Atlassian Summit 2019

Earlier this month, we had the pleasure of taking part in the Atlassian Summit 2019, this time in the one and only Las Vegas Nevada. During the event, we attended many inspiring talks and had great conversations with numerous Atlassians, Atlassian partners, marketplace vendors and customers. In this blog, we aim to share some of the highlights and takeaways we came back home with.

Atlassian Product Updates

During the various keynotes, Atlassian made some announcements concerning their product roadmaps for the near future. Below is a summary of the product related highlights:

Cloud premium (coming soon!)

Atlassian is launching a Premium version of Jira and Confluence on its Cloud platform. Both editions will offer 99.9% availability, which will be financially backed with service credits. It will offer 24/7 Premium Support with a 1 hour response time for critical issues and will also include unlimited storage!

• Further, Jira Cloud Premium will include features that enhance the way teams build roadmaps, manage capacity, and communicate plans and progress.
• Confluence Cloud Premium will provide new key features for administrators that need more control and visibility over their Confluence instance, such as analytics and the ability to easily debug permission issues.

Pricing is yet to be announced...

Data Center

Atlassian announced that they will be rolling out exciting new Data Center Only features and functionalities:

• CDN Support: The introduction of CDN Support will help improve performance for distributed teams. By enabling CDN Support, customers can accelerate remote users' experience as they interact with the Atlassian UI and reduce peak load on their primary application instances. Customers will be able to use AWS CloudFront or any other preferred CDN solution for this.  
  • Products: Jira Software, Jira Service Desk, Confluence, Bitbucket
    

• Issue Archiving: Archiving an entire project can be too extensive, especially for customers working on large or long-lived projects. Similarly, customers that use Jira Service Desk don't always need to archive an entire service desk. This is why, after the recent project archiving feature release, Atlassian is now introducing Issue Archiving. Customers will be able to archive individual issues, using JQL queries to collect and archive issues as a bulk action or use the API.
  • Products: Jira Software & Jira Service Desk

• Updates to Data Center AWS & Azure Templates: Atlassian has updated its AWS and Azure templates. With improved support, the templates are easier to set up and to customize for a users' specific needs. Click here to read more about these updates.
  
  • Products: Jira, Jira Service Desk, Confluence, Bitbucket
    
    
• Smart Mirror Farms: Smart Mirror Farms support enterprise customers' growing number of builds and clones by increasing the merge and deployment frequency. It also adopts additional developer tools like resource intensive CI/CD for their development teams. Smart Mirror Farms are individual smart mirrors clustered into “farms” that are grouped together, behind a load balancer.
  
  • Product: Bitbucket
    
    
• Rate limiting for REST APIs: A number of factors can lead to performance degradation or outages. To help customers better protect their instances, admins can set thresholds for the number of requests allowed within a specific time frame. This solution will target REST API usage specifically. Although they will start with Bitbucket only, Atlassian is also looking to add similar support to Jira Software and Jira Service Desk in the future. 
  • Product: Bitbucket
    
    
• Centralized License and Permissions Visibility: Crowd is being extended to cover more than just user management. It starts with centralized license visibility, making it easier to track the myriad of licenses owned across the organization, and is followed by centralized permission visibility, allowing admins to see who has access to what, across all of their instances. 
  • Product: Crowd
    
    
• Support for Amazon Aurora: More details coming soon
  • Products: Jira Software, Jira Service Desk, Confluence, Bitbucket
    
    

Portfolio 3.0

Based on input from customers, key elements of the Portfolio for Jira platform have been radically improved. It has become a lot more simple and intuitive to use. Portfolio 3.0 accommodates to customers' planning and process style and makes it more transparent for all users within their organization.

As part of Atlassian's mission, they are constantly reflecting on the changes taking place in how teams work. These changes have led to the rise of the "Team of Teams" construct. Further, the increased adoption of Jira Software and the increasing autonomy of teams are major influences in this new direction. 

With Portfolio 3.0, Atlassian has changed the way Portfolio for Jira operates. It gives its users more control to create a roadmap exactly as they've envisioned it. It allows for plans to evolve as changes occur and the option to share strategy with key stakeholders. Its key features include:

• An intuitive planning UI
• Enhanced drag and drop scheduling functionality
• New filtering options and view settings
• Improved dependency management capabilities

Note: Themes are no longer a feature in Portfolio 3.0. You can use label colouring options to highlight your organization's strategic themes instead.

Jira Align

Atlassian announced a new addition to its product portfolio: Jira Align (formerly known as Agilecraft). This enterprise-grade solution enables an organization and its leaders to tie the work done across the organization to business outcomes, without disrupting the work of agile teams. This product is well suited for large enterprises as it will keep everyone in the organization, from top to bottom, aligned with the core strategy.

This is indeed a welcomed addition to the Atlassian tool suite. We really like how developers can see why a story should be developed, and how it fits in the overall strategy of the organization.

Click here for pricing.

Differences between Portfolio 3.0 and Jira Align

Portfolio for Jira helps multiple teams (or up to a team increment known as a tribe) to get visibility across projects, map dependencies and visualize outcomes. It is an add-on designed to empower a number of teams by providing program management capabilities. It is best suited for a group of teams working on a single instance of Jira. By providing intuitive road mapping and planning capabilities; Portfolio feels like an extension of Jira Software.

Jira Align is most effective for large enterprises that begin scaling agile, as they often use multiple instances of Jira, Jira Service Desk, or other tools that are needed to get visibility across projects to make decisions. Jira Align combines the work happening on technological initiatives across an enterprise into an all-encompassing view that connects strategy, work, and outcomes. Agile teams are able to use their tools of choice, such as Jira or Trello. Jira Align supports a range of scaled agile frameworks and is best suited to scaling agile across the enterprise.

Jira Portfolio is integrated into your Jira instance. Jira Align is deployed outside of your Jira instance because it can connect multiple Jira instances if desired. 

About ITIL, Version 4

Just recently, Axelos released a new version of the ITIL framework. ITIL 4, as it is known, provides an emphasis on the world of business and technology, ranging from how it works today to how it will work in the future with Agile, DevOps and digital transformations. For the first time, the development of the framework was crowdsourced, by over 2,200 IT professionals across many roles and industries! Atlassian and Axelos have published an interesting whitepaper on the subject: A practical guide to ITIL 4 in an age of agile. Download your copy here!

The Science of Happiness and Effective Teams

In one of the general sessions, guest speaker Shawn Achor gave a talk that was not related to Atlassian tooling per se but was rather focused on Atlassian's mission to unleash the potential in every team. He shared his views on the power of human social connections. It was a long story, but in short, he discovered that when people actually work well together (effective teamwork), every metric of potential rises, for everyone involved. This was a very inspiring talk, backed up by factual research and rather welcomed in between all the "Atlassian-talk" during Summit. Unfortunately, this session isn't available online (unlike the other talks), so I guess this really was a thing that happened in Vegas, and stayed there.

Updates from Add-On Vendors

Atlas CRM: server version

Following a great number of requests, our very own Atlas CRM app has been launched for both Server and Data Center platforms! If you're not familiar with it, this app allows you to easily link Company and Contact Information to Jira (and Jira Service Desk) issues. This isn't just a custom field, but it displays all the information you're looking for. And best of all, you decide what information you store for companies or contacts. With a single click, you can easily see other related issues per contact, without any context switching.

Not all Cloud features are available in this version. To check out what our app team is currently working on, you can follow their roadmap here.

Riada: Insight Asset Management for Jira Cloud

It's almost here! The Asset Management solution for Jira Cloud! The app is currently in beta, but it is now publicly listed and free for you to try out. Riada is working hard on making most of the on-premise features available for the Cloud version of their app. You can check this page to learn more.

Refined Rebranded

Formerly known as RefinedWiki, Refined has launched a new website and has updated their look and feel across all products. Their vision is that the app shouldn't be your silo. Instead, it should gather information on all of your connected apps and present it in a way that matters: branded, in your look and feel. Refined is making the Atlassian products easier to use for all its users by making content more accessible and findable. Interesting? Have a look at this demo....