Happy New Year everyone!!

What an amazing 2024 we had in regards to all of the changes we saw for Atlassian and of course, December was no exception. While most of us were busy winding down for the end of year parties, or the week long food fiesta (maybe this was just me), Atlassian had released over 140 functionality updates across the entire Atlassian cloud platform.

As we wrap up Atlassian’s 2024 update, let’s take a look back over the last month for Atlassian products. This blog is not going to be a complete catch up of everything I or someone in the community has noticed over the last month, but more on the larger release items or the new EAP & other important announcements from Atlassian.

With so many updates, we’ll go ahead and take a look over each of the following four tracks:

• Agile & DevOps.

• Work Management & Collaboration.

• Service Management.

• Platform.

So without further or do, let’s get started!

In Case You Missed It

Agile & DevOps

Jira sees new permissions hit the permission scheme. Last month, Jira saw additional project admin permissions, one for issue layouts and the other for edit workflows. Now Jira admins are able to delegate additional controls out to specific trusted users. These permissions are not for everyone I know, but there will definitely be cases where Jira admins can remove themselves as the bottleneck and enable those with a bit more skill.

If you are working with Slack as your ChatOps tool then this is a must know! If you are often creating Jira work related to those messages but find it difficult to consolidate the messages into an easy to digest ticket then the following announcement will be incredibly helpful. Atlassian announced last month that you can now access Atlassian Intelligence through the Jira Cloud Slack app. The app references the original and all thread messages to auto-generate a summary and a description of your conversations to provide a more full and developed work item in Jira, removing context switching. Find out how to use Atlassian Intelligence to create issues from Slack

Work Management & Collaboration

The smart link list view just got smarter in Confluence. When working with Jira data from within Confluence, you can now in line edit status, priority and the assignee of issues. This isn’t everything, so you may think this is not adding a lot of value, but this is just the start. Where some in-line editing comes, more follows. Let’s see where this goes

Atlassian Intelligence yet again is making our lives easier. You can now have the AI engine suggest and create Jira issues based on the Confluence page currently being displayed. AIntelligence will automatically generate issue summaries and descriptions when you create multiple Jira issues from a Confluence page. Please note that this is only for premium & enterprise users.

Confluence whiteboards got an upgrade over the festive period. Whiteboards now has the ability to import Miro boards. Keeping all your work in one place can significantly speed up deicision making process and enable more teams to reach their full potential. Your Miro boards are exported as vector PDFs and imported to Confluence whiteboards under native functionality.

Whiteboards also saw some additional attention. Introducing version history for whiteboards. You can now view and restore versions of your whiteboards, giving you greater flexibility and control over your knowledge. Should you wish to restore previous versions, this will create a new entire whiteboard with the same permissions as the historic version.

Back in August, I spoke about how Atlassian were bringing around the ability to change space keys. Well I am very excited to say that this functionality is now available for all. The rollout for this update is complete, meaning space admins are now able to go and update as they need to. The old keys still redirect, meaning users wont get stuck with old URLs.

Service Management

Atlassian intelligence can now suggest where there are possible knowledge gaps within your knowledge base. This functionality gives your team a head start an opportunity to improve ticket deflections and increase self service rates for your customers. AIntelligence generates a list of topics by analysing requests and looking for related articles.

Atlassian Intelligence now goes multi channel! AIntelligence can now be found on both the portal and in e-mail. So let’s start with the email.

Once enabled, the virtual service agent will be able to start responding to any inbound emails and assist in escalating or resolving using your knowledge.

The virtual agent on the help centre now allows customers to better find knowledge on the knowledge base or even get their requests submitted.

Terraform Integration

JSM gains integration with Terraform. When integrating with Terraform, you are now able to define, edit and version control JSM resources like teams, schedules and escalations.

Platform

Copy Product Data improvements EAP is now available. This EAP is designed to help showcase the improvements Atlassian are making to making their ‘Cloud Migration Assistant’ (CMA). Currently the CMA tool copies ALL configuration and data. Meaning this often leads to duplication. The new CMA will reduce the amount of duplication and manual clean up effort. To understand more around the EAP, take a look at this community blog.

Data security policies have been getting an upgrade over the last month. Both with a new facelift and improved functionality. The data export rule has been extended to now also block the downloading of files that are attached to protected Confluence pages. Users will no longer find a download button in sections like the attachment list, macros, and file previews. This change will affect any existing policies that have configured the data export rule to block exports. At this stage, it will not block attachment downloads in Jira.

Guard Detect now has the ability to redact your data to help reduce the risk to your organization. When sensitive data in Confluence is detected, Guard Detect alerts admins when the page is published & includes the excerpt to help the investigation.

If you decide that the data is sensitive and should not be stored in Confluence, you can redact the content directly from the alert, regardless of any space permissions or page restrictions.

This deletes the sensitive data and replaces it with a solid bar in the current version of the page. You also have the option to remove any historical versions that contained the data from the page history.

The sensitive data will be deleted and replaced with a solid bar everywhere it appears in the current version of that page. It can’t be restored or undone.

As mentioned, due to the holidays, this was a nice short and sweet update but still, which one of the latest updates is your favourite? Until the next year.