A strong emphasis on cloud solutions, customer-focused narration as well as promoting the idea of being “open”. What happened during Atlassian Open 2019 in Vienna, what elements was the event composed of and how is it being evaluated by TTPSC professionals?
Atlassian Open 2019 – three days covering products and the idea of a brand.
Atlassian Open are entirely new events organised in three different locations (Vienna, Sydney, Boston) aimed at encouraging customers to use the tools offered by the brand, integrating the community concentrated by the producer (including networking), sharing the news and the direction the brand is following through communicating their offer. TTPSC professionals used the opportunity to participate in the Vienna edition divided into three parts: Open Day, Partner Day and Atlas Camp. See below for a brief summary and our impressions of each of them.
OPEN DAY
The part called “Open Day” was clearly dedicated not to Partners, but to Atlassian’s customers. The speakers pointed out the idea of openness reflected by teamwork, lack of divisions between departments as well as tools which enable cooperation within the whole organisation. Communicating the products and announcing, or rather reminding, of the changes Atlassian is planning to introduce into their solutions were important elements. The vast majority of the subjects were focused on functionalities for the cloud versions of Jira and Confluence. – says Magdalena Kwaczyńska, Business Analyst for Transition Technologies PSC.
Cloud Premium
The idea of Cloud solutions is still being promoted. One of the major upcoming changes within Atlassian’s portfolio of products and services is the introduction of a Cloud Premium service for Jira Software Cloud and Confluence Cloud. The principles of the service are to improve and develop the standard hosting option based on cloud solutions, i.e. increasing the availability of SLA by nearly 100%, unlimited storage space in the cloud and top quality of the support service.
Cloud Premium is supposed to fulfil the needs of organisations with even the most extensive instances for which Jira is a critical system. Using Cloud Premium is a guarantee of 24/7 support with the maximum of one hour administrator response time. – adds Magdalena Kwaczyńska.
An improvement of the Data Center model
Amongst the innovations announced by Atlassian, there was also information on the improvement work on the Jira Data Center model. Some of the innovations:
- Introduction of “mirror farms” for the Bitbucket solution in the Data Center model (ensuring so called mirror servers closer to the end user to eliminate slow data transmission in case the company has a distributed structure).
- Introduction of CDN (Content Delivery Network)
- Individual report storage
- New, improved templates to create AWS and Azure infrastructure
- A new mobile application for Jira Data Center
Updates
During Atlassian Open there were major changes mentioned and discussed which were brought by the latest update of the brand’s products available for the standard servers:
- Confluence 7.0
- Jira Service Desk 4.0
- Portfolio for Jira 3.0
- Bitbucket 6.0
- Jira Software 8.0
The discussion on each update overlapped to a large extent with the information presented during Atlassian Summit in Las Vegas. Broadly speaking, the main emphasis has been placed on speeding up the operation of the applications, stabilising them and taking care of the intuitive nature of the interface.
Jira Align vs Portfolio for Jira
Jira Align is an innovation within Atlassian’s offer. The application has become a part of it as a result of the merger of Agile Craft and Atlassian and has been intensively adapted and developed. A large part of the presentation during the conference was devoted to comparing Jira Align and Portfolio for Jira, in order to explain when, in what manner and by whom they should be used.
There are three solutions in Atlassian’s portfolio which enable efficient project management:
- Jira Software is designed for project work within teams,
- Portfolio for Jira which allows for project management at all its stages,
- Jira Align – a scalable solution based on SAFe principles designed for major players in the market and focused on managing huge project portfolios.
PARTNER DAY
Partner Day is a one-day event aimed at integrating all of Atlassian’s partners which is always a good opportunity to establish new relationships as well as exchange views and experiences. One of the points on the agenda were workshops on how to cope with problems with the use of the “A beautiful constraint” method which teaches how to change one’s attitude from “can’t be done” to “can be done, if…”. The participants were supposed to solve a seemingly insurmountable issue.
Personally, I appreciate events like Partner Day the most as they provide the opportunity to talk to other people from the business who share similar interests and who are associated with the Atlassian community. All these people are amazing! I had a chance to exchange experiences with representatives of companies like Rozdoum – the authors of WatchTower (the original idea of how to integrate separate instances into one), or our partners from Seibert/Media, thanks to whom we are able to build complex diagrams with the use of draw.Io or to change a Confluence instance into an efficient Intranet that looks great due to the Linchpin Suite.
This part of the event was also an opportunity for the participants to take part in lectures concerning the scalability of Atlassian products, migration to the Cloud version, applications available via the Marketplace and selling them with the use of materials shared with the Partners by the brand.
ATLAS CAMP
Atlas Camp, a two-day event dedicated to coders once again did not disappoint and provided many great experiences. During Atlas Camp, innovations which influence the manner of designing and implementing applications in this ecosystem were presented. The following improvements are worth mentioning:
– development of the API to manage Workflows in Jira,
– adding the management of so called “assets” (which e.g. improve administration of company property),
– enriching the information obtainable from the Atlassian Marketplace with attributes connected with the application distribution channels which are extremely helpful e.g. for the marketing team.
Atlassian is heading towards the public cloud, therefore there was also an announcement on the launch of tools for application migration from the server to the cloud version. Atlas Camp was, however, entirely dominated by something entirely new – the Forge framework. A declarative language for defining UIs, based on JSX, business logic hidden behind the Function as a Service (based on AWS Lambda) – all hosted by Atlassian. Forge is currently in closed beta – it is supposed to enable the creation of applications for cloud platforms in the future (Jira, Confluence etc.) – without the need to place infrastructure on the vendor’s side. Atlas Camp also included workshops allowing participants to test the new framework on their own.
The possibility of making direct contact with other developers from the Atlassian ecosystem or employees of the Australian giant obviously cannot be overestimated. Thanks to such contacts – through better understanding of customer needs, learning best practices from other vendors or discussing directions to proceed in and current trends – we can enhance communication and react faster to changes in the constantly developing environment of dedicated applications for Atlassian platforms. It is definitely a great idea to participate in events like Atlas Camp and to be a part of the Atlassian vendors community – Michał Dubel, Development Team Manager in Transition Technologies PSC.