by Bill Cushard (@BillCush)
Atlassian Summit 2014 Conference Recap: All About Teams
Last week, there were six major announcements at the Atlassian Summit 2014 Conference in San Jose, California about Jira, Confluence, Stash and some new ones that have major implications for improving collaboration and team performance. We love to attend this conference for several reasons, but one major reasons sticks out. Many of our customers attend the conference, and we love having discussions with them at our booth, over lunch, and between sessions about how we can help them improve team performance by applying the new products, features, and use cases learned at the conference. And there were a lot of new products, features, and use cases announced at the conference.
The Changing Nature of Atlassian Products
When Atlassian Co-founder and CEO, Scott Farquhar took the stage at the opening keynote, he told the audience that they will hear stories at the conference about how Vistaprint uses Jira Service Desk to support teams in over 22 countries, how Twitter uses Atlassian products to support HR, Finance, and Legal teams, and how B|Braun created a social intranet using Confluence that over 50,000 employees use every day.
This year more than ever, the message from Atlassian is that companies of all sizes and teams of every function can use Atlassian products to collaborate better and improve performance. "There's only one company that wakes up every morning and thinks about teams. And that company is Atlassian," says Scott Farquhar.
There's only one company that wakes up every morning and thinks about teams. And that company is Atlassian."
Scott Farquhar, Co-founder and CEO of Atlassian
Yes, software development teams are at the core of what Atlassian does, but Atlassian products are not just about software development anymore. The announcements from Summit make that clear.
The Five.. OK Six... Announcements and What They Mean
Mike Cannon-Brookes, Co-founder and CEO of Atlassian came onto the stage to make these announcements. Here is a brief summary:
Enterprise-Level Offerings for Confluence and Stash: As large companies begin to use Atlassian products and realize how mission critical these products have become, Atlassian developed an enterprise level product for Jira called Jira Data Center which is designed for large-scale implementations that are mission critical. That has been so successful that Atlassian announced Data Center products for Confluence and Stash. Now large enterprises can rely on these tools to be up-and-running when they need them most to lee their teams productive and high performing.
HipChat Real-Time Communications: Three billion messages have been sent through HipChat so far, and it is rapidly becoming the go-to real-time communications tool for teams around the world. To help this growth, Atlassian announced that HipChat will be free. Atlassian also announced a new HipChat product called HipChat Plus, which has all the real-time communication features of HipChat (group chat, file attachments, etc) but with the addition of audio and video calling. And the best thing about HipChat is that people can us it on just about any device for a seamless, real-time communications experience, keeping teams even closer together.
Jira Service Desk 2.0: Atlassian calls Jira Service Desk it's most successful product launch ever, and it keeps getting better. Perhaps the most significant Jira Service Desk announcement of Summit was the change in pricing, making end users free. Customers will only pay for agent users in Jira Service Desk, not end users, who will only make requests through the customer portal. This announcement was met with cheers.
Confluence - Collaboration in Context: If you thought the cheers from the Jira Service Desk pricing announcement was loud, you didn't hear the audience hoot and holler when Mike announced that Confluence will soon allow inline commenting to pages and the ability to comment on attachments, like PowerPoint slides, slide-by-slide. The point of all of this is to increase collaboration through context. By allowing people to comment in context, it speeds up collaboration and allows people to get work done faster.
Automate WorkFlows for Development Teams: Not to be ignored, software development and operations (DevOps) teams got a big announcement too: Automated Issue Transitions. When developers are working in Stash and operations is working in Bamboo, their work can automatically move an issue from one workflow step to another. For example, when the developer branches and/or commits code (in Stash), the automated issue transition feature will automatically move that issue along the workflow. This saves time and keeps Jira issues up-to-date. The idea is that people can work in their tool of choice, and issues can be kept moving through the workflow.
Jira Portfolio: Finally, Atlassian had to make one large, entirely new product announcement that would provide further evidence that it is "all in" on producing collaboration products for large enterprises. This new product is Jira Portfolio. Jira Portfolio is designed to help large enterprises conduct strategic planning and tie those strategic plans with current initiative realities, so they can respond to changes to keep their organizations on track.
Conclusion
What ever type of company you are, however large, no matter what team your work on, Atlassian has tools that will help you improve collaboration in your teams.
Call for Comments
- What is your favorite announcement? How will it improve/change how your team works?
- If you attended Summit, what was the most important thing you learned?
- Based on these Atlassian announcements, what is one thing you will change in your organization to help your teams collaborate better?
