Welcome to the next instalment in our ICYMI series. In this series we 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

July has been a good month for Atlassian, even though we are very much heading into the summer holiday period, there are still plenty of great updates to inform you about. Some of the items we were hearing about at Team ‘24 at vegas have all started to come through. We have seen Jira Software & Jira Work Management change to just Jira as well as Guard & Guard Detect replace what was Access & Beacon.

We have also seen another announcement over the course of this month. It looks like Team is on tour. That’s right, Atlassian & all of the ecosystem are heading to Barcelona for Team Europe ‘24. More on that to follow.

So without further or do, lets get into the updates.

Agile & DevOps

Small announcement:

Jira’s “.” menu is going! This may seem simple but I know that there will be a fair few power admins using the dot menu to shortcut their way through Jira. This change is happening August 19th and making way for the command palette only!. You can access the command palette through ctrl K (windows) or cmd k (mac). Atlassian is performing this change to simplify the offering and eventually make a more powerful command palette.

A new trigger has come to Jira automation. You can now trigger automations to run when a new project is created. Great for all of those admins that want to make sure certain standards are being set.

Some additional automation functionality was also released very recently. There has long been a call for Atlassian to open APIs to manage automation rules. This includes searching, creating and editing rules through API. If you have been following this, you’ll definitely be aware of AUTO-51. Over the last week, Atlassian completed part of this request, but have reopened the request in order to complete the full list of items. But for now, you are now able to search for your rules using APIs. Check out the documentation here

Work Management & Collaboration

Automations are a powerful thing. Everyone can benefit from automation as well, however, you definitely have to protect both users and systems from malicious intent or unintentional accidents. End user automations have come to confluence. Your end users can now create smart buttons where end users can add simple automations from pre defined lists, or add them to templates to streamline processes. If you want to learn more, check out this community post.

Confluence is getting new enhanced inline commenting. You can now comment directly on elements like emojis, statuses, mentions, dates, and smart links. Why is this important? By enabling inline commenting on more content, means better context for reviewers, streamlining processes and improving collaboration on documentation.

Confluence has also seen some more improvements to the formatting of content. If you have missed your ability to highlight text, you don’t have to any longer. This improvement is being improvements to collaboration or readability. Go give it a go.

Editing Confluence pages can sometimes be annoying. Especially when you then have to reorganise the page due to changes in design etc. Well Atlassian have helped us here, since we are now able to easily move top level elements like sections & simply drag and drop to where you now want it. The aim is to improve the creators efficiency by easily enabling them to work with content and have the freedom to redesign the flow without having to spend loads of time doing it.

Service Management

Canned responses have proven to save time, create better standardisation & improve productivity, but one issue for the native functionality over things like the marketplace apps is that you have not been able to add personal signatures into the canned responses. Well that is all changing. Atlassian have added the ability to create your own personal signature and add it to when you use a canned response. Go check out the documentation to learn more.

A huge benefit coming to cloud. The ability to now restrict request types to specific users!!! THIS IS HUGE. The ability to do this restriction opens up more possibilities to service teams and their offerings. Just like anything in Atlassian, it is easy to work with. Just simply click the padlock and add specific users or groups. Go check out the community post to learn more.

A new beta is out this month. Atlassian have released the virtual agent on the help centre. Last year they brought the virtual agent to Slack, streamlining customer requests from start to finish. But now we have the ability to have the virtual agent on portals when you may not be directly chatting to your customers. To review the full announcement, as well as join the beta. Go check out this community post.

Finally we have the ability to translate forms. Forms inside JSM have revolutionised the ease and speed at which service teams can deliver their services. But a large downside is not having the ability to provide true translations since translations have only been offered on physical Jira fields over the forms. Announced this month, forms has changed. simply open the form, click translations and start translating. For more information, review this support doc.

Platform

Announced this week, Guard Detect allows for regex in custom content scanning. That’s right, you can now scan your content with Confluence (sorry yes, Confluence only for now) for your own special terms that you may want to create specific detections for. It can either use regular expressions or specified terms in order to work. To get started, check out the following documentation.

While this may seem trivial, for large enterprises trying to understand how content is digested this will be perfect. A new tracking item will be available inside Guard coming very soon. The ability to track the use of Atlassian mobile apps. Underneath the security tab in Guard, you will seen see an addition to the insights page. A new mobile app graph showing if users are consuming Jira, Confluence or Opsgenie via their phone.

A huge aim with this would help large organisations understand their workforce and produce better designed documentation or blogs if users are coming through the apps or via the web.

Which one of the latest updates is your favourite? Until the next time.