Atlassian ICYMI May 2024
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
We are five months into 2024 and only one month since the Conference in Las Vegas. Yet even in such a small amount of time, we are already starting to see some of the functionality spoken about coming through. This month we saw over 150 different updates to the entire platform. Lets take a look at the big hitters for me.
Agile & DevOps
You can now edit more fields directly from the issue navigator. Okay usually I’m not working off of the issue navigator I will admit, but the idea of being able to update data more seamlessly, whether you are running a query, working on the list view or on a scrum board sits very well with me. Users can now update the following without leaving the view:
Priority
Reporter
Assignee
Sprint
The integration between Jira & Confluence continues to strengthen. You can now create both normal pages and whiteboards straight from your Jira issue view. Whether you use whiteboards for planning, retros or just brainstorming ideas for your issues, being able to simplify the way we work is brilliant.
AI was of course a big hitter for Atlassian again this year. They announced a crazy number of new ways AIntelligence will help us as users. One of those was the ability to suggest child issues based on the data on the parent issue. This has just started its rollout this month. To break down work using Atlassian Intelligence:
Open an issue and select Add child issue.
Select Suggest child issues.
Work Management & Collaboration
Another month and another fully loaded set of changes to Confluence automation. I really don’t think this team understand the word slow. I definitely am not criticising. I very much am enjoying all of the awesome changes coming to the automation platform for Confluence.
Okay so first up we now have contextual discovery for bulk archiving. While we have been able to archive pages as for a little while, You can now use branches & conditions to create a proper knowledge management workflow with automatic archiving of information.
Automation is now supporting whiteboards & databases as well. No longer just creating pages, but start creating more page types to help automate all needs. Check out the blog on databases here and whiteboards here. Both of these updates bring new actions to your automations, but whiteboards also brings you the ability to run automations when a new whiteboards is created. Definitely go check out all the triggers, conditions and actions.
Finally we have some improvements to page conditions. If you are familiar with Jira automation, this condition will make you feel very much at home. The condition allows you to filter the automation based on the page title, labels, unqique visitors, or a total view count. Go take a look at the full community post here.
Spaces getting their own mission control
Over the last couple of months we have seen the mission control get launched to admins of Confluence. Well based on popular feedback, Atlassian are launching a space admin version. This will largely follow a lot of the same principles around search and data quality. I am very much looking forward to this hitting my teams over the next month.
To round off a very busy month in collaboration, whiteboards can now export. Whiteboards has been a great addition to Confluence since its release, but the lack of exporting or importing has been an issue with the collaboration outside of Confluence. Well Atlassian have resolved half of this issue with the exporting. You now have the ability to export to PDF or image based on the entire board or a selection of the board.
Service Management
JSM has been busy of course. While there is a lot more new functionality announced this month, the most important one for me is around the new ability to additionally restrict internal comments. Atlassian are releasing the functionality to restrict internal comments based on roles or groups within a project. Why? Well sometimes, teams need to hold private discussions about customer requests, and in the case of particularly sensitive topics these discussions may need to be confidential between only a few team members (such as those in your HR or Legal teams). The idea being that you will be able to hold all of your conversations on the same within without having to switch away for more confidential conversations.
Platform
Atlassian’s Beacon Point A product was announced to be going into the new Atlassian Guard at Team 24. But one piece of functionality being released before this change is the ability to now create your own custom detections. To start doing this, you can select the data you need to search, then the custom labels you are searching for. It seems simple, but since every business has unique elements, the ability to create detections for the uniqueness can help keep all businesses safe.
A new data security policy is soon to come to Access (Now Guard, Check out the Team’24 blogs), that will allow admins to stop the exporting of Jira issues on an entire site. Yes that is right. Should you need the ability to keep data in Jira, you can do that.
Multiple Atlassian Cloud organizations can now claim accounts from the same domain. While I understand that statement may not mean a lot to most users of Atlassian, but it certainly will to admins. Where I work have recently gone through an M&A. This meant a huge effort to consolidate organizations to achieve the user security we needed, so this news will mean a lot to a lot of admins. You can check out the full blog on this here.
Data classification finally coming out for all sites. No matter where you work, you’ll have different docs with different levels of ‘security’. The ability to now set classification labels on the data whether it is in Jira or Confluence means we can make sure out secrets stay safe. Data classifications will be set inside Access (Guard premium), they can be done by:
Go to admin.atlassian.com. Select your organization if you have more than one.
Select Security, then Data classification.
Select Create a new classification level.
Select Get started and enter the relevant details.
Publish your classification levels when you’re ready for people to start classifying their work. Once a classification level is published, you can also add it to a data security policy to reduce the risk of data exfiltration and unauthorized access.
Which one of the latest updates is your favourite? Until the next time.
