Atlassian heard this, and are planning to allow a user level notification scheme, so each user can define the notifications they want. Unfortunately, they didn’t have a good slide or mock-up of this, so this feature may not be ready to come out just yet….but at least our woes have been heard!

Your work Dashboard (Bitbucket)

So, you know that situation where you have to jump on JIRA to figure out what issues are assigned to you, then onto bitbucket to pull the repo, then back and forth? Well, Atlassian wants to do something about it. Bitbucket will have a new dashboard that will show you all the relevant information at one go – no more context switching.

Live Status (Automation for JIRA)

So, it looks like Atlassian has some plans to make some in-place automation leveraging automation for JIRA. This will help move issues along a track based off of what’s happening to a given repo.

Here you can see an issue move through the workflow when actions are taken within Visual Studio.

While we’ve had some triggers to do something like this for a while, that was always on a pull request creation or other such event. To do it from Visual Studio by changing code – that might be big.

Code Insights in Bitbucket Cloud

So, how do you build new products without exposing yourself and your customers to potential vulnerabilities? Well, Bitbucket is building in some reviews from top vendors that will look at your code and alert you to possible vulnerabilities right away. This could be big in helping bad code not be released.

Automating Change Requests

So, JIRA Service Desk is getting some love too! Now when you have a successful test build in your build tool of choice, you can have it automatically generate a change request in JIRA Service Desk.

There is even some logic to allow a low-risk change automatically to go through, or to hold it up for a human to review.

If it’s a high risk change (as judged by the rules), it will flag it for your team to review.

And then give you all the information you need to make a decision – all in one place.

Fix Fast

So, this is about OpsGenie. However, one of the major new features is now you can now bulk-link incoming support requests to a given problem. This can save time as you don’t have to go to each one and do it. Nice!

The Incident Investigation platform seems like it will bring together information from a variety of places, allowing you to see the exact change that caused the problem, as well as who submitted it and what was changed. For some outages this can be big.

You can also do your after-action report within OpsGenie to have details about what went wrong, what you learned from it, and how it can be prevented again.

AND THEN you can export it into Confluence to share out with your team. Nice!

Roadmaps in JIRA

They’ve also added the ability to view the full hierarchy from a sub-task all the way to the epic.

And all was going well when suddenly….

The video site when down!

Kind of funny huh? The video just went down…hard. This is what one of my colleagues had to say about it.

This wouldn’t be as funny, but Atlassian was just talking about Incident response.

And we are back! So…Roadmaps?

They have added progress bars to your roadmap, so you can see how much work is actually left on different items.

This didn’t show up on the image I got, but you can also drag-and-drop dependencies on each other, so you can track what is waiting on what task to be done.

And what use is a roadmap if you can’t share it? Yes, another Confluence Macro to bring that into Confluence, then let it update in real-time!

Some more features!

So, they’ve also been getting some feedback on Roadmaps for those who have been using them.

Solution one: Add Roadmaps to Classic Projects. Seems obvious in hindsight, doesn’t it?

They are also adding the ability to create Multi Project roadmaps for those with a Premium license.

Here you can plan out across multiple teams and keep track of time frame, dependencies, and capacity.

However….you might notice this looks familiar….almost like Portfolio for JIRA. That is no mistake, this is meant to take some of the best features of Portfolio and bring it into the Roadmap.

Unify Work across all teams with Atlassian

So we are onto the final section – wonder what we’ll have here!

So we are all familiar with Confluence Templates? It looks like they want to bring that concept to more apps, including Trello and JIRA Service Desk.

For JIRA Service Desk, they will have templates for HR, Legal and Facilities. This should make bringing these teams into JIRA is now that much faster.

Finally! A template gallery so you as an admin doesn’t have to make one for scratch for a team you may not be familiar with!

New Tech? Okay, lets see where this goes…

Butler for Trello becomes a core feature one very Trello Board….and comes to JIRA and Slack!

Butler can now automatically create JIRA Issues for you when you make a Trello Card.

You can also get Butler to post a message to any slack channel! Get the word out about a new card that much faster.

Automation for JIRA

This is being brought into JIRA Cloud as we speak, bringing a native automation engine for your Projects. Which honestly, JIRA has needed for some time…

New (?) Navigation in the Cloud products

Well, they are finally revamping how the cloud products look. Atlassian won’t admit it’s the old style, and technically they are right, but looks enough like the old style that I’m happy.

Atlassian has revamped Confluence’s home page, and honestly I love this design. It’s fresh, but still has all the needed pieces within reach.

New Fun Trello Features

So, how do you add “fun” into a project management tool?

Well, you can add an image to a card’s cover so it looks more visually appealing. Having spent years looking at JIRA Boards, I can’t say I dislike this feature.

Also partnering with Giphy to add stickers doesn’t hurt. Considering the number of Gifs I use on the blog, I bet you can imagine how I feel about being able to use more of them…

Page Analytics (Confluence Cloud)

I am very much a statistics fan, so I love that we can get some analytics around Confluence page views. I really hope they move this to Confluence Server!

This has been available in Confluence Premium, but you can now access it at the standard tier now.

Confluence Editor

There are some minor changes to how links appear and how to expand sections in Confluence Cloud, but the change that has me the most excited:

That’s right, a new macro browser. The one in Confluence Server is passable, but not good, and they managed to make it worse in Cloud by throwing in JIRA Gadgets. Nice to see they put some love into this! BTW: If you are not using macros in Confluence, what are you even doing?

Inline comments in Edit mode

Just one word here: Finally.

And that’s it for day one!

So, what features are you excited about? Honestly some of the automation around Change Requests look exciting to me. Leave a comment with what you are looking forward to.

Today was very cloud heavy, so I’m hoping tomorrow we can learn more about Atlassian’s plan for Server and Data Center. In speaking of tomorrow, we’ll be back here with another post about what they announce in Tomorrow’s Keynote. Again, don’t expect it at Noon Eastern – it will likely be some time a 5-6 PM Eastern.

Until then, my name is Rodney, asking “Have you updated your JIRA Issues today?” I’ll see you all tomorrow!

So, Atlassian’s annual conference in the US, “Summit”, is now less than 30 days away. And at the time of writing I don’t know if I’ll be going to Summit yet. I would very much like to, but there are some final logistical hurdles to overcome first. But, I wanted to take a look ahead to it and figure out what breakout sessions I’d recommend to you, and which I’ll be going to if I can.

Now my advice is if you can, DEFINITELY go to Summit. It is an amazing learning experience each time I have gone. But much like me, it may not be possible for everyone to go every year. As I’ve stated previously, Atlassian has been very good about posting breakout sessions and keynotes to their YouTube page. I very much intend this to be running in the background while I work if I can’t go – and I’ll definitely be focusing in on the sessions I point out here today. But if I can go, I have some special plans for you readers from this blog.

So lets get into this

How Atlassian Enterprise Services are Unleashing our potential

Speaker: Christopher Heritage, Agile Leader, NextEra Energy
Time: 02 April, 2020 @ 3:00 PM
Room: Oceanside F

So this one seems like it will be a good story on how Atlassian’s Enterprise Services – that is to say their Premier Support and Technical Account Mangers (TAM’s) helped NextEra Energy scale and grow their Atlassian deployment. I’ve also had a really good experience with the Enterprise Services people (Hi guys!), and know more than a few of them personally, so I’ll be going here for more stories I can pass on to clients who are on the fence about signing up. If you are thinking “Are Atlassian Enterprise Services for me?”, maybe check out this session to hear first hand what they can do for you.

How to clean up your Atlassian suite (without losing your damn mind)

Speaker: Alex Christensen, Lead Atlassian Suite Engineer, AppDynamics
Time: 01 April, 2020 @ 3:05 PM
Room: Oceanside D

So, you get onto a new job, just to realize the JIRA Instance is a complete mess. This is a topic I am actually planning on touching here soon. I’ve had several experiences with messy JIRA Instances, and seen many more.

So, what do you do? Alex will guide us on how they went about cleaning several “messy” instances, and best practices they do to keep it clean.

How we learned to stop worrying and love weekday upgrades

Speaker: Ed Bukoski, Software Engineer, Netflix
Time: 02 April, 2020 @ 11:00 AM
Room: Oceanside C

Okay, going to admit, the title of this one gave me a mild panic attack.

Downtime is a necessary evil, and in the days when JIRA Server was the only deployment option, it was required for an uptime. But as a point of pride, I’d prefer my systems be up when people need them – which meant I’ve done A LOT of weekend upgrades.

However, with the Data Center Deployment option, you don’t have to bring the system down to upgrade it. This does open up the ability to do an upgrade during the weekday – without the system being down for your users. This is exactly what Ed intends to talk about, and the consequences there-in. Should be an interesting talk.

How to Un-F*** Jira

Speaker: Jon Kern, Agile Consultant, Adaptavist
Time: 31 March, 2020, 1:55 PM
Room: Oceanside C

Jon here speaks to something I’ve seen to often. Agile is meant about making things simple. So why do so many organizations make their JIRA usage so complicated? This is the curse with any highly configurable tool: People will see everything they can do, and feel they need to use it all. Jon will present several best practices for administering JIRA while honoring agile principles.

Personal branding for people who hate personal branding

Speaker: Megha Narayan, Head of Brand, Atlassian
Time: 02 April, 2020, 4:25 PM
Room: Mandalay Bay J

So, something I had to come to terms with during my job hunt is that I have a brand, and I haven’t been managing it to that point. This blog has made that even clearer. Megha will be speaking to just that – how defining your brand can be a very good thing for you and your teams. She also share tips from brands like Apple and Nike that you can apply to your personal brand. Sounds like a must-listen to me

Dev Teams & Dragons: From DM to PM

Speaker: Anthony Nomorosa, UX Designer, Atlassian
Time: 01 April, 2020, 11:00 AM
Room: Oceanside F

So, what does Dungeons & Dragons, the classic yet resurgent table top RPG have to do with leading a team?

A lot actually! Anthony will share how he takes lessons learned from the game and use it to foster communication, motivation, and empathy within cross-functional teams. As I’ve recently gotten back into playing myself after some 20 years, this one is a can’t miss for me.

Will you be at summit?

As I said, I will be there if I can make it. Will you be there? I hope so!

So, for the next blog post, I’m going to be doing something different. I was recently contacted by a friend of mine that works as an Atlassian TAM. Atlassians are reading my Atlassian blog – that blew my mind. But he also had several requests of topics that we can cover – and honestly, they are all too good, I can’t decide! So instead, I’ll let you decide.

I’ll let this run to Noon EDT on Sunday, 8 March, 2020 – at which point I’ll have to start writing whatever you chose to talk about!

In speaking of the blog, we hit a new high monthly viewership in February with 550 page views! I thought it would be a while before we beat last January, as it was a rare month with five posts published, but we did it in a month with only four! Lets see what March will bring.

If the numbers are to be believed, LinkedIn hasn’t been sharing the articles the past two weeks as widely as they previously had – or our numbers would have been even larger! If you want to help me change that, start a conversation within the comments of the LinkedIn Post! That is one of the key parameters their algorithm looks at when deciding to show it to new people. Thank you!

Don’t forget to subscribe to get our new blog posts directly to your email! The Email Subscription form will be at the bottom of this post. Also don’t forget to check out our Atlassian Discord Chat!It’s always interesting to see who has popped up there and what’s being discussed. https://discord.gg/mXuRsVu

But until next time, this is Rodney, asking “Have you updated your JIRA issues today?”