We were honoured to have Jay Simons, President of Atlassian, come to Toronto on April 6th as part of his Atlassian Roadshow. The event was also streamed live by Atlassian User Groups across the United States, in Atlanta, Boston, and Charlotte.
The event kicked off with a few updates from the Toronto AUG and a brief intro by Ashley Edwards from Atlassian. Jay Simons took the stage and dove into a list of updates to Atlassian applications and spoke to Atlassian’s recent acquisition of Trello and how it’s integrating with Atlassian. Here’s a breakdown of everything Jay Simons spoke about:
Upcoming Features
JIRA
- JIRA users can now benefit from Kanban backlog functionality, which allows operations teams to plan a backlog similar to scrum projects
- Canned responses for JIRA Service Desk allow users to respond to issues more quickly via saved templates
- Program level planning for Portfolio supports planning across multiple plans
- JIRA users will benefit from an improved installation experience, with pre-upgrade integrity checks and improved error handling
Confluence
For many people, confluence is the go to destination for collaborative project planning & iteration, documentation, and feedback. Jay announced some simple yet awesome updates to confluence that will help make Confluence an even better place for content.
Collaborative editing
Confluence users no longer have to worry that their hard work will be erased by version issues in confluence. Collaborative editing will allow each collaborator’s changes to be visible to anyone working on a page. This will enable more transparency and understanding for users working on a project together.
Search bar
Updates to Confluence’s search bar will allow users to easily find documents that they’ve worked on recently, and from the past. For anyone who wasn’t aware, when you click into the search bar within Confluence, you have visibility into the last 7 confluence pages you’ve worked on. When you click on ‘More recently viewed pages’ you have even further visibility into what you’ve worked on. Plus, Atlassian has made strides on improving the indexing, so when you’re searching for something you can’t find under ‘recently viewed’, the search bar will only show you pages that you’ve had access to- so you no longer have to scroll through pages that you’ve never seen, in order to find something. This will serve as a huge time saver for teams with a large repository of pages.
Data Center
The Atlassian Data Center has been a huge investment for Atlassian. Although Atlassian is saving the bigger Data Center announcements for the Atlassian Summit in Barcelona this May, Jay did touch upon a few recent updates announced at the last summit:
Performance improvements
JIRA zero downtime upgrades: You can deploy JIRA across physical nodes, allowing you to upgrade nodes sequentially with better availability and fault tolerance. Administrators can breathe easy, knowing that they no longer have to sacrifice weekends and evenings to upgrades.
Hipchat has been added to the Data Center family
This allows for deployment of physical architecture across machines, which expands usability past 5,000 users, surpassing Atlassian Server capability. They also announced expanded deployment options, which allow large organizations to deploy Hipchat to Amazon Web Services for enhanced scalability and performance in the AWS Cloud.
Trello Acquisition
In early 2017, Atlassian announced that it acquired Trello for $425 million. For those not familiar with Trello, it’s a freemium project management service that uses simple lists and ‘cards’ so users can organize, prioritize, and collaborate on projects. Since the announcement, many have been wondering where Trello fits in with other Atlassian products, so Jay reviewed how Trello integrates with Atlassian’s main applications.
Integrations with Atlassian products
JIRA: Users can link to Trello cards from within JIRA. The status of a JIRA issue can therefore be visualized within a Trello board, so there’s a natural click though between the two products.
Confluence: Users can attach a confluence page to a Trello card or create one within a Trello card, so you can seamlessly build content related to a card. For example, if you have a Trello card for a Statement of Work or Project Plan, you could directly create the corresponding confluence page from the card. It’s a simple, but important integration that will help enhance productivity around content creation.
Bitbucket: This integration enables users to attach and link a bunch of artifacts from within bitbucket to a Trello card. This means that full Bitbucket code requests can be represented within a Trello card. This gives small development teams full visibility on code collaboration projects.
Hipchat: Users can now see when changes are made to a Trello card, right within a Hipchat room, similar to confluence notifications. If the notifications become too much, you can ultimately select the level of notifications you’d like to receive for it.
For Atlassian User Groups across North America, Jay Simon’s Roadshow was a great way to gain insight into Atlassian’s growth, priorities, and development plans. It gave users and partners an opportunity to network with others who are passionate about Atlassian applications and strategize ways to grow and improve their functionality.
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