Atlassian Team’24, all the news

What happens in Vegas… TecnoFor tells you all about it!

Last week, the annual Atlassian event, Team’24, took place in Las Vegas where all the ecosystem’s news were presented: new products, training plans, beta features, integrations… and the TecnoFor Team was there to bring you all the details firsthand.

Let’s start from the beginning:

System of Work

Arguably the most important topic of the entire conference, and it’s not about a functionality or a new product. It’s about a new approach, a new way of understanding teamwork. This new “System of Work” is Atlassian’s new overarching approach on how companies can achieve their goals through Atlassian’s products, services, practices, and platform.

Throughout the 3-day event, goals have been the fundamental focus of the entire platform: unifying Jira into a single product, reinventing Confluence, or integrating AI into all suite products (yes, we’re diving into all of this now).

What was born 20 years ago as a new disruptive technology for developers, is today a work system based on products and customer experiences that serve to drive transparency, improve productivity, and increase collaboration. The environment has evolved, and Atlassian has evolved its business at the same pace.

This new approach revolves around 3 main ideas:

1. Aligning work with clear objectives.
2. Effectively planning and tracking work across all teams.
3. Building, sharing, and leveraging knowledge to its fullest potential.

How to achieve this? By using Jira, Confluence, and Loom throughout the organization. Once all teams are consolidated on the same foundations and are tracking the core elements of work, then specialized teams can delve deeper, knowing that everything will connect to the common work system.

• Add Jira Align so that management and leadership teams can drive business portfolio planning and management.
• Incorporate Jira Product Discovery, Bitbucket, or Compass so that product and development teams can discover new ideas and create software aligned with goals and projects.
• Use Jira Service Management so that IT or service teams can help customers answer better and faster to incidents and requests, leveraging a single source of knowledge from across the organization.

All of this, powered by team workflow charts and reports and a common data model within the platform that connects critical elements of teamwork: teams, goals, work, and knowledge.

The more teams centralize their work on the Atlassian platform, the better we can connect all the work being done in the company.

Product updates

And now, let’s see the planned updates for each of Atlassian’s products, which are not few:

Jira Cloud:

A new era has arrived for Jira, simply Jira.

What we’ve known as Jira Software and Jira Work Management is now simply Jira. A combination of both products to create the most powerful tool for any type of team. From this combination emerges a more robust Jira, with more features and new characteristics:

• New ways to visualize work and coordination between teams: list view or calendar.
• New features on boards such as bulk editing or grouping of items.
• Rich integrations with Confluence and Loom to encourage knowledge sharing.
• Improved Plans (formerly known as Advanced Roadmap) with new views: comprehensive project plan summary and calendar with all tasks.

If you were already a user of Jira Software, this new version will be available from today. If you were a user of Jira Work Management, changes will occur gradually between May and June.

Additionally, if you’re a fan of Figma, the partnership with Jira was also announced to enhance collaboration between developers and designers: an enhanced integration and an easier and more convenient application to use.

Atlassian Goals:

Goals are a new experience in the Atlassian Platform that adds the “why” to work, wherever it occurs in our products. They provide coherence and a results perspective to all Atlassian products.

Goals allow all team members to see how their work scales toward company goals. Goals provide people and teams with important context so they can make better decisions considering outcomes. They connect across all products, so any update is seen in real-time across all views.

Goals connect performance and results, becoming an attribute of every piece of work. Traditionally, goals and OKRs are kept on a spreadsheet, disconnected from work, but these new goals are different: they can be connected to any part of work, updated monthly, and visible to team peers no matter where the work is done.

Atlassian Rovo:

One of the most celebrated announcements during the event has been Atlassian Rovo: the new paid offering from Atlassian Intelligence. It will be launched later this year and will include features such as enterprise search (including multiple connectors), knowledge cards, definitions and topics, chat, agents, and more.

Yes, it will be possible to search across any data source, not just Atlassian, but also with external providers. It will also include a personal virtual assistant to be able to solve any problem or make queries instantly. Looking forward to seeing it live and start interacting with it.

Atlassian Intelligence:

Several features of Atlassian Intelligence, Atlassian’s proposal on Artificial Intelligence, were announced. All aimed at accelerating productivity and improving collaboration for product and business teams. Some of the most important ones:

• AI Work Breakdown: suggests various relevant secondary issues in Jira, which you can then create with just one click. It’s currently in beta, but it promises a lot to save us time on mechanical Jira tasks and to dedicate that time to what really matters.
• AI Automations: are already available. They allow users to explain any requirement or action they want to automate in everyday, natural language, and Atlassian Intelligence will create an automation rule.
• AI on Whiteboards: if you’re already using Whiteboards for a brainstorming session, Atlassian Intelligence will draw on information from Jira Product Discovery, Jira tickets, and Confluence pages to generate new ideas and create virtual sticky notes. Then AI will help you organize them by grouping similar ideas or creating the board.

And also, updates with the task editor, information summary in documents or fields, or information formatting based on templates. Over the next few months, we will see how these new features are gradually integrated into our instances.

Atlassian Guard:

One of the most surprising presentations has been Atlassian Guard, the new brand for the product we knew as Atlassian Access, created to provide security across the entire Atlassian cloud. It has been launched with two different plans: Standard and Premium.

The current Atlassian Access we already knew will be renamed Atlassian Guard Standard. And the recent new products InfoSec/”NSO” Beta and Beacon will merge to become Atlassian Guard Premium, for now with limited availability.

Jira Service Management:

This product is gearing up for a wave of new features throughout this year and promises much for service management improvement: new capabilities that accelerate agent productivity, enable administrators to get started quickly, and help deliver exceptional service experiences, wherever and whenever customers need them.

• Virtual agent across all channels: yes, now you can also use the virtual agent directly from the service desk portal. To automate responses to your users and provide truly Level 1 support that offloads the workload and allows them to focus on higher value tasks.
• Incident classification with AI: will allow agents to intelligently classify, assign, and take action on requests in queues. Assign request types, modify status… is scheduled for the end of the year.
• Sentiment analysis: AI will be able to quickly measure customer sentiment and intelligently prioritize issues causing the greatest frustration to ensure the best possible service experience. It is scheduled for the end of the year.
• Help center customization: the possibility to update the design and content of various help centers in Jira Service Management was announced to create an experience that satisfies customers. This allows scaling and categorizing support by department, audience and reduces the need to use other solutions. Total flexibility will give customers control over the appearance of their help centers and create a good comprehensive help experience for an organization’s employees.

And these are just some of the planned features. There is a specific section focused on Opsgenie and how to better manage alerts:

• Alert grouping: you will be able to display important alerts, detect incidents faster, and use AI to group similar alerts and escalate them effectively based on impact. This functionality will be available soon.
• PIR Generation: Soon you will be able to use AI to efficiently document and share incident learnings to help prevent future incidents: complete the PIR including context, timeline, involved people, activities, and more.
• Notification suppression: reduce noise, review only those notifications that are truly relevant, and take action only on high priority alerts.

And one of our favorite parts, which we’ve been waiting for months since we discovered the Airtrack integration with Jira, is finally becoming a reality “Assets Data Manager” and it looks spectacular. It is a feature that will be available only to Premium and Enterprise Cloud customers starting in June.

IT teams need to track critical assets to minimize risks and costs. Obsolete and incomplete data pose challenges with CMDB efforts. Atlassian’s acquisition of AirTrack aims to address this issue by integrating data quality into JSM Assets.

This new Assets Data Manager has over 30 connectors to retrieve data from various systems, databases, and discovery tools. Users can consolidate, analyze, and compare data within JSM to identify inconsistencies and improve data quality before importing it into Assets. Reliable data quality control enables agents to understand changes in the IT environment, create monitoring dashboards, and automate actions.

Jira Product Discovery:

One of the latest products added to the Atlassian suite continues to expand its functionality (Product Managers are in luck).

Some of the most demanded, which are already available, are:

• Public views: this allows users of Jira Product Discovery to share read-only views with those who do not have access to Jira or their Atlassian site. This considerably saves information update time and improves project scope visibility for all stakeholders.
• Within a few months, it will also be possible to use the premium version of the product, with some features such as: cross-project visualization, Atlassian Intelligence integration, sandbox, unlimited storage…

Confluence:

“Company Hub” has been presented, a new space that is currently in Beta, designed for each organization to have a single centralized point to communicate the most important updates and share resources with the entire company. It will include features such as designing an intranet, custom homepages, or advanced brand customization capabilities.

Additionally, Atlassian Intelligence has also heavily influenced this product. Some of the new features planned for this year and next are:

• Page update: Detailed summary of the latest decisions, action items, and comments.
• Summarize information: AI summaries of comments (including inline and bottom-of-page comments), smart links (Confluence, Jira, and Google Docs), and home page feed.
• Add context: Reference and generate content from other Confluence pages and Jira tickets.
• Content conversion with AI: Convert a whiteboard into a Confluence page and convert a Confluence page into Jira tickets to advance workflows.

Compass:

Atlassian has announced the acquisition of Optic to help reduce interruptions, save developers time, and improve software status by offloading manual API documentation work. This allows users to automatically maintain updated documentation based on changes in the source code, use status dashboards to assign API documentation coverage for level 1 and 2 services, and centralize all API documentation to create new services.

But also, now Compass components integrate fully natively with Jira Cloud projects.

We also know that in the middle of the year, we will be able to see a more natural integration between Opsgenie and Compass live, which will help improve collaboration between development and operations teams.

Atlassian Data Center:

Yes, there is also a section, albeit small, for the on-premise version of Jira: Data Center

Platform versions will include several architecture updates that bring a variety of security enhancements, including faster resolution of security incidents with fewer exposed dependencies and a reduction in false security scans due to the removal of older code.

The 6 Data Center products to be launched in 2024:

• Jira Software 10.0
• Jira Service Management 6.0
• Confluence 9.0
• Bitbucket 9.0
• Bamboo 10.0
• Crowd 6.0

Atlassian University

Well, yes, from now on, all courses available from Atlassian University are completely free!

A great piece of news to continue learning and training in the Atlassian ecosystem with quality courses that help you achieve the best results.

From courses covering only basic concepts, to advanced ones suitable only for users who have been navigating the ecosystem for some time.

If you have any questions about how these updates may affect your instance, or you simply would like to know more, let us know!