Team ‘23 Day 2 - The day of announcements
Day two had to be the most important day of the three. It had the most number of keynotes, therefore the most number of major announcements from Atlassian. Atlassian announced a new product entering Beta, a new acquisition, great feature updates to existing products as well as the most important announcement (in my eyes), Atlassian intelligence, so lets take a look at what some of these announcements are in a little more detail.
Jira Product Discovery released for general availability
Back at Unleash, Atlassian spoke around how JPD had become one of the most loved tools within the Atlassian ecosystem. It provides a proper space to capture ideas and insights for your future development in Jira Software. Check out more from the Unleash Wrapped talk here. Well today they officially announced it for general availability. To find out more on the cost of JPD, click here
Atlassian together released for $11 per person
A new bundled release of the best in class apps from Atlassian. It is a single subscription including Trello, Confluence, Atlas and Jira Work Management while also providing user provisioning and security using Atlassian Access. Expensive you may think? Atlassian is giving all of this for $11 per person.
Privacy & Security tab on marketplace.atlassian.net
While this may seem trivial to a lot of users, for some this is actually a really simple but great addition to the Atlassian marketplace.
Anyone who has data storage concerns when it comes to apps or the security when using these vendors now has a simple and easy way to relieve their concerns without having to trawl through loads of documentation or going to the vendor and raising a support request.
External user security management coming soon
Currently, the only way of ensuring a level of security for your users is to manage them. However, we often find ourselves working with third parties on a regular basis and onboarding every single user is time consuming and not really a viable option. Luckily Atlassian did recognise this (after a lot of feedback). Today they announced External user security. it will allow unmanaged users to still have controls like 2fa or soon, SSO capabilities enforced helping to keep company data safe. This is currently still in EAP and will only launch at first with the 2fa control with SSO joining in the latter parts of 2023.
They have not provided any word as to when general availability will be for this functionality, all we got was a coming soon.
More data residency locations
Data residency is key to so many regulatory requirements and therefore a lot of businesses. Atlassian back in February (Unleash in Berlin) stated, “it was there mission to remove any and all barriers to moving to cloud”. With this in mind, further data residency locations were announced. Taking a look back on the roadmap we can see four additional locations:
Singapore
Canada
UK
Japan
I imagine this is not the last we have heard around data residency.
Atlassian acquire K15T’s Orderly database for Confluence
What was previously Orderly databases, is now Confluence databases. Confluence databases provides additional functionality to your tables within Confluence making them far for rich in filtering as well as providing better structure to the data being inputted.
JSM gets new no code JSM portal customisations allowing a better user experience
As of now there one of Jira Service Managements more weaker areas is when your help centre gets too busy. Teams love the power JSM can bring and therefore are desperate to get onto the platform. But the downside is that you and your users have too many portals to choose from. Right now the level of customisations is somewhat limited, we can create topics, bring in important youtube videos etc. But this wasn’t enough for a lot of customers. Atlassian announced they are now bringing the ability to fully customise the portal to provide a better user experience for your customers.
But better yet. A complete no code experience for your admins. This entire view will be done without the pre-requisites of knowledge on coding.
Beacon, the new Point-A product into Beta
I have been lucky enough to be using Beacon since pre-Alpha. Essentially, it is Atlassian’s answer to the much needed, what is actually going on and do I need to be aware? Beacon is a proactive security scanning tool built for your Atlassian ecosystem. It provides security analysts and admins an opportunity to deal with any events that before would have gone under the radar. Today Beacon was announced as a Beta product through the Point-A programme. While this product is fairly new and I’m sure has a lot of growth to come, it is already showing huge potential in the available triggers and functionality once an alert has gone off.
Jira command palette making you extra productive
The Jira command palette is a pop-up menu that provides users the ability to quickly access various commands and actions throughout Jira via the keyboard. The initial release contains a range of different actions including:
Creating and updating some fields in issues
Searching for your recent issues
Navigating around your projects
The feature is intended to increase your every day productivity by giving more functionality to the users fingertips without having to constantly switch screens within Jira.
The functionality was released to the early access program which you can read about and subscribe to HERE.
Join the Beta group here: Jira Command Palette Beta Group
Confluence gets whiteboards
Formerly the Point-A product, Fabric. Confluence now has access to native whiteboard functionality.
Confluence Whiteboards gives you the ability to turn any great idea or conversation into something visual. You can then turn those ideas back into Jira tasks to start working on. Even create lines on whiteboards between cards to create dependencies back in Jira.
Like the rest of the ecosystem, whiteboards has access to the smart links functionality. Embed any Atlassian or partner product to help connect the dots without context switching.
Bring your own keys - Security
Depending on your regulations, you may find yourself wishing for cloud, but because you don’t manage the encryption its kind of a no go. Well that is changing. Atlassian announced that the BYOK early access programme for Jira will be here very soon with Confluence following in the latter half of the year. We will have the ability to control the encryption key in your own AWS key storage so you feel more secure over who and how that data is seen and used.
Data security policies coming to Atlassian
The new data security policies allow us admins to restrict apps, anonymous users etc. from gaining access to specific content that we define. You first select the coverage for the rules. What spaces or projects etc. Then define what you want to do with this policy using the rules section. Atlassian also mentioned during this talk that this is JUST THE START for new DLP abilities. Coming in 2024, they want to expand the offering for full classifications of data. Admins will be able to set tags for different types of data (credit cards, passwords etc.) These will then display on the top of the page for all users to see the level being defined. These can be set manually by users or by third party DLP tools. Once set, additional controls can then be placed onto the page for additional security.
Atlassian intelligence will bring forward the historic AI Atlassian has offered in the form of machine learning, with the large language models like ChatGPT & most importantly your knowledge to really power up your team.
During early access, Intelligence will be available in Jira (all flavours), Confluence & Analytics. At launch there are five major ways Intelligence will be there to assist us, so lets take a look at some of the power it will be able to offer us.
Instant Help
The AI will be there to assist your agents and end users resolve more of your easy support requests without the need of any human interference.
Getting up to speed
Use the AI to summarise open tickets to get a better understanding of what has already been tried and where next to go.
Accelerating your work
The AI can assist you with changing tones of messages to customers.
Since the AI has full access to the editor, you AI can provide detailed tickets, or pages depending on the need.
Use the AI to create summaries or detailed action plans based on the current Confluence page, or others.
Learning on the fly
Intelligence can scan your environment to help you get up to speed with acronyms. Just highlight the text and ask Intelligence to explain what it is.
Answer on the fly
Use the AI to answer questions using your own companies knowledge. No more dealing with complicated and blurred search results.
Intelligence can deal with 24 different languages and respond accordingly.
For those on Enterprise licensing, use Intelligence to help write complex queries within Atlassian Analytics.
Intelligence will have the ability to help all end users get up to speed learning JQL (Jira query language). While JQL can be really powerful, unless you get used to the advanced mode you may struggle to pick it up. Intelligence can now help those users.
Intelligence is such a large announcement. A more detailed article will follow.
Wow. I mean what a day. I did spend most of today in sessions but it was a fully packed schedule. Outside of sessions I managed to continue catching up with vendors and learning more about those within the ecosystem. But until tomorrow, that’s me done.
