This blog is a series of three (DataCenter / Server and Cloud) where we will give a round-up of Atlassians key news during last week Remote Summit. The summit is a yearly event where Atlassian shares the latest and future developments with their customers and partners. As a Platinum Atlassian partner in the Netherlands we’re fully committed to Atlassian’s products and always visit the Summit to get the latest insight. We went through the presentations and compiled a list of noteworthy developments that we would like to share with you. We hope you appreciate and like the news.

Even though Atlassian is putting a lot of development in Cloud and Data Center the Server software of things still is being improved with lot’s of new functionality. We notice improvements for software developers, Agile teams and Service oriented (ITSM) organisations.

Server for Software Developers

Atlassian just released two new platform releases on Bitbucket and Bamboo on which you can read in our latest monthly blog.

• Improved branch configurations in Bamboo: The ability is added to define and maintain branch configurations that differ from the master branch. This gives developers the flexibility to update build configurations as often they need in line with the corresponding code.
• New and improved pull request experience in Bitbucket: The pull request experience in Bitbucket Server and Data Center is completely redesigned. The experience is made significantly faster with an increase in performance by almost 50% across key pages and interactions. With tools like syntax highlighting on the unified diff and the ability to expand context and comment anywhere in the diff, you’ll see collaboration improve. Additionally, reviewers now have the flexibility and control to suggest changes wherever they’re needed. And finally, filtering to the file tree was added.
• COMING SOON Expanding CI/CD support for Bitbucket. While CI/CD was initially geared to Bamboo, which is still the preferred choice for optimal product integration, there is a large population using the open source Jenkins platform. The new CI/CD integration allows it to build and maintain a CI/CD pipeline. No need to purchase add-ons for external add-on to support Jenkins in our CI/CD environment and making a more seamless interface with your Atlassian tooling.

We believe these are major improvements which every company that uses Bitbucket and/or Bamboo should try out as soon as possible. 

Server for Agile users

At TMC we have a lot of Agile professionals working for us and almost all of our customers use the Agile way of working. It came as no surprise for us that Atlassian anounced (major) improvement in Server for Agile users. From what we have heard, there was a still room to put in extra user requests from the Agile community, and Atlassian came/is coming through.

Jira Software

• COMING SOON Improved sprint management in Jira Software will allow for a more fine grained permissions on who can plan, reschedule or create future sprints. This way Program Managers and Scrum Master can optimize the forecasted and planned work on mulitple teams.
• COMING SOON Jira Software and Jira Align connector is now easier to setup, maintain and keeping the two systems in sync. This is accomplished by making an seamless integration between the two applications.

Portfolio for Jira

• Capacity management snapshot: Recently a new snapshot of key sprint details was launched, which gives you insight on your teams’ velocity in Jira Software. Coming soon, you’ll also be able to adjust your teams’ future sprint velocity based on a few different factors. By looking at past and present team velocity and adjusting your team’s expected velocity for future planned sprints, you’ll have a more accurate read on whether your plans can get done. This takes the guesswork out of your scoping decisions and makes your plans more predictable.
• Confluence Macro for Portfolio: You can now save different views of your Portfolio plans and embed them live in pages with a Confluence macro. And because they’re always up to date, you can point your stakeholders back to the same source of truth instead of re-sharing your roadmaps or updating powerpoints.

As a partner we see Portfolio for Jira as one of the fastest growing solutions of Atlassian. Nearly every customer which uses Jira Software on a professional level wants to use a Portfolio like planning app sooner or later. Of course there are also alternatives like BigPicture, but Portfolio is the number one choice we see in the market. These new features show that Atlassian is constantly improving their Portfolio experience for Server.  

Jira Align

• Jira Align and Trello connector: A connector is added to bring the work happening in Trello into Jira Align. Also a new powerup was just released that links teams’ Trello boards to your Jira Align instance. Then, you can create a burnup chart and cumulative flow reports for your Team boards. By tracking work from Trello in Jira Align, you can see the progress towards your quarterly increments, and see how the work happening in Trello rolls up to your company’s strategic objectives and direction.
• COMING SOON OKRs in Jira Align: A new dashboard to display real-time OKR scores and all the work connected to the OKR. Now, all of your teams can see how their sprints impact the overall OKR.
• COMING SOON Bringing AI to Jira Align: Major steps are taken to bring Artificial Intelligence directly into your Jira Align Experience. Ways are inspected to guide you as you navigate trough your data and points you in the right direction. At the same time is looked, how to make Jira Align smarter and change the way that it presents data to you, ensuring that you have all of the right data to make the right decisions for your business.

Server for the Service organization

ITSM & IT Ops

There are two primary Atlassian products that help deliver exceptional service at scale – Jira Service Desk Server and Data Center and Opsgenie.  These are the (announced) improvements:

• COMING SOON High context incident management with Jira Service Desk and Opsgenie: When you connect your Jira Service Desk instance with Opsgenie, you’ll notice more integrated functionality and insights to help IT teams resolve incidents more efficiently. No more jumping between your ITSM solution and your monitoring & alerting system. You now have one platform for IT support and ops teams to support your most critical services.
• COMING SOON Improved agent queues in Jira Service Desk Server and Data Center: In addition to improving queues with better sorting, agents will also soon be able to bulk edit issues, make changes in line, and star commonly used queues for quick access.
• AWS Service Catalog Connector for Jira Service Desk Server and Data Center: As the demand for cloud services increase, it is important to balance high demand for products with risk and security. With the AWS Service Catalog Connector for Jira Service Desk, users can now self-serve and request admin-approved AWS catalog products right in Jira Service Desk, while admins can rest easily knowing governance and compliance needs are met.
• COMING SOON Multi-lingual customer portal: Soon, you’ll have the ability to display the language of the customer portal in the local setting of each user – so each and every employee can have the same seamless and exceptional experience.

As TMC ALM we think these new development point to a future where is much more to come and Atlassian is keeping it’s commitment to add customer added value. With the new announcements we believe the new upcoming features help our customers raising their productivity to keep up in this demanding market. It also shows that Atlassian continues to invest in their ITSM & IT Ops offering, establishing their market leader position in this domain. 

Contact

If you still have any question after reading this blog. Feel free to reach out to us if you want to receive more information about our services. As one of the few Atlassian Platinum Partners in the Netherlands we have a deep knowledge and experience with Atlassian products. Remember to contact us if you have any (support) questions.